Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny used to live alone in a boxcar. Now they have a home with their grandfather, and an exciting new exhibit to explore—from behind the scenes—at their local zoo. But disaster strikes when a pair of rare ferrets is stolen. The two huge California condors are the thief’s next target. The Aldens quickly decide that the animals are being taken by someone that works in the zoo. But how do they stop a thief who has keys to all the cages? The Boxcar Children are determined to solve the mystery before the zoo looses any more rare animals! Views: 639
Mesa, Colorado, was a nice town. Settled, growing, thriving. God-fearing on a Sunday, money-making of a weekday, the citizens grew carefully richer, and their life had a pattern to it.A pattern that Adam Steele didn't fit. Not when he rode in, sweaty and shabby after too long on the trail, leading a gelding with two dead men lashed across the saddle.Mesa, Colorado, drew back, squeamish and shocked at the blood dried black round the gunshot wounds, at the flies and the smell.Until the news got around that there was a fortune buried somewhere out there in the hills. And only one man had the map of its location. Then the niceness and the manners were stripped away to the bare bones of greed and hatred. And the citizens remembered how to kill. Views: 634
Hunter S. Thompson's legions of fans have waited a decade for this book.
They will not be disappointed. His notorious Screwjack is as salacious, unsettling, and brutally lyrical as it has been rumored to be since the private printing in 1991 of three hundred fine collectors' copies and twenty-six leather-bound presentation copies. Only the first of the three pieces included here—"Mescalito," published in Thompson's 1990 collection Songs of the Doomed—has been available to the public, making the trade edition of Screwjack a major publishing event. "We live in a jungle of pending disasters," Thompson warns in "Mescalito," a chronicle of his first mescaline experience and what it sparked in him while he was alone in an L.A. hotel room in February 1969—including a bout of paranoia that would have made most people just scream no, once and for all. But for Thompson, along with the downside came a burst of creativity too powerful to ignore. The result is a poetic, perceptive, and wildly funny stream-of-consciousness take on 1969 America as only Hunter S. Thompson could see it.
Screwjack just gets weirder with its second offering, "Death of a Poet." As Thompson describes this trailer-park confrontation with the dark side of a deservingly doomed friend: "Whoops, I thought. Welcome to the night train."
The heart of the collection lies in its final, title piece, an unnaturally poignant love story. What makes the romantic tale "Screwjack" so touching, for all its queerness, is the aching melancholy in its depiction of the modern man's burden: that "we are doomed. Mama has gone off to Real Estate School...and after that maybe even to Law School. We will never see her again."
Ostensibly written by Raoul Duke, "Screwjack" begins with an editor's note explaining of Thompson's alter ego that "the first few lines contain no warning of the madness and fear and lust that came more and more to plague him and dominate his life...." "I am guilty, Lord," Thompson writes, "but I am also a lover—and I am one of your best people, as you know; and yea tho I have walked in many strange shadows and acted crazy from time to time and even drooled on many High Priests, I have not been an embarrassment to you...."
Nor has Hunter S. Thompson been to American literature. Quite the contrary: What the legendary Gonzo journalist proves with Screwjack is just how brilliant a prose stylist he really is, amid all the hilarity. As Thompson puts it in his introduction, the three stories here "build like Bolero to a faster & wilder climax that will drag the reader relentlessly up a hill, & then drop him off a cliff....That is the Desired Effect." Views: 633
In this mesmerizing new novel, Anne Rice demonstrates once again her gift for spellbinding storytelling and the creation of myth and magic, as she weaves together two of her most compelling worlds? those of the Vampire Chronicles and the Mayfair witches.In this mesmerizing new novel, Anne Rice demonstrates once again her gift for spellbinding storytelling and the creation of myth and magic, as she weaves together two of her most compelling worlds? those of the Vampire Chronicles and the Mayfair witches. Views: 632
From bestselling author Diney Costeloe, a young woman fights to save a treasured war memorial and uncovers a tragic story that reverberates from World War I to the present day. 'This is our secret, pet. You mustn't tell anyone about us planting this tree for dad. It's our secret.' 1921. In the sleepy village of Charlton Ambrose, eight ash trees stand as a timeless memorial to the men killed in the Great War. On a dark and chilly night, a ninth tree appears. Who planted it and why? And who was 'the unknown soldier' for whom it is marked? 2001. Eighty years later, the memorial is under threat from developers. Local reporter, Rachel Elliott, is determined to save it, and to solve the mystery of the ninth tree. The trail will take her into the dark heart of her own family history;to a great, but tragic, love;and to a secret that has been kept since the war to end all wars. ... Views: 629
Garrett Mattingly's thrilling narrative sets out the background of the sixteenth-century European intrigue and religious unrest that gave rise to one of the world's most famous maritime crusades and the naval battles that decided its fate. In putting the naval campaign of 1588 back into the context of the first great international crisis of modern history, Mattingly builds up, like the movements of a symphony, a broad picture of how events of the time affected men's actions, plans and hopes. He brilliantly connects a series of scenes or episodes, shifting the point of focus from England to the continent and from courts to ships and cities. The feeling of tension mounts to a crescendo throughout Europe as the great drama of the Armada is approached. The battle itself and the aftermath are so vividly and poignantly described that they might be happening in our world... Views: 628
Evil Times Two Something icky is brewing, as usual, in Sunnydale. This time it's in the form of two clean-cut, prep school-type boys. Buffy's suspicious from the start — their fashion statement is so old it's dead, and it seems they have a slightly unnatural attachment to their mother. But then, almost everything about these boys is unnatural — they're vampires. Not ordinary vampires, either — they are descendants of a clan known for its ability to summon powerful occult forces. And when the Slayer dusts this dynamic duo, she learns what you get when you mess with a vamp family tree. Now it's up to Buffy to battle her personal demons — or risk endangering her own most cherished relation. Because mama vamp has something in mind for Joyce.... Views: 628
RAIN ALREADY KNOWS HOW HARD LIFE CAN BE. BUT SHE IS ABOUT TO DISCOVER A SHATTERING SECRET FROM THE PAST THAT WILL CHANGE HER FUTURE FOREVER....
