Excerpt: ...Osborne, in despair; "they\'ll never guess \'P\'!" The next scene was gorgeous. Solomon John, as a Turk, reclined on John Osborne\'s army-blanket. He had on a turban, and a long beard, and all the family shawls. Ann Maria and Elizabeth Eliza were brought in to him, veiled, by the little boys in their Hindoo costumes. This was considered the great scene of the evening, though Elizabeth Eliza was sure she did not know what to do, Views: 349
The landmark exposé of the most powerful and secretive vice president in American historyBarton Gellman shared the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for a keen-edged reckoning with Dick Cheney?s domestic agenda in The Washington Post. In Angler, Gellman goes far beyond that series to take on the full scope of Cheney?s work and its consequences, including his hidden role in the Bush administration?s most fateful choices in war: shifting focus from al Qaeda to Iraq, unleashing the National Security Agency to spy at home, and promoting ?cruel and inhumane? methods of interrogation. Packed with fresh insights and untold stories, Gellman parts the curtains of secrecy to show how the vice president operated and what he wrought.About the AuthorBarton Gellman is a special projects reporter at The Washington Post, following tours that covered diplomacy, the Middle East, the Pentagon, and the D.C. superior court. His Cheney series, with partner Jo Becker, won a 2008 Pulitzer Prize, a George Polk Award, and the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. Gellman also shared a Pulitzer for national reporting in 2002, and his work has been honored by the Overseas Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Gellman graduated with highest honors from Princeton University and earned a master’s degree in politics at University College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar. He is the author of Contending with Kennan: Toward a Philosophy of American Power. Gellman lives in New York City.Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.Chapter OneA Very Short ListFrank Keating reached for the telephone on a desk the size of a Cadillac sedan. He was the picture of a governor in command, the first Republican to break the Oklahoma jinx on reelection. Working oil rigs outside his window—drilled right there on the capitol grounds, living relics of the old frontier exuberance—pumped cash into a booming state economy. Keating had big plans for the second term, not least the construction of a grand new dome atop the statehouse. And now here came Dick Cheney on the line. Truth was, Keating had been half expecting the call.The week before, a “Dear Frank” note had arrived from George W. Bush. Keating’s Texas neighbor had locked up the Republican presidential nomination on Super Tuesday, besting John McCain in six of ten states. Now Bush wanted advice on a running mate, “one of the most important decisions I will make this year,” he wrote on May 18, 2000. A form letter, Keating knew. The newspapers said Bush sent one to every big name in the GOP.And yet . . . Keating could not help but tally his prospects. He was fifty- six years old, telegenic and tough and going places. Bush admired the way Keating handled himself in 1995, when homegrown terrorists in a Ryder van blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building across town. The two men had a friendly football rivalry, liked to bet on Sooners- Longhorns games, and watched each other’s back in national politics. Bush supported Keating to chair the Republican governors; Keating endorsed Bush for president early on. More than endorsed him—Keating vouched for Bush with right- to- lifers, who needed the reassurance, and he delivered his Oklahoma political machine. All that and the right kind of résumé—special agent in the FBI, U.S. attorney, senior posts in Washington at Treasury, Justice, and Housing. True, Keating did not offer a whole lot of balance to the ticket. He was an oil- state fiscal conservative, hawkish on the death penalty and union- busting “ right- to- work” laws. Too much like Bush, most probably. Still, a person might wonder.Cheney dialed the call himself. A lot of people liked that in a man of his rank, the sense that he refused to take on airs. The habit had other aspects. Cheney was chairman of a Fortune 500 company and had been a war- winning secretary of defense. Phoning unannounced had a way of catching people off balance, depriving them of that “Hold, please” moment to collect their thoughts. Aides said Cheney liked a glimpse at an unstudied interlocutor on the other end of the line. When Keating picked up, Cheney said his piece without preamble.“The governor would like to have you be considered as running mate,” he said.Cheney let the statement hang, in that disconcerting way of his, stopping before the other person quite expects. Keating found nothing to read in the man’s flat, clipped tone. He waited a beat, then probed.“Dick, I don’t really do anything for you-all,” Keating said, thinking Cheney might add a word or two.Cheney chose to take that as a question of geography.“No, it doesn’t matter,” Cheney said. “Oklahoma and Texas, you may be joined by a border, but that is not a factor to us. Would you be willing to fill out all the paperwork?”Indirection was getting Keating nowhere. He decided to ask flat out. Was this just a friendly gesture, or was Bush serious? Before running for governor, Keating had been through FBI background checks and four Senate confirmation hearings. He knew, or thought he did, what it meant to hand cool- eyed strangers the keys to every lockbox in his life. He did not care to go through that again without good cause.