Prose; fiction, Masculine Views: 28
Celia was paying Jethro to be her husband—so she was disconcerted to discover Jethro was actually a multimillionaire. Why had he agreed to marry—if he didn't need the money...?All Celia had wanted to do was grant her dying father's wish to see her happily married. Now she must spend day and night pretending to be madly in love with her gorgeous new groom. And, although she'd stipulated "no sex" in the contract, it was exactly that clause she was finding impossible to keep.... Views: 28
City players know they aren't well-liked in Greece, but they never expected to face death on the football pitch.Scott Manson and London City are in Athens battling for the UEFA Champion's League title. The situation in Athens is tense, and some of City's players are so unpopular in Greece they've been assigned bodyguards.Karaiskakis Stadium is packed to the rafters when tragedy strikes. Christoph Bundchen collapses and dies mid-match. Is it a heart attack? Or something more sinister? The team have a crucial match in England - but they can't go home until the investigation is complete. The Greek authorities are dragging their heels... Can Scott Manson find the truth and get the team home in time?The second Scott Manson thriller from bestselling crimewriter Philip Kerr. Views: 28
From the electrocution of Topsy the Elephant at Coney Island in 1903 to the rekindling relationship of two high school sweethearts in a stolen SUV, each story in Nick Arvin's remarkable first collection reveals a world where people struggle against their own shortcomings as time and technology move inexorably forward. With great intelligence, warmth and sly humor, Arvin explores how technology shapes the way we interact with one another and how we experience a world governed by it. With awe and sympathy, he exposes our human limitations despite our apparent advancements—marking both how far we've come and how much farther we need to go. Don't miss this new edition, now with three additional stories. Views: 28
It is difficult today to imagine life before standard time was established in 1884. In the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, there were 144 official time zones in North America alone. The confusion that ensued, especially among the burgeoning railroad companies, was an hourly comedy of errors that ultimately threatened to impede progress. The creation of standard time, with its two dozen global time zones, is one of the great inventions of the Victorian Era, yet it has been largely taken for granted.In Time Lord, Clark Blaise re-creates the life of Sanford Fleming, who struggled to convince the world to accept standard time. It’s a fascinating story of science, politics, nationalism, and the determined vision of one man who changed the world. Set in a time marked by substantial technological and cultural transformation, Time Lord is also an erudite exploration of art, literature, consciousness, and our changing relationship to timeFrom the Trade Paperback edition.Amazon.com ReviewIn the 1880s, a businessman traveling by train from New York to Boston needed, on arrival, to adjust his clock, moving it ahead by 12 minutes. The strange increment, writes Clark Blaise, was a matter of local interpretation, some enterprising Bostonian having determined that the rising sun touched the shore of Massachusetts a dozen minutes before warming Manhattan.Such local interpretations of time made the job of establishing railroad schedules a matter of guesswork and hope, as the Canadian entrepreneur Sandford Fleming discovered when he missed a train in the west of Ireland in 1876. Frustrated, Fleming realized that a new system of universal time would need to be created if railroad travel were ever to realize its full potential. As Blaise writes, "the adoption of standard time for the world was as necessary for commercial advancement as the invention of the elevator was for modern urban development," and nations such as England that had a system of standard time in place owed much of their economic superiority to the predictability and reliability such a system put in place.Fleming discovered that getting the world onto the same schedule required years of negotiating and browbeating, a nightmare that Blaise ably recounts. Fleming's efforts eventually paid off, and as Blaise writes, "Of all the inventions of the Industrial Age, standard time has endured, virtually unchanged, the longest." His entertaining account of how that came to be will be of appeal to readers who enjoyed Dava Sobel's Longitude, Henry Petroski's The Pencil, and other popular works in the history of technology. --Gregory McNameeFrom Publishers WeeklyAlthough he had consulted his guide to Irish railroad travel for the correct time of his train's departure, Sanford Fleming discovered that the train scheduled to depart at 5:35 p.m. would actually depart 12 hours later, at 5:35 a.m. Prior