A mesmerising novel of the film industry and one man's life that charts a path for all of us. Larrikin Australian actor Randy Storm had it all. Swept up by Hollywood in the 1950s he had the looks, charm and talent to take on the world. But by the 1990s he's forgotten, burned out after a life of movie star excess. When producer Michael Matthews meets the once great Randy Storm, he is surprised to find a man who is at peace with himself. Both he and researcher Janie Callendar set out to discover the source of this inner peace. Meanwhile his agent Ariel Margoles finds out that Australia's world acclaimed film director Patricia Jordan is making the hottest Hollywood film of the year and she sees a chance for Randy to be a star once more. But just as Randy is about to reach his pinnacle, a secret from his past threatens to bring down his greatest triumph. . .
Gail Tsukiyama's A Hundred Flowers is powerful novel about an ordinary family facing extraordinary times at the start of the Chinese Cultural Revolution China, 1957. Chairman Mao has declared a new openness in society: "Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend." Many intellectuals fear it is only a trick, and Kai Ying's husband, Sheng, a teacher, has promised not to jeopardize their safety or that of their young son, Tao. But one July morning, just before his sixth birthday, Tao watches helplessly as Sheng is dragged away for writing a letter criticizing the Communist Party and sent to a labor camp for "reeducation." A year later, still missing his father desperately, Tao climbs to the top of the hundred-year-old kapok tree in front of their home, wanting to see the mountain peaks in the distance. But Tao slips and tumbles thirty feet to the courtyard below, badly breaking his leg. As Kai Ying struggles to hold her small family together in the face of this shattering reminder of her husband's absence, other members of the household must face their own guilty secrets and strive to find peace in a world where the old sense of order is falling. Once again, Tsukiyama brings us a powerfully moving story of ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances with grace and courage.
Featured in The Wall Street Journal and on ABC's Nightline, Manthropology is an entertaining and surprising look at manlinessAnthropologist Peter McAllister set out to prove once and for all that man today is the best man who has ever lived. But to his disappointment, in nearly every category he examined modern man was beaten by his ancestors.Manthropology, then, is a look at male achievement-and underachievement. It kicks off in Ice Age France, where McAllister proves how a Neanderthal woman could beat even today's strongest strongman at arm wrestling. He looks at medieval Slavic poets who could take 50 Cent to school in a rap battle. And he takes readers to the jungles of Africa, where Aka Pygmy men have taken fatherhood to such extremes that they even grow breasts to suckle their children. For the modern man, the results aren't always pretty. But Manthropology is unfailingly smart and entertaining.How Does Modern Man Stack Up?Ultimate Fighters routinely end up on a blood-soaked canvas. But what would a match in the Octagon look like next to the bouts of Ancient Greece: a battleground or a playground? [Page 77]***A modern army goes into battle with state-of-the-art technology. But could they have beaten Nero's legions, who marched fifty miles a day for six straight days-each soldier carrying a hundred-pound pack? [Page 99]***Wilt Chamberlain is known for scoring on the court and off. He claimed to have had as many as 20,000 sexual encounters. But that's nothing compared to the 32 million people today all descended from just one conqueror. [Page 248]
Many malevolent menaces have imperiled the magical land of Xanth in its long and storied history. But none has been as despicably dangerous as the Dastard-a craven miscreant who sold his soul to a detestable demon for the power to erase events. Now the entire future of Xanth is at the mercy of his every whim. Only a young dragon-girl named Becka has the power to stop his devious deeds!Becka is a crossbreed-the daughter of Draco Dragon and a lovely human woman who met, by chance, at a Love Spring. Now fourteen, Becka is beginning to wonder where in Xanth she belongs-on the ground with her mother's people, or flying the skies with her father's kind. So she journeys to the Good Magician Humfrey to discover her True Purpose in life. Much to her astonishment and surprise, the Magician tells her that a great Destiny awaits her-one that will affect the future of all of Xanth...in Piers Anthony's The Dastard.