“I want you to know the list is a very short list,” Cheney replied.People would talk about all kinds of names, Cheney said matter-of-factly, but most of them would be decoys. Three, maybe four, were genuine. Keating’s was one of those, Cheney said. The next day a thick envelope arrived. Inside was the most demanding questionnaire the Oklahoma governor had ever seen.Keating knew Cheney, trusted him. He had helped recruit Cheney five years before to chair the memorial committee for Oklahoma City bombing victims. Later, Cheney headlined a fund-raiser for Keating’s reelection campaign. “My relationship with Cheney was a good one, a correct one, and one that I thought was aboveboard and transparent,” Keating recalled. “It turned into a very unpleasant association.”What happened after that was prologue to the play of Cheney’s two terms as vice president. Amid stealth and misdirection, with visible formalities obscuring the action offstage, Cheney served as producer for Bush’s first presidential decision. Somewhere along the way he stepped aside as head of casting, taking the part of Bush’s running mate before anyone really auditioned. And he dodged most of the paperwork, bypassing the extraordinary scrutiny he devised for other candidates.Keating filled out the questionnaire, handed over volumes of his most confidential files. In time he would have cause to regret that.Two states east, in Tennessee, Lamar Alexander got word that Cheney was looking for him, too. He waited a couple of days to return the call. The campaign had come and gone for Alexander, and he had made up his mind to skip the GOP convention in July.“You’re hard to reach,” Cheney began, the Wednesday before Memorial Day.“Oh, not so hard, I don’t think,” Alexander said. “I’m sitting right here in front of our picture of the cabinet with President Bush.”Bush senior, he meant. Alexander had been education secretary from 1991 to 1993, when Cheney ran the Pentagon.“Governor Bush would like to consider you as vice president,” Cheney said.Again the words hung, unembellished.“I don’t know what to say,” Alexander replied. “I’ve changed my life. I’ve put politics behind me.”Not for nothing. Alexander had mounted two drives for the presidency himself, neither a juggernaut. His 2000 campaign did not last out 1999, dying with a sixth- place finish in the Iowa straw poll—behind Gary Bauer and Pat Buchanan, for heaven’s sake. He was weary and disappointed and ready for his first long vacation in years.“Surely there are other, better people,” Alexander said.“The governor has told me to put race and gender and geography aside and go for the person who would make the best president.”“There must be a long list,” Alexander said.“You try to make a long list,” Cheney said. “When you make a list of Republicans, using that criterion, it is a short list.”“How about Fred Thompson?”“He might,” Cheney said.Another silence.“There are plenty of people who’d like the notoriety of being on the vice- presidential list, and I’m not one of them,” Alexander said.“I’m not talking about that kind of list. This is a short list,” Cheney repeated.“How short?”“A handful.”“How big is a handful?”“I’ve got five fingers on my hand,” Cheney said, amused or impatient or maybe neither, Alexander couldn’t tell. “How many have you got on yours?”Alexander tacked again.“Why don’t you do it?” he asked.“It’s not for me. He’s asked me to find someone else to do it.”Enough. Alexander owed the nominee a yes or no. He would have to think on the offer, talk things over with Honey. She wasn’t going to like it. Five days later, May 29, Alexander called Cheney in Texas. Send the forms, he said.Alexander did have one question. What should he tell reporters?Cheney knows, if anyone does, how to keep a secret. His reply might have raised an eyebrow on a more suspicious man. “Of course we want to keep this private,” Cheney said. But he added: Confirm that you’re a candidate. Tell them you’re filling out the questionnaire.Bill Frist and Tom Ridge, John Engler and John Kasich, Chuck Hagel and John Danforth and Jon Kyl—they all got similar calls and similar instructions. Speculation in the media was intense. With the nomination decided, the race for running mate was front and center. Feed the beast, Bush’s Austin campaign staff insisted, or the press pack will come up with its own story line. Alexander and Keating and the rest gave the talking heads something to chew on.“I’ll send you the papers,” Cheney told Alexander, signing off. “Fill them out and send them back to me. Late in the month we’ll get together.”Alexander headed to Nantucket for what would have been four weeks of biking alongside cranberry bogs and strolling the beaches of Siasconset. He spent half of it with his accountant and lawyer, on the phone and on a plane, assembling a comprehensive record of his life. He sent the package to Cheney in the second week of June, boxed in a heavy carton best left to younger backs. No easy task, but he understood that a campaign had to run all the traps.“The only thing was,” Alexander recalled, “I never heard from him again.”Secrecy was part of the bargain Cheney struck in the first week of April, when he agreed to run Bush’s vice- presidential search. Worked best out of the limelight, he said. Fewer involved, fewer the leaks, fewer the egos to stroke. For Cheney, the low profile was a me... Views: 348