to 1884, conflicts like Fleming's were not unusual since time was not standardized as it is today. Determined to impose a rational order over something so elusive, Fleming, a Canadian engineer and surveyor, turned his attention to the creation of a standard global time based on a 24-hour clock, which he presented to an assemblage of leaders from around the world in 1884 at the Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C. After much scrutiny and debate, these leaders accepted Fleming's proposal, agreeing that the day would begin at midnight and establishing both the Prime Meridian at Greenwich and the International Dateline. Blaise's splendid account traces Fleming's starring role as the creator of a method of measuring time that rules people's lives even today. Blaise, author of 15 previous books of both fiction and nonfiction (Brief Parables of the Twentieth Century: New and Selected Stories, etc.), presents an important history of ideas and examines how this invisible yet remarkable technological achievement of the Victorian era, a period marked by a dogged confidence in its own capacity for progress, changed the world. Blaise writes with perfect pitch and graceful narrative; his most beautiful chapter explores the ways that writers like Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf manipulated time in their work even as they were constrained by it. (Apr. 20) Forecast: Every popular science book that comes down the pike these days is compared by its publisher to Dava Sobel's Longitude. But this beautiful little book may really follow in Sobel's footsteps. Blaise's six-city author tour (San Francisco, Minneapolis, Chicago, Iowa City, Seattle and Portland, Ore.) can only help to garner attention.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. Views: 28
Authors Shannon Hengen and Ashley Thomson have assembled a reference guide that covers all of the works written by the acclaimed Canadian author Margaret Atwood since 1988, including her novels Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, and the 2000Booker Prize winner, The Blind Assassin. Rather than just including Atwood's books, this guide includes all of Atwood's works, including articles, short stories, letters, and individual poetry. Adaptations of Atwood's works are also included, as aresome of her more public quotations. Secondary entries (i.e. interviews, scholarly resources, and reviews) are first sorted by type, and then arranged alphabetically by author, to allow greater ease of navigation. The individual chapters are organized chronologically, with each subdivided into seven categories: Atwood's Works, Adaptations, Quotations, Interviews, Scholarly Resources, Reviews of Atwood's Works, and Reviews of Adaptations of Atwood's Works. The book also includes a chapter... Views: 28
Footsteps, the third in Umm Zakiyyah's internationally acclaimed If I Should Speak trilogy, is a story that stands on its own in both impact and inspiration. At the heart of the novel are Ismael and his wife Sarah. Married for twenty-six years and having accepted Islam on a journey they took together, Ismael and Sarah have what every marriage couple hopes to achieve. Stability, dedication, and a comfortable life. But as the story unfolds, the hairline fractures in their marriage become visible, and the fractures become splintering cracks as Sarah discovers a detrimental secret her husband has kept from her for four months, a secret second wife. In the face of his wife's discovery, Ismael is torn between the love and security of his marriage, and the natural inclinations any man must temper in a world full of choices, and devastating consequences. Views: 28
Insects have inspired fear, fascination, and enlightenment for centuries. They are capable of incredibly complex behavior, even with brains often the size of a poppy seed. How do they accomplish feats that look like human activity— personality, language, childcare—with completely different pathways from our own? What is going on inside the mind of those ants that march like boot-camp graduates across your kitchen floor? How does the lead ant know exactly where to take his colony, to that one bread crumb that your nightly sweep missed? Can insects be taught new skills as easily as your new puppy?Sex on Six Legs is a startling and exciting book that provides answers to these questions and many more. With the humor of Olivia Judson's Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation, Zuk not only examines the bedroom lives of creepy crawlies but also calls into question some of our own longheld assumptions about learning... Views: 28
On New Year's Eve, 1940, James Paradine makes a speech to his family. Valuable documents have disappeared and the culprit has until midnight to confess. A few minutes after twelve James is dead and it is up to retired governess turned private detective Miss Silver to solve the mystery. Views: 28
