Bücher veröffentlicht von Houghton Mifflin

Nothing's the matter with Kansas: Americans voting their values are responding to a real moral crisis. And in this forceful follow-up to The Cheating Culture, David Callahan argues that the problems for most Americans are not abortion and gay marriage but rather issues that neither party is addressing?the selfishness that is careening out of control, the effect of our violent and consumerist culture on children, and our lack of a greater purpose. As Republicans veer into zealotry, liberals can find common ground with the moderate majority. But to alleviate the moral anxieties that drove GOP electoral victories they need a powerful new vision. In The Moral Center, Callahan articulates that vision and offers an escape from the dead-end culture war. With insights garnered from in-depth research and interviews, he examines some of our most polarized conflicts and presents unexpected solutions that lay out a new road map to the American center.

Eleven-year-old Joyce lives with her reclusive uncle, Old Dad, who runs the town garbage dump--which is why the kids at school call her the Dump Queen. Her only friend is Mrs. Fish, the new school custodian whose wild outfits and uninhibited personality inspire her nickname, "Crazy Fish." When Mrs. Fish is around, everything in Joyce's life seems okay. So when fiercely independent Old Dad falls ill, Joyce must convince him to accept her friend's help.

From the author of The Necropolis Railway and The Blackpool Highflyer comes another ingenious thriller featuring Jim Stringer. It is winter 1906 and Jim has been promoted from sleuth to official railway detective for York station. His first day on the job, the mysterious Lost Luggage Porter, "a human directory to everything in York," tips him off to a group of railway thieves. Jim is instructed by his Inspector to infiltrate their gang and is drawn along into their plot to carry out a robbery and make their getaway across the Channel. Soon Jim finds himself swept off to Paris with the thieves, his plight made even worse when threats are made against his wife. Can Jim get to get to her before the villains do? UK Praise for The Lost Luggage Porter:"Page-turning, confidently written..." ? Guardian"The atmosphere of neglected streets...dingy saloon bars, supper of boiled bacon and pickles, and dismal, unceasing rain are splendidly evoked." ? Telegraph

This superb Pulitzer Prize?winning collection gives voice to failure with a wry, deft touch from one of this country's most engaging and uncompromising poets. In Failure, Philip Schultz evokes the pleasures of family,marriage, beaches, and dogs; New York City in the 1970s; revolutions both interior and exterior; and the terrors of 9/11 with a compassion that demonstrates he is a master of the bittersweet and fierce, the wondrous and direct, and the brilliantly provocative. Filled with poems of "heartbreaking tenderness that [go] beyond mere pity" (Gerald Stern), Failure is a collection to savor from this major American poet.

When Ben's parents go to Africa, they leave the fourteen-year-old in charge of the family's wild animal preserve. Everything seems to be running smoothly until one night when the silence is broken by the sound of peacocks screeching. When Ben leaves the house to investigate, he sees a terrifying sight: two lions shot dead from bullets sent straight to their hearts. Someone is out there, someone with a score to settle . . . and there's no telling who will be the next victim." Includes a reader's guide."

A spell that gets you land, money, long golden hair, or a date to the prom can't be a curse, can it? A curse just gets you "dead." Or does it?. . . In these ten stunning short stories, boys and girls learn firsthand just what magic spells, enchantments, and curses really can do.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Mina, Daniel, Yasha, and Rachel are just a few of the many people leaving their countries for America. They have great hopes for their new lives, but before they can achieve their dreams, they must survive the long and difficult voyage across the sea. As passengers in an overcrowded steerage compartment, they must endure hunger, thirst, and even brushes with death. And as they struggle to hold on to their hopes for a better future, they find that even under such harsh conditions, friendship and love can flourish. Includes a reader's guide.

April Chen is happily planning to go away to college, and she has a great new boyfriend, Steve. But as the only girl in her family, April is expected to take care of her grandmother. And Grandma, "the Dragon Lady," hates Steve and has other plans for April. Torn between her duty to her family and her desire for independence, April realizes she must find a way to define herself on her own terms. Includes a reader's guide.

**DEBUT FICTION** Golden Country vividly brings to life the intertwining stories of three immigrants seeking their fortunes: the handsome and ambitious Seymour, a salesman turned gangster turned Broadway producer; the gentle and pragmatic Joseph, a door-to-door salesman who is driven to invent a cleanser effective enough to wipe away the shame of his brother's mob connections; and the irresistible Frances Gold, who grows up in Brooklyn, stars in Seymour's first show, and marries the man who invents television. Their three families, though inextricably connected for years, are brought together for the first time by the engagement of Seymour's son and Joseph's daughter. David and Miriam's marriage must endure the inheritance of not only their parents' wealth but also the burdens of their pasts. Spanning the first half of the twentieth century, Golden Country captures the exuberance of the American dream while exposing its underbelly-disillusionment, greed, and the disaffection bred by success.