CHAPTER I THE WICKED GIANT HE was ten. But his clothes were forty. And it was this difference in the matter of age, and, consequently, in the matter of size, that explained why, at first sight, he did not show how thin-bodied he was, but seemed, instead, to be rather a stout little boy. For his faded, old shirt, with its wide sleeves lopped off just above his elbows, and his patched trousers, shortened by the scissors to knee length, were both many times too large for him, so that they lay upon him, front, back and sides, in great, overlapping pleats that were, in turn, bunched into heavy tucks; and his kitchen apron, worn with the waistband about his neck, the strings being tied at the back, also lent him—if viewed from the front—an appearance both of width and weight. But he was not stout. His frame was not even fairly well covered. From the apron hem in front, the two legs that led down to the floor were scarcely larger than lead piping. From the raveling ends of his short sleeves were thrust out arms that matched the legs—bony, skinny arms, pallid as to color, and with hardly any more shape to them than there was to the poker of the cookstove. But while the lead-pipe legs ended in the sort of hard, splinter-defying boy\'s feet that could be met with on any stretch of pavement outside the tenement, the bony arms did not end in boyish hands. The hands that hung, fingertips touching halfway to the knee, were far too big for a boy of ten. They were red, too, as if all the blood of his thin shoulders had run down his arms and through his wrists, and stayed there. And besides being red, fingers, palms and backs were lined and crinkled. They looked like the hands of a hard-working, grown girl. That was because they knew dish washing and sweeping, bed making and cooking, scrubbing and laundering. But his head was all that a boy\'s head should be, showing plenty of brain room above his ears. While it was still actually—and naturally—large for his body, it looked much too large; not only because the body that did its bidding was undersized, but because his hair, bright and abundant, added to his head a striking circumference. He hated his hair, chiefly because it had a hint of wave in it, but also because its color was yellow, with even a touch of green! He had been taunted about it—by boys. But what was worse, women and girls had admired it, and laid hands upon it—or wanted to. And small wonder; for in thick undulations it stood away from forehead and temples as if blown by the wind. A part it had not, nor any sort of neat arrangement. He saw strictly to that. Whenever his left hand was not busy, which was less often than he could wish, he tugged at his locks, so that they reared themselves on end, especially at the very top, where they leaned in various directions and displayed what appeared to be several cowlicks. At every quarter that shining mop was uneven, because badly cut by Big Tom Barber, his foster father, whose name belied his tonsorial ability.... Views: 346
View the animated video for The Adventures of Johnny Bunko and check out popular books for the new graduate here.
There’s never been a career guide like The Adventures of Johnny Bunko by Daniel H. Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others). Told in manga—the Japanese comic book format that’s an international sensation—it’s the fully illustrated story of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job.
Johnny Bunko is new to the Boggs Corp., and he stumbles through his early months as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to rethink his approach. Step by step he builds a career, illustrating as he does the six core lessons of finding, keeping, and flourishing in satisfying work. A groundbreaking guide to surviving and flourishing in any career, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko is smart, engaging and insightful, and offers practical advice for anyone looking for a life of rewarding work. Views: 346
Pushbutton War is presented here in a high quality paperback edition. This popular classic work by Joseph Paul Martino is in the English language, and may not include graphics or images from the original edition. If you enjoy the works of Joseph Paul Martino then we highly recommend this publication for your book collection. Views: 346
Grandmaster A. E. van Vogt was one of the giants of the Golden Age of classic SF, the 1940s. Of his masterpieces, The World of Null-A is perhaps most influential. It was the first major trade SF hardcover ever, in 1949, and has been in print ever since. The careers of Philip K. Dick, Keith Laumer, Alfred Bester, Charles Harness, and Philip Jose Farmer were created or influenced by The World of Null-A. It is required reading for anyone who wishes to know the canon of SF classics.
And so John C. Wright was inspired to write a sequel to the two novels of Null-A (the second was The Players of Null-A). To do this, he trained himself to write in the pulp style and manner of van Vogt. So return again to the Null-A future, in which the superhuman amnesiac with a double brain, Gilbert Gosseyn, must pit his wits once more against the remorseless galactic dictator Enro the Red and the mysterious shadow-being known as The Follower, while he is hurled headlong through unimaginable distances in space and in time and through alternate eternities to fend off the death, and complete the rebirth, of the Universe itself! Views: 345
In space, a vengeful fleet waited.... Then the furred strangers arrived with a plan to save Earth\'s children. But the General wasn\'t sure if he could trust an ALIEN OFFER. Show Excerpt loading, and if the President says it\'s okay, then it\'s okay with me!" He stepped out onto the grass of his yard, and quashed a little shriek of conscience somewhere in the back of his mind. * * * * * Blinding lights pinned him in mid-stride. A familiar voice sprang out of the glare, "Here he is now viewers, General James Rothwell, commander of the western armies, and head of the Earth evacuation project. General, International-TV cameras have been waiting secretly in your yard for hours for your return." As his eyes adjusted, Rothwell distinguished a camera crew, their small portable instrument, and a young, smooth-talking announcer that he had seen several times on television. He forced the annoyance out of his eyes. This, he thought, is all I need. "What the general doesn\'t know," the announcer went on, "is that earlier this evening it was announced by Moscow Central that the computers had picked his son as one of the evacuees!" The shock was visible on 150,000,000 TV se Views: 344
This brilliant novel with universal resonance tells the story of three people trying to survive in a city rife with the extreme fear of desperate times, and of the sorrowing cellist who plays undaunted in their midst.