The thrilling new book based on the hit Fox TV series 24 from New York Times bestselling author David Mack, 24: Rogue. The time is 8:00 PM. Jack Bauer is a man without a country, a fugitive hunted by the most powerful nations in the world. He lives on the run, survives by his wits, and finds purpose in his exile by waging a one-man war against those who profit from the deaths and sufferings of others.On a self-imposed crusade to destroy the criminal empire of international arms dealer Karl Rask, Jack has infiltrated the crew of one of Rask's freighters. But his mission is disrupted when the ship is hijacked by a band of suspiciously well-informed pirates off the coast of Somalia.As Jack fights to free the ship, he discovers a deadly secret hidden in its hold: a prize the pirates were hired to steal, and that could be used to ignite a world war-unless Jack captures it first.
"Deservedly compared to her countrywomen, Binchy and Pilcher, Willett is an equally gifted storyteller."-Booklist The Keep - that beautiful, ancient family home where the Chadwick family had lived for generations - is still a haven from the heartbreaks and storms of life. Jolyon Chadwick, a famous television presenter, takes his new girlfriend Henrietta home meet his extended family - and also to meet Maria, the mother who deserted him and his father many years ago, now re-appeared and seeming to want forgiveness. Jolyon, however, is not in the mood for forgiveness - although his father Hal, now married to his cousin and childhood sweetheart, feels a lingering guilt about Maria and wants them all to be friends. And Henrietta, still vulnerable from the break-up of her own parents' marriage, is not sure whether she can move on.
Before Jo Walton won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for her stunning Among Others, she published a trilogy set in a dark alternate postwar England that had negotiated "Peace with Honor" with Nazi Germany in 1941. These novels-Farthing, Ha'penny, and Half a Crown-are connected by common threads, but can be read in any order.In Ha'penny, England has completed its slide into fascist dictatorship. The last hopes of democracy seem extinguished. Then a bomb explodes in a London suburb. The brilliant but compromised Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard is assigned the case. What he finds leads him to a conspiracy of peers and communists-of staunch King-and-Country patriots and hardened IRA gunmen-to murder the Prime Minister and his ally, Adolf Hitler.Against a background of domestic espionage and suppression, a band of idealists blackmails an actress who holds the key to the Fuhrer's death. From the ha'penny seats in the theatre to the ha'pennys that cover dead men's eyes, the conspiracy and the investigation swirl inexorably to a stunning conclusion.
In 1994, Interface founder and chairman Ray Anderson set an audacious goal for his commercial carpet company: to take nothing from the earth that can't be replaced by the earth. Now, Anderson leads the way forward and challenges all of industry to share that goal, with Business Lessons from a Radical Industrialist.The Interface story is a compelling one: in 1994, making carpets was a toxic, petroleum-based process, releasing immense amounts of air and water pollution and creating tons of waste. Fifteen years after Anderson's call for change, Interface has:-cut greenhouse gas emissions by 82%-cut fossil fuel consumption by 60%-cut waste by 66%-cut water use by 75%-invented and patented new machines, materials, and manufacturing processes-increased sales by 66%, doubled earnings, and raised profit marginsWith practical ideas and measurable outcomes that every business can use, Anderson shows that profit and sustainability are not mutually exclusive; businesses can improve their bottom lines and do right by the earth.Ray Anderson is featured in the film, So Right, So Smart, which takes a behind-the-scenes look at how his leadership transformed Interface into a company with a sustainable business practices that made it more profitable than it was before.
The new novel from Australia's favourite writer and author of bestsellers such as TEARS OF THE MOON and THE OPAL DESERT.
"Simmons writes like a hot-rodding angel." -Stephen King An evil legacy comes to life in this classic and ultimately human novel about believable vampires, featuring a brand-new introduction by Dan Simmons. Children of the Night will take you to a place that no one knows-yet all of us fear.In a desolate orphanage in post-Communist Romania, a desperately ill infant is given the wrong blood transfusion-and flourishes rather than dies. For immunologist Kate Neuman, the infant's immune system may hold the key to cure cancer and AIDS. Kate adopts the baby and takes him home to the States. But baby Joshua holds a link to an ancient clan and their legendary leader-Vlad Tsepes, the original Dracula - whose agents kidnap the child. Against impossible odds and vicious enemies- both human and vampire - Kate and her ally, Father Mike O'Rourke, steal into Romania to get her baby back."A mesmerizing tour through the ghostly, gray tatters of Romania." -Publishers Weekly
Talk radio has done an end run around the voting public. With the far right controlling the five major syndicates, conservatives have a disproportionate voice in the medium-even in liberal markets such as New York, Boston, and San Francisco. Writing with his characteristic and incisive wit, Bill Press exposes the destructive power of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and the other polarizing figures of talk radio who dominate 90 percent of the political airwaves today while spewing partisan lies and propaganda. Toxic Talk fires a timely cannon blast at the right-wing media machine and how it subverts American democracy.
