All the fairies expect to eat candy corn at the Harvest Festival, but the crop of candy corns is shrinking! Is someone playing a trick?Mellie the Caramel Fairy discovers that the Chuchies are back and have been digging in the fields, pulling up the candy corns before the fairies can collect them. Mellie makes sure the Chuchies learn a lesson while her friends help her to harvest a new crop of candy corn just in time for the festival. Views: 58
Former #1 Epic Fantasy Free Kindle DownloadFans of Robert E. Howard's Conan, R.A. Salvatore's-Drizzt Do' Urden, Frizt Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, David Gemmell's Druss the Legend, and Raymond E. Feist's Pug the Wizard like The Darkslayer series ... perhaps you will as well. WELCOME TO THE UNWELCOME WORLD OF BISH ...When recklessness provokes a Royal household, Venir and his friend Melegal the thief are forced to flee the city. In pursuit, the Royals soon unleash some unusual powers against them and start to close in. Can Venir and Melegal survive the impending doom that is about to befall them? Only Bish knows, but Venir has been secretly keeping evil forces at bay for years. He is the Darkslayer, a man possessed by a mantle of power he cannot let go. Enter the underlings, an evil race bent on the destruction of mankind. Enter the Royals, the self-absorbed rulers of the world of Bish.Enter the orcs, halflings, dwarves, ogres and other races, some good, most bad, all caught in the maelstrom of treachery and seduction.Strife and turmoil are constant features of life as humans struggle to survive among orcs, ogres, and the most evil of all--the underlings. As the underlings rally all of the evil forces they can muster to destroy the mystical and legendary Darkslayer, something unexpected has upset the delicate balance between good and evil on the world called Bish, making the Darkslayer a pawn in other insidious disputes.Update July 2012: Due to popular demand, this is an edited version with illustrations!Review5 out of 5 Stars!"From the causal fantasy subscriber, to the die-hard Tolkienist, everyone will find something to enjoy in the ever expanding world of Bish." See full review below. --Sacramento/San Francisco Book Review5 out of 5 Stars!"...this author has written an extremely cool book.""...makes me believe that these characters should also appear in a video game or up on a movie screen very, very soon. Enjoy! --Feathered Quill Book Review From the AuthorSee Author Page Views: 58
Amazon.com ReviewProduct Description_Washington Post _columnist Dana Milbank takes a fair and balanced look at the unsettling rise of the silly Fox News host Glenn Beck. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that “the tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” In America in 2010, Glenn Beck provides the very refreshment Jefferson had in mind: Whether he’s the patriot or the tyrant, he’s definitely full of manure. The wildly popular Fox News host with three million daily viewers perfectly captures the vitriol of our time and the fact-free state of our political culture. The secret to his success is his willingness to traffic in the fringe conspiracies and Internet hearsay that others wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole: death panels, government health insurance for dogs, FEMA concentration camps, an Obama security force like Hitler’s SS. But Beck, who is, according to a recent Gallup poll, admired by more Americans than the Pope, has nothing in his background that identifies him as an ideologue, giving rise to the speculation that his right-wing shtick is just that—the act of a brilliant showman, known for both his over-the-top daily outrages and for weeping on the air. Milbank describes, with lacerating wit, just how the former shock jock without a college degree has managed to become the most recognizable leader of antigovernment conservatives and exposes him as the guy who is single-handedly giving patriotism a bad name. From the Hardcover edition. Author Dana Milbank on Beck University As part of his $32-million-a-year business empire, Fox News host/radio show host/March on Washington demagogue Glenn Beck has begun offering on-line classes through “Beck University.” For an annual tuition of $74.95, and hundreds of perfectly good hours wasted, you will learn why everything they teach you at other universities is, as Beck puts it, “unbelievably incomplete” – because those schools, unlike Beck University, are constrained by annoyances such as facts. Alternatively, for much less money and pain, you can decline Beck University’s admission offer and buy this book. Consider it the Cliff’s Notes to Glenn Beck University: Everything you need to know about the most successful, and dangerous, media personality in America. I’d call it “Glenn Beck for Dummies,” but people might confuse it with Beck’s broadcasts.The Class Offerings:Chemistry 101: How Beck uses menthol paste to produce the famous tears that flow from his eyes.Economics 110: Beck describes himself as a “regular