Just out of college, Patricia Hampl was mesmerized by a Matisse painting in the Art Institute of Chicago: an aloof woman gazing at goldfish in a bowl, a Moroccan screen behind her. In Blue Arabesque, Hampl explores the allure of this lounging woman, immersed in leisure, so at odds with the rush of the modern era. Hampl's meditation takes us to the Cote d'Azur and to North Africa, from cloister to harem, pondering figures as diverse as Eugene Delacroix, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Katherine Mansfield. Returning always to Matisse's portraits of languid women, she discovers they were not decorative indulgences but something much more. Moving with the life force that Matisse sought in his work, Blue Arabesque is Hampl's dazzling and critically acclaimed tour de force.

Brendan Thorne, ex-Ranger, ex-sniper for the CIA, has foresworn violence when his presence is demanded at a top-secret meeting. Halden Corwin, legendary Vietnam sniper and mercenary, has vowed to assassinate the recently elected president of the United States, and the government's computers have picked Thorne as the most likely person to find Corwin. Special agent Terrill Hatfield's crack FBI team will take care of the rest. But when the plan doesn't go as described, Thorne discovers he's been drawn into a web of lies, ambitions, and double-crosses that will force him to stand and fight. A fast-paced thriller full of stunning revelations, Glass Tiger will leave the reader breathless.

They are two sworn enemies with a single obsession: a woman on the run from them both. Scott Weiss is a private detective. John Foy is a profes­sional killer. The woman is Julie Wyant, a hooker with the face of an angel. Julie spent one night with Foy?a night of psycho­pathic cruelty that Foy called love. Desperate to get away from him, she vanished without a trace. And Foy wants her back. There's only one man who can find her: Weiss, the best locate operative in the business. She's begged him not to look for her, fearing he'll bring the killer in his wake. But Weiss can't stay away. Now, from a town called Paradise, through a wilder­ness that feels like hell, Weiss searches for Julie?and the killer follows, waiting for his chance. They are two expert hunters matching move for move?until it ends on Damnation Street.

David Sears grew up in the shadow of his brilliant sister, Diana, convinced by their father that she would accomplish great things. Instead, she married and had a son, Jason, who-like David and Diana's father-is schizophrenic. Her husband, Mark, a geneticist, never made peace with Jason's condition. Perhaps this is why Diana will not accept the authorities' conclusion that Jason's drowning death was accidental. Or perhaps Diana is going mad. As she builds a case against her husband and the seductive qualities of her manic energy become impossible to ignore, David finds himself afraid for his own family's safety. In The Cloud of Unknowing, Cook explores the power of blood and family mythology.

Set in Caxley, the quiet country town neighboring the village of Fairacre, The Caxley Chronicles follow two intertwined families, the Howards and the Norths, through the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century. The first Caxley tale, The Market Square, introduces the deep-rooted camaraderie of Septimus Howard and Bender North, whose friendship survives misunderstandings, the tragedy of war, and the bitterness of loss. The story of their families continues through the generations. The second tale, The Howards of Caxley, tells of Edward Howard, grandson to them both. Edward flies for the Royal Air Force Reserve as England prepares for another war -- and Caxley braces itself for overwhelming changes.

The enchanting follow-up to Village School, Miss Read's beloved first novel, Village Diary once again transports us to the picturesque English village of Fairacre. Each chapter describes a month in the life of the village school's headmistress, Miss Read. As the villagers prepare for their country pageant, Fairacre welcomes many newcomers, such as the headstrong Amy, Mr. Mawne (whom the villagers would like to see the reluctant Miss Read marry), and the earnest new infants' teacher, Miss Jackson.

For environmentally critical times, Courage for the Earth is a centennial appreciation of Rachel Carson's brave life and transformative writingRachel Carson's lyrical, popular books about the sea, including her best-selling The Sea Around Us, set a standard for nature writing. By the late 1950s, Carson was the most respected science writer in America.She completed Silent Spring (1962) against formidable personal odds, and with it shaped a powerful social movement that has altered the course of history. In Silent Spring, Carson asserted that ?the right of the citizen to be secure in his own home against the intrusion of poisons applied by other persons? must surely be a basic human right. She was the first to challenge the moral vacuity of a government that refused to take responsibility for or to acknowledge evidence of environmental damage.In this volume, today's foremost scientists and writers give compelling evidence that Carson's transformative insights -- her courage for the earth -- are giving a new generation of activists the inspiration they need to move consumers, industry, and government to action.Contributors include John Elder, Al Gore, John Hay, Freeman House, Linda Lear, Robert Michael Pyle, Janisse Ray, Sandra Steingraber, Terry Tempest Williams, and E. O. Wilson

Rigby John Klusener is hitchhiking to San Francisco. The year is 1967, the town is Pocatello, Idaho. Fresh out of high school, Rigby John is leaving behind his bohemian ex-girlfriend, his prayerful mother, his distant father, and the hay dust of his harsh farm town Catholic upbringing. As he stands by the side of the road desperately waiting for that one ride out, he reflects on the events that brought him there: the discovery of love, friendship, literature, and all the small joys that set him free. At once a tale of sexual awakening, racial enlightenment, and personal epiphany, Now Is the Hour is the disarming and sweetly winning story of one unforgettable teenager who dares to hope for a different life.