As the first wave of pioneers travel westward to settle the American frontier, two women discover their inner strength when their lives are irrevocably changed by the hardship of the wild west in The Removes, a historical novel from New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Tatjana Soli. Spanning the years of the first great settlement of the West, The Removes tells the intertwining stories of fifteen-year-old Anne Cummins, frontierswoman Libbie Custer, and Libbie's husband, the Civil War hero George Armstrong Custer. When Anne survives a surprise attack on her family's homestead, she is thrust into a difficult life she never anticipated-living among the Cheyenne as both a captive and, eventually, a member of the tribe. Libbie, too, is thrown into a brutal, unexpected life when she marries Custer. They move to the territories with the U.S. Army, where Libbie is challenged daily and her worldview expanded: the pampered daughter of a small-town judge, she transforms into a daring camp follower. But when what Anne and Libbie have come to know-self-reliance, freedom, danger-is suddenly altered through tragedy and loss, they realize how indelibly shaped they are by life on the treacherous, extraordinary American plains.With taut, suspenseful writing, Tatjana Soli tells the exhilarating stories of Libbie and Anne, who have grown like weeds into women unwilling to be restrained by the strictures governing nineteenth-century society. The Removes is a powerful, transporting novel about the addictive intensity and freedom of the American frontier.
"A perfect example of what literature can give us that history books cannot."-Francine Prose, The New York Times Book ReviewA New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Steve and Jabulile, once clandestine lovers under a racist law forbidding sexual relations between black and white, are living in a newly free South Africa. Both were combatants in the struggle against apartheid, and now, he, a university lecturer, and she, a lawyer, are parents of children born in freedom. But as the ideals of this "better life for all" are challenged by the realities of the world around them, Steve and Jabulile consider leaving the country they so vehemently fought to free.The subject in No Time Like the Present is contemporary, but Nadine Gordimer's treatment is, as ever, timeless. In the telling of this conflicted couple, she captures the fragmented essence of a nation.
"Mohammed ElBaradei is one of the genuinely great leaders of his generation."-Graham T. Allison, Douglas Dillon Professor of Government and Director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard UniversityAs the director of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei played a key role in the most high-stakes conflicts of our time. Contending with the Bush administration's assault on Iraq, the nuclear aspirations of North Korea, and the West's standoff with Iran, he emerged as a lone independent voice, uniquely credible in the Arab world and the West alike. As questions over Iran's nuclear capacity continue to fill the media, ElBaradei's account is both enlightening and fascinating.ElBaradei takes us inside the nuclear fray, from behind-the-scenes exchanges in Washington and Baghdad to the streets of Pyongyang and the trail of Pakistani nuclear smugglers. He decries an us-versus-them approach and insists on the necessity of relentless diplomacy. "We have no other choice," ElBaradei says. "The other option is unthinkable."
In the tradition of Alison Weir's New York Times bestselling Mary, Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley, comes the most sensational crime story of Tudor England. On the morning of September 8, 1560, at the isolated manor of Cunmor place, the body of a young woman was found at the bottom of a staircase, her neck broken. But this was no ordinary death. Amy Robsart was the wife of Elizabeth I's great favorite, Robert Dudley, the man who many believed she would marry, were he free. Immediately people suspected foul play and Elizabeth's own reputation was in danger of serious damage. Many felt she might even lose her throne. An inquest was begun, witnesses called, and ultimately a verdict of death by accident was reached. But the mystery refused to die and cast a long shadow over Elizabeth's reign. Using recently discovered forensic evidence from the original investigation, Skidmore is able to put an end to centuries of speculation as to the true causes of Robsart's death. This is the story of a treacherous period in Elizabeth's life: a tale of love, death, and tragedy, exploring the dramatic early life of England's Virgin Queen.
Jetzt zum Newsletter anmelden und tolle Angebote und Anregungen für Ihre nächste Lektüre erhalten.
Mit Ihrer Newsletter-Anmeldung erklären Sie sich mit unseren Datenschutzbestimmungen einverstanden.