schmoe” who lives in a “subdivision,” then takes a chauffer-driven sedan to his 16-room mansion on three acres in the wealthiest hamlet in America: New Canaan, Connecticut.Economics 330: Beck’s apocalyptic pronouncements on air have made him a favorite of advertisers selling gold coins and “Survival Seed Banks” that can be used in the End Times.Religion 220: Beck’s advancement of the White Horse Prophecy, an obscure Mormon philosophy dating to the Prophet Joseph Smith, who said elders of the Mormon Church will save the Constitution.Biology 111: The saga of how Glenn Beck was almost killed by his hemorrhoids.Biology 330: The science behind Beck’s killing of a frog and restoring life to a dead fish on his Fox News set.Psychology 125: How to convince millions of people that the U.S. government is operating concentration camps in Wyoming.History 114: Beck’s discovery that progressives in America are using “the same tactic” Hitler did in “rounding up Jews and exterminating them.”History 220: Advanced Revisionism. Beck, fierce foe of government spending, once said of the Wall Street bailout: “the real story is the $700 billion that you’re hearing about now is not only, I believe, necessary, it is also not nearly enough, and all of the weasels in Washington know it.”Genealogy 401: Beck’s research determines that Woodrow Wilson is Obama’s grandfather.Enroll today. Because the End is Near.Review"[A] droll, take-no-prisoners account of the nation's most audacious conspiracy-spinner...Milbank is pitch-perfect in describing a typical Beck performance. He has watched and listened to more Beck programs than I believed possible for the human mind to absord...Milbank is also superb in describing how Beck manipulates his listeners..."-- David Oshinsky for _The Washington Post _"Train-wreck fascinating...Milbank's obsessions about Beck's obsessions can be contagious." -- _San Francisco Chronicle_"Milbank's fast-paced chronicle of Beck World ably details the meteoric rise of a low-rent radio shock jock to national phenomenon in less than a decade." _--The Christian Science Monitor _ Views: 58
My Happy Days in Hell (1962) is Gyorgy Faludy's grimly beautiful autobiography of his battle to survive tyranny and oppression. Fleeing Hungary in 1938 as the German army approaches, acclaimed poet Faludy journeys to Paris, where he finds a lover but merely a cursory asylum. When the French capitulate to the Nazis, Faludy travels to North Africa, then on to America, where he volunteers for military service. Missing his homeland and determined to do the right thing, he returns - only to be imprisoned, tortured, and slowly starved, eventually becoming one of only twenty-one survivors of his camp. Views: 58
This is the second Kit and Kat mystery. Kit and Kat have just set up their own private detective agency, and are ready to go on a Mediterranean cruise before they open up their doors for business. The cruise is meant to be a time of relaxation, exploring ancient towns and cities. And it would have been relaxing – if a woman hadn't shown the guests at table nine a necklace worth over $3,000,000.Within the hour the necklace has been stolen. Who is the thief? One of the guests at table nine? One of the four servers? Perhaps it is a person who overheard mention of the value, or someone one of the guests talked to.When the ship docks in Turkey, Inspector Rashan comes aboard to investigate the robbery and invites Kit and Kat to help with the mystery of the stolen jewelry. Without hesitation they agree to help.Soon it's not just stolen jewelry that Kit and Kat are involved with, as theft turns to murder on the High Seas.Chuck and Doni have been missionaries since 1981. They live on the... Views: 58
The bestselling book that launched meth back into the nation's consciousness. Based on Reding's four years of reporting in the agricultural town of Oelwein, Iowa, and tracing the connections to the global forces that set the stage for the meth epidemic, Methland offers a vital perspective on a contemporary tragedy. It is a portrait of a community under siege, of the lives that meth has devastated, and of the heroes who continue to fight the war. Nick Reding is the author of The Last Cowboys at the End of the World, and his writing has appeared in Outside, Food and Wine, and Harper’s. Born in St. Louis, he decided to move back to his hometown in the course of reporting this book. Crystal methamphetamine is widely considered to be the most dangerous drug in the world, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the small towns of the American heartland. In Methland, journalist Nick Reding tells the story of Oelwein, Iowa (pop. 6,159), which, like thousands of other rural communities across the country, has been left in the dust by the consolidation of the agricultural industry, a depressed local economy, and an out-migration of people. Now an incredibly cheap, long-lasting, and highly addictive drug has rolled into town. Through four years of reporting, Reding brings us into the heart of