In Henry Adams and the Making of America, Pulitzer Prize winner Garry Wills makes a compelling argument for a reassessment of Henry Adams as our nation’s greatest historian and his History as the “nonfiction prose masterpiece of the nineteenth century in America.” Adams drew on his own southern fixation, his extensive foreign travel, his political service in the Lincoln administration, and much more to invent the study of history as we know it. His nine-volume chronicle of America from 1800 to 1816 established new standards for employing archival sources, firsthand reportage, eyewitness accounts, and other techniques that have become the essence of modern history.Ambitious in scope, nuanced in detail, Henry Adams and the Making of America throws brilliant light on the historian and the making of history.

Psychologically astute and passionately written, Molly Worthen’s remarkable debut charts the intricate relationship between student and teacher, biographer and subject. As a Yale freshman, Worthen found herself deeply fascinated by worldly-wise professor Charles Hill, a former diplomat who had shaped American foreign policy in his forty-year career as an adviser to Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and Boutros Boutros-Ghali, among others. Hill was never afraid to tell students how to think or what to do, and the Grand Strategy seminar he co-taught had developed a cult following.The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost is at once the biography of a political insider and the story of how its author evolved as she wrote it. In a moving, highly original work, Worthen conveys the joy and the heartache of uncovering the human being behind one’s idol.

One of America's foremost novelists and critics, Cynthia Ozick has won praise and provoked debate for taking on challenging literary, historical, and moral issues. In her spirited essay collection The Din in the Head, she focuses on the essential joys of great literature. With razor-sharp wit and an inspiring joie de vivre, Ozick investigates unexpected byways in the works of Leo Tolstoy, Saul Bellow, Helen Keller, Isaac Babel, Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, and Henry James, among others. Throughout this bracing collection, she celebrates the curative power of the literary imagination.

The setting: Bolivia in the near future. Miguel “Turing” Saenz, a veteran cryptanalyst, is the most famous code-breaker in the employment of a secret government organization known as the Black Chamber. He is leading the pursuit of the Chamber’s latest target: Kandinsky, a “cyberhacktivist” leader who is staging a war against both the government and the country’s transnational corporations as part of an antiglobalization revolution. As Turing finds himself drawn into a web of murder, intrigue, and deception, he begins to suspect that his work is not as innocent as he once believed.

Just as Jay Gatsby was haunted by Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fizgerald was haunted by his own great first love - a Chicago socialite named Ginevra. Alluring, capricious, and ultimately unavailable, she would become his first muse, the inspiration for such timeless characters as Gatsby's Daisy and Isabelle Borge in This Side of Paradise. Caroline Preston's astute perceptions of her characters and the cultural landscapes they inhabit have earned her work comparisons to to that of Anne Tyler, Alison Lurie, and Diane Johnson. Now, in this richly imagined and ambitious novel, Preston deftly evokes the entire sweep of Ginevra's life - from her first meeting with Scott to the second act of her sometimes charmed, sometimes troubled life. Ginevra was sixteen, a rich man's daughter who had been told she was pretty far too often for her own good. Scott was nineteen, a poor boy full of ambition. They met at a country club dance in St. Paul, Minnesota, in January 1916. For almost a year they wrote each other letters - so long, breathless, and yearning that they often required more than one envelope. But despite their intense epistolary romance, the relationship wouldn't last. After throwing him over with what he deemed "supreme boredom and indifference," she impulsively married a handsome aviator from the right society background. Ruminating over what might have been had she picked the writer instead of the flier, she furtively reads the now famous Fitzgerald's work. When she sees herself - much to her surprise - in his characters, it's not just as the spoiled debutante he'd known; he's also uncannily predicted the woman she's become, cracks and all. An affecting story of two people, one famous, one known only through her portrayals in enduring works of fiction, Gatsby's Girl is a tremendously entertaining and moving novel about the powerful forces of first love, memory, and art.