One day a shell lands in a bread line and kills twenty-two people as the cellist watches from a window in his flat. He vows to sit in the hollow where the mortar fell and play Albinoni’s Adagio once a day for each of the twenty-two victims. The Adagio had been re-created from a fragment after the only extant score was firebombed in the Dresden Music Library, but the fact that it had been rebuilt by a different composer into something new and worthwhile gives the cellist hope.
Meanwhile, Kenan steels himself for his weekly walk through the dangerous streets to collect water for his family on the other side of town, and Dragan, a man Kenan doesn’t know, tries to make his way towards the source of the free meal he knows is waiting. Both men are almost paralyzed with fear, uncertain when the next shot will land on the bridges or streets they must cross, unwilling to talk to their old friends of what life was once like before divisions were unleashed on their city. Then there is “Arrow,” the pseudonymous name of a gifted female sniper, who is asked to protect the cellist from a hidden shooter who is out to kill him as he plays his memorial to the victims.
In this beautiful and unforgettable novel, Steven Galloway has taken an extraordinary, imaginative leap to create a story that speaks powerfully to the dignity and generosity of the human spirit under extraordinary duress.
From the Hardcover edition. Views: 344
′Jones knew the score with "deniable" operations that were sanctioned secretly at the highest levels. If they turned to custard and the cover was blown, the powers-that-be would simply deny everything and disown all involved, from the military down to the spooks and, at the bottom of the food chain, Hired guns like him.′ What happens to the elite, close-knit soldiers of Australia′s Special Air Service (SAS) Regiment after they leave the Who Dares Wins world of special forces? For some, there are highly paid jobs in the world′s war zones and trouble spots protecting global corporations from terrorism, sabotage and violence. Others become powerful government advisers, many join foreign armies to train their special forces and expand the global botherhood. Most risky of all is the shadowy world of deniable ′black ops′. Guarding a deadly secret military cargo - a new missle system brokered... Views: 344
At Risk featured Massachusetts state investigator Win Garano, a shrewd man of mixed-race background and a notinconsiderable chip on his shoulder; District Attorney Monique Lamont, a hard-charging woman with powerful ambitions and a troubling willingness to cut corners; and Garano’s grandmother, who has certain unpredictable talents that you ignore at your peril.
And in The Front, peril is what comes to them all. D.A. Lamont has a special job for Garano. As part of a new public relations campaign about the dangers of declining neighborhoods, she’s sending him to Watertown to “come up with a drama,” and she thinks she knows just the case that will serve. Garano is very skeptical, because he knows that Watertown is also the home base for a loose association of municipal police departments called the FRONT, set up in order that they don’t have to be so dependent on the state—much to Lamont’s anger. He senses a much deeper agenda here—but he has no idea just how deep it goes. In the days that follow, he’ll find that Lamont’s task, and the places it leads him, will resemble a house of mirrors—everywhere he turns, he’s not quite sure if what he’s seeing is true. Views: 344
The stratoship lurched suddenly. The deck heaved up under Lawton\'s feet, hurling him against Captain Forrester and spinning both men around so that they seemed to be waltzing together across the ship. The still limp gym slugger slid downward, colliding with a corrugated metal bulkhead and sloshing back and forth like a wet mackerel. "Slashaway," Lawton muttered. "Slashaway, old fellow." Slashaway opened blurred eyes, "Phew!" he muttered. "You sure socked me hard, sir." "You went out like a light," explained Lawton gently. "A minute before the ship lurched." "The ship lurched, sir?" "Something\'s very wrong, Slashaway. The ship isn\'t moving. There are no vibrations and -- Slashaway, are you hurt? Your skull thumped against that bulkhead so hard I was afraid --" Views: 342
This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.
--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition. Views: 342
Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School is presented here in a high quality paperback edition. This popular classic work by L. T. Meade is in the English language, and may not include graphics or images from the original edition. If you enjoy the works of L. T. Meade then we highly recommend this publication for your book collection. Views: 342
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. Views: 342