rural America through a cast of intimately drawn characters. Trafficker Lori Arnold is the queen of Midwest crank. Roland Jarvis is a former meatpacking worker who blew up his mother's house while cooking meth. Oelwein's doctor, Clay Hallberg, feels his own life falling apart as he attempts to put that of his town back together. Nathan Lein, the son of farmers, is now the county prosecutor, struggling with what Oelwein has become.Methland is a portrait not just of a town, but of small-town America on the brink. Centered on one community battling for a brighter future, it reveals the connections between the real-life people touched by the drug epidemic and the global forces behind it. Methland provides a vital perspective on a contemporary tragedy, ultimately offering the very thing that meth once took from Oelwein: hope. “This is a strong book, and it tells a complicated story in comprehensible, human dimensions. Like all good journalism, it’s the hand holding up the mirror, the friend telling us to take a cold, hard look at ourselves.”—Los Angeles Times "Think globally, suffer locally. This could be the moral of Methland, Nick Reding’s unnerving investigative account of . . . Oelwein, Iowa, a railroad and meatpacking town of several thousand whipped by a methamphetamine-laced panic whose origins lie outside the place itself . . . [Reding] introduc[es] a cast of local characters whose trust it must have been a feat to gain, so wobbly and troubled are their lives. Nathan Lein, the crusading county prosecutor, is the 28-year-old son of pious farmers who’s come back to Oelwein to help clean up the meth mess after obtaining degrees in philosophy, law and environmental science . . . Manning another fortress against the siege is Dr. Clay Hallberg, Oelwein’s leading physician . . . In the tradition of James Agee’s writings on Depression-era sharecroppers, Reding displays the faces of the damned in broken-capillary close-ups . . . Too many scenes of sulfurous agony might chase away the most calloused, ambitious reader, so Reding recounts these nightmares sparingly, surrounding them with stretches of patient journalism tracing the convergence of social vectors that made the meth plague nearly inevitable and its eradication well-nigh impossible. He details, with blunt statistics and apt anecdotes, the vanishing of educated young males from rural Iowa, as well as the butchering of middle-class jobs at the local packing plant . . . 'Vicious cycle' is not an adequate term. As Reding painstakingly presents it, the production, distribution and consumption of methamphetamine is a self-catalyzing catastrophe of Chernobylish dimensions. The rich, with their far-off, insulated lives, get richer and more detached, while the poor get high and, finally, wasted . . . What’s clear is that the golden rolling heartland that Americans used to think symbolized stability beats fitfully and irregularly still and almost certainly remains inclined to seek out sources of chemical optimism. And no one, least of all Reding, who knows what’s what on an intimate, human level as well as on the astral plane of globalism, can tell us where it will all end."—Walter Kirn, The New York Times Book Review “This is a strong book, and it tells a complicated story in comprehensible, human dimensions. Like all good journalism, it’s the hand holding up the mirror, the friend telling us to take a cold, hard look at ourselves.”—Los Angeles Times“The strength of Methland lies in its character studies. As a ‘social problem’ meth is dull and intractable, as are all such problems; reduced, or rather elevated, to the individual level, it is piercing and poignant.”—The Wall Street Journal"Small-town residents, the story goes, are honest, hard-working, religiously observant and somehow just more American than the rest of America . . . Reding reveals the fallacies of this myth by showing how, over the past three decades, small-town America has been blighted by methamphetamine, which has taken root in—and taken hold of—its soul . . . Oelwein serves as a case study of the problems many small towns face today. Once a vibrant farming community where union work and small businesses were plentiful, Oelwein is now struggling through a transition to agribusiness and low-wage employment or, alternatively, unemployment. These conditions, Reding shows, have made the town susceptible to methamphetamine . . . [He] tracks the decline—and, ultimately, the limited resurgence—of Oelwein, while also examining the larger forces that have contributed to its problems. He links meth to the gathering power of unregulated capitalism beginning in the 1980's. It was then, he argues, that one-time union employees earning good wages and protected by solid benefits . . . began to see their earnings cut and their benefits disappear. Undocumented migrants began taking jobs at extraordinarily low wages, thereby depressing the cost of labor. Meth, with its opportunity for quick profit and its power to make the most abject and despondent person feel