Growing up in the ghettos of Washington, D.C., the cards are stacked against a hardworking dreamer like Rain Arnold. Rain has fought to be the best daughter she can: she studies hard and gets good grades; she helps her mother cook and clean. And unlike her defiant younger sister, she avoids the dangers of the city streets as if her life depends on it...and it does. But Rain can't suppress the feeling that she has never truly fit in, that she is a stranger in her own world.
Then one fateful night, Rain overhears something she shouldn't: a heartbreaking revelation from the past, a long-buried secret that is about to change her life in ways she never could have imagined. In the blink of an eye, everything Rain has ever known -- the family she has loved and the familiar place she has called home is left behind, and Rain is sent to live with total strangers, the wealthy Hudson family. But just as she did not belong to the troubled world she was raised in, Rain is also out of place in this realm of luxury and privilege. With nowhere to turn, Rain finds an escape in the theater, inside the walls of an exclusive private school. But will it be enough to fulfill her heart's deepest wish -- and give her a place to call home? Views: 623
Edward Said, the renowned literary and cultural critic and passionately engaged intellectual, is one of our era's most formidable, provocative, and important thinkers. For more than three decades his books, which include Culture and Imperialism, Peace and Its Discontents, and the seminal study Orientalism, have influenced not only our worldview but the very terms of public discourse.
The Edward Said Reader includes key sections from all of Said's books, from the groundbreaking 1966 study of Joseph Conrad to his new memoir, Out of Place. Whether he is writing of Zionism or Palestinian self-determination, Jane Austen or Yeats, music or the media, Said's uncompromising intelligence casts urgent light on every subject he undertakes. The Edward Said Reader will prove a joy to the general reader and an indispensable resource for scholars of politics, history, literature, and cultural studies: in short, of all those fields that his work has influenced and, in some cases, transformed.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 622
From the raw clay of historical fact, James Carlos Blake has sculpted a powerful novel of both a man and an America at war with themselves. Here is the brutally honest story of free-spirit William Anderson, who is pulled into a savage conflict of state against state in the years leading up to the Civil War. When Bill suffers a catastrophic loss, a fury is unleashed in his anguished soul. He becomes the most fearsome guerrilla captain and earns a name that becomes whispered with reverence and terror: "Bloody Bill." Views: 616
His style from his first book, The Christmas Box, used quotes from fictitious diaries to highlight idea's or themes. Someone told him at a book signing that the person that wrote the diaries was a better writer than he was, so he stated writing diaries. Views: 615
From the bestselling author of The Bone Collector and The Devil's Teardrop comes this spine-chilling new thriller that pits renowned criminalist Lincoln Rhyme against the ultimate opponent -- Amelia Sachs, his own brilliant protégée.
A quadriplegic since a beam crushed his spinal cord years ago, Rhyme is desperate to improve his condition and goes to the University of North Carolina Medical Center for high-risk experimental surgery. But he and Sachs have hardly settled in when the local authorities come calling. In a twenty-four-hour period, the sleepy Southern outpost of Tanner's Corner has seen a local teen murdered and two young women abducted. And Rhyme and Sachs are the best chance to find the girls alive.
The prime suspect is a strange teenaged truant known as the Insect Boy, so nicknamed for his disturbing obsession with bugs. Rhyme agrees to find the boy while awaiting his operation. Rhyme's unsurpassed analytical skills and stellar forensic experience, combined with Sachs's exceptional detective legwork, soon snare the perp. But even Rhyme can't anticipate that Sachs will disagree with his crime analysis and that her vehemence will put her in the swampland, harboring the very suspect whom Rhyme considers a ruthless killer. So ensues Rhyme's greatest challenge -- facing the criminalist whom he has taught everything he knows in a battle of wits, forensics, and intuition. And in this adversary, Rhyme also faces his best friend and soul mate. Views: 613
Originally published in 2000, The Right to Vote was widely hailed as a magisterial account of the evolution of suffrage from the American Revolution to the end of the twentieth century. In this revised and updated edition, Keyssar carries the story forward, from the disputed presidential contest of 2000 through the 2008 campaign and the election of Barack Obama. The Right to Vote is a sweeping reinterpretation of American political history as well as a meditation on the meaning of democracy in contemporary American life. Views: 608
