Sometimes what you can't see means everything. A young woman is missing. In desperation, her parents turn to Autumn Rain for help. Autumn reads imprints—emotions mysteriously left behind on certain treasured objects. But will this ability enrich her life or destroy it? Autumn isn't sure—her life has become far from normal—but for people whose loved ones are missing, her talent might mean the difference between life and death. Even the infuriating Detective Martin has asked for Autumn's help, though at times she feels more like a suspect than a consultant. Too often Autumn find herself retreating to her antiques shop and the company of her best friend, Jake Ryan, to avoid notice. But soon more than one woman is missing, and Autumn teams up with private eye Ethan McConnell to investigate their disappearance. Ethan's attraction to her is a pleasant change from Jake's frustrating offers of friendship, but once Autumn takes that first step, she sets in motion a... Views: 51
SUMMARY:The war on terror-fought shot by shot, bullet by bullet, and kill by kill.
The ongoing War on Terror is unlike any conflict the United States Armed Forces have fought. There are no set battles. The enemy adheres to no warrior code or international law. Their only desire is to kill- or be killed. That's where the snipers of the U.S. Marine, Army, and Navy SEALs come in...
Here in their own words are the compelling and gripping true stories of the snipers whose sole purpose is to eliminate any and all enemy threats with a single bullet. From the deserts and rubble-strewn streets of Iraq to the endless labyrinth of the remote Afghanistan mountain country, this is life and death beyond the front lines of battle and behind the scope of a high-powered rifle. Views: 51
From BooklistPsychiatrists, counselors, and the like are in a unique position. They are in possession of incredibly interesting stories, yet the constraints of confidentiality and ethical concerns make sharing them difficult. Balancing the maintenance of privacy with the urge to tell—what are stories for, if not for sharing?—is a tricky matter. Small achieves that feat in this collection of “his most bizarre cases.” This is not a metaphor. While working a psychiatric ward shift as a new doctor, he is faced with an unresponsive client who is naked and standing on her head. Another client seems obsessed with having an arm amputated. A couple faces conflicting dreams and nightmares of a Disneyland wedding. Small’s stories cover the entire range of his more than 20-year career, from his fumbling attempts at looking professional with a client who is certain he’s trying to seduce her, to a recent encounter with a mentor who feels that his career has been a fraud. The stories are witty; the clients are treated respectfully, and the reader reaps the reward. --Matthew Tiffany Product DescriptionTrue stories are more bizarre than any fiction, and Dr. Gary Small knows this best. After thirty distinguished years of psychiatry and groundbreaking research on the human brain, Dr. Small has seen it all—now he is ready to open his office doors for the first time and tell all about the most mysterious, intriguing, and bizarre patients of his career. The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head is a spellbinding record of the doctor's most bewildering cases, from naked headstands and hysterical blindness to fainting schoolgirls and self-amputations. It is an illuminating journey into the mind of a practicing psychiatrist and his life in medicine as it evolves over time—a behind-the-scenes look at the field and a variety of mental diseases as they've never been seen or diagnosed before. You'll find yourself exploring the puzzling eccentricities that make us human.Often funny, sometimes tragic, and always compelling, Dr. Small takes you on a tour of his career that moves from the halls of a crowded inner-city Boston emergency room to the multimillion-dollar ski lodges of the nation's elite. In between, Dr. Small introduces a strange cast of true-life characters and conditions, while dealing with mysterious hysterical blindness, a man convinced that his penis is shrinking, secret double lives, and frighteningly psychotic romantic desires. His career and personal life come full circle when his own mentor becomes his patient, making Small realize that no one is beyond mental exploration—not even himself. Views: 51
Victor Davis Hanson has long been acclaimed as one of our leading scholars of ancient history. In recent years he has also become a trenchant voice on current affairs, bringing a historian's deep knowledge of past conflicts to bear on the crises of the present, from 9/11 to Iran. "War," he writes, "is an entirely human enterprise." Ideologies change, technologies develop, new strategies are invented-but human nature is constant across time and space. The dynamics of warfare in the present age still remain comprehensible to us through careful study of the past. Though many have called the War on Terror unprecedented, its contours would have been quite familiar to Themistocles of Athens or William Tecumseh Sherman. And as we face the menace of a bin Laden or a Kim Jong-Il, we can prepare ourselves with knowledge of how such challenges have been met before.The Father of Us All brings together much of Hanson's finest writing on war and society, both ancient and modern. The author has gathered a range of essays, and combined and revised them into a richly textured new work that explores such topics as how technology shapes warfare, what constitutes the "American way of war," and why even those who abhor war need to study military history. "War is the father and king of us all," Heraclitus wrote in ancient Greece. And as Victor Davis Hanson shows, it is no less so today.From Publishers WeeklySince 9/11, Davis, director of the Hoover Institution's group on military history and contemporary conflict, has emerged as a major commentator on war making and politics. This anthology brings together 13 of Hanson's essays and reviews, revised and re-edited. They have appeared over the past decade in periodicals from the American Spectator to the New York Times. Hanson's introductory generalization that war is a human enterprise that seems inseparable from the human condition structures such subjects as an eloquent answer to the question Why Study War? a defense of the historicity of the film 300, about the Persian Wars, in a masterpiece of envelope pushing, and a comprehensive and dazzling analysis of why America fights as she does. He explains why, though a lesser historian than