suddenly alive and vibrant, found fertile ground. Meanwhile, in Washington, pharmaceutical lobbyists were working hard to keep DEA agents from attempting to limit access to the raw ingredients; ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, meth's core precursors, were simply too vital to the lucrative allergy-remedy market . . . Reding positions the meth epidemic as the triumph of profits over the safety and prosperity of America's small-town inhabitants. But meth hasn't always been seen as a menace. In fact, Reding explains, 'methamphetamine was once heralded as the drug that would end the need for all others.' First developed by a Japanese chemist at the end of the 19th century, meth was, by the middle of the 20th century, embraced by many in government and industry as a wonder drug . . . Among the biggest culprits in the spread of the meth epidemic, Reding argues, are the media, which, he says, have gone from obliviousness to obsession to a premature declaration of the end of the meth problem, and finally the pronouncement that there never was a meth problem in the first place . . . Methland makes the case that small-town America is perhaps not the moral and hard-working place of the public imagination, but it also argues that big-city ignorance—fueled by the media—toward small-town decay is both dangerous and appalling."—The Washington Post“Methland is a stunning look at a problem that has dire consequences for our country.”—New York Post“A powerful work of reportage . . . a clear-eyed look at a scourge that continues to afflict wide swaths of American society—whether we want to acknowledge it or not.”—The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)“Through scrupulous reporting and fierce moral engagement, Reding conveys the tragedy of the meth epidemic on both a micro- and macroscopic level.”—The Village Voice“Reding’s group portrait of Oelwein’s residents is nuanced and complex in a way that journalists’ depictions of the rural Midwest rarely are; he has a keen eye for details.”—The Washington Monthly“What’s most impressive about Methland is not only the wealth of information it provides but the depth of Reding’s compassion for the individuals meth has touched: the heroes, the helpless witnesses, the innocent victims—and even the perpetrators—of this American crisis.”—Francine Prose, O, The Oprah Magazine“Methland tells a story less about crime than about the death of an iconic way of life.”—Details“Methland is definitely worthwhile reading. In some circles it should be required reading. This isn’t just a small town issue or an Iowa issue. This is an American issue.”—Oelwein Daily Register"Methland explains so much that it ought to be read by anyone who is at all interested in why this country continues to divide between rich and poor, educated and un-schooled, rural and urban. Most of all, Methland reminds us that people who confront their devils, inside and out, sometimes find a way to beat them."—Bill Bishop, author of The Big Sort: How the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart and coeditor of the Daily Yonder, an online news source from the Center for Rural Strategies Views: 58
The hilariously funny story of Heathrow (affectionately named after London's airport) whose TOTALLY EMBARRASSING parents will do anything to be on TV, even if it involves rice pudding or a racing car or a rhinoceros! But in the end it's Heathrow's quick thinking that makes the news headlines!Laugh your socks off with this highly silly story specially for Pocket Money Puffins. Views: 58
Bryn Schaefler never expected to be the new lead guitarist in mainstream rock band Everlasting. She is thrown into the world of touring, meeting new people and experiencing new things. She also never expected to be attracted to Cale Pelton, her band mate and lead singer. Their chemistry is undeniable, on stage and off, but Bryn isn't sure she wants to date someone who's come to feel like brother. Views: 58
This paperback edition of Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's popular Free-Range Knitter: The Yarn Harlot Writes Again reminds us of the joy we felt upon first encountering her hilarious and poignant collection of essays surrounding her favorite topics: knitting, knitters, and what happens when you get those two things anywhere near ordinary people.For the 60 million knitters in America, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (a.k.a. the Yarn Harlot) shares stories of knitting horrors and triumphs, knitting successes and defeats, but, mostly, stories about the human condition that ring true for everyone—especially if you happen to have a rather large amount of yarn in your house.Funny, unique, and gleeful in her obsession, Pearl-McPhee speaks to knitters of all skill levels in this delightful celebration of craft and creativity. Views: 58
Luca and Isolde continue investigating for the Order of Darkness in the fourth book in the Order of Darkness series from #1 New York Times bestselling author Philippa Gregory. Views: 58