This groundbreaking work of history investigates the mystery of how the Civil War began, reconsidering the big question: Was it inevitable? William Marvel vividly depicts President Lincoln's tumultuous first year in office, from his inauguration through the rising crisis of secession and the first several months of the war. Drawing on original sources, Marvel suggests that Lincoln not only missed opportunities to avoid conflict with the South but actually fanned the flames of war. Then he wittingly violated the Constitution in his effort to preserve the Union.With a keen eye for the telling detail -- on the battlefield as well as in the White House -- William Marvel delivers a satisfying revisionist history of Lincoln and the early days of the Civil War.

Rodney Jones has long been praised for his masterly storytelling and the bold southern voice he brings to his poetry. Salvation Blues celebrates the range and evolution of his work over a twenty-year period with one hundred selected poems -- including twenty-four bold pieces published only in this collection.

"An uncannily honest writer." -New York Times Book Review The novelist and journalist Amitav Ghosh has offered extraordinary firsthand accounts of pivotal world events over the past twenty years. He is an essential voice in forums like The Nation, the New York Times, the New Republic, Granta, and The New Yorker. Incendiary Circumstances brings together the finest of these pieces for the first time-including many never before published in the States-in a compelling chronicle of the turmoil of our times. Incendiary Circumstances begins with Ghosh's arrival in the Andaman and Nicobar islands just days after the devastation of the 2005 tsunami. We then travel back to September 11, 2001, as Ghosh retrieves his young daughter from school, sick with the knowledge that she must witness the kind of firestorm that has been in the background of his everyday life since childhood. With a prescience born of experience, Ghosh warned decades ago of the dangerous rise of religious extremism. In his travels he has stood on an icy mountaintop on the contested border between India and Pakistan, interviewed Pol Pot's sister-in-law in Cambodia, shared the elation of Egyptians when Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize, and stood with his threatened Sikh neighbors through the riots following Indira Gandhi's assassination. With intelligence and authentic sympathy, he "illuminates the human drama behind the headlines" (Publishers Weekly). Incendiary Circumstances is unparalleled testimony of an era defined by the ravages of politics and nature. Amitav Ghosh is acclaimed for his political journalism and his travel writing. The New York Times Book Review called his travelogue, In An Antique Land, "remarkable . . . rivals anything by the masters of social realism in modern Egyptian literature." He is also the best-selling author of four novels, including The Hungry Tide and The Glass Palace, which has been published in eighteen foreign editions. Ghosh has won France's prestigious Prix Medici Etranger, India's Sahitya Akademi Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and a Pushcart Prize. Educated in South Asia, the Middle East, and the United Kingdom, Ghosh holds a doctorate in social anthropology from Oxford. He divides his time between Harvard University, where he is a visiting professor, and his homes in Kolkata, India, and Brooklyn, New York. Praise for Incendiary Circumstances "This absorbing collection of essays by the novelist, journalist, and travel writer Ghosh . . . covers some two decades of catastrophe and upheaval, from sectarian violence in his native India during the 1980s through the September 11 attacks . . . to the recent Indian Ocean tsunami. With an eye for evocative detail, he illuminates the human dramas behind the headlines: the plight of tsunami refugees trying to rebuild their lives and finances after every bank record and piece of ID is lost to the waves; the courage of ordinary Indians protecting their Sikh neighbors from rampaging Hindu mobs . . . He is equally engaging when he turns from current affairs to literary essays on, say, the international culture of novel reading or the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali. Written in luminous prose with unusual understanding . . . an insightful look at a chaotic world."-Publishers Weekly Starred Review Praise for Amitav Ghosh "Ghosh is adept at delineating the complicated crosscurrents of emerging national independence movements. He is even more impressive at portraying the different ways in which individuals react to the turmoil, hardship, and disorientation wrought by war."-Wall Street Journal "A wonderful hybrid of travel writing, reporting, historical analysis, and memoir - in other words, the kind of piece [Ghosh] writes better than almost anyone else."-Washington Times

Long dismissed as a relic of a bygone era, coal is back -- with a vengence. Coal is one of the nation's biggest and most influential industries -- Big Coal provides more than half the electricity consumed by Americans today -- and its dominance is growing, driven by rising oil prices and calls for energy independence. Is coal the solution to America's energy problems?On close examination, the glowing promise of coal quickly turns to ash. Coal mining remains a deadly and environmentally destructive industry. Nearly forty percent of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere each year comes from coal-fired power plants. In the last two decades, air pollution from coal plants has killed more than half a million Americans. In this eye-opening call to action, Goodell explains the costs and consequences of America's addiction to coal and discusses how we can kick the habit.

Joseph Epstein demonstrates time and again his talent for taking nearly any subject and polishing it into a gem of sparkling wit and fascination. In Narcissus Leaves the Pool, he displays his signature verve and charm in sixteen agile, entertaining pieces. Among his targets in this collection are name-dropping, talent versus genius, the cult of youthfulness, and the information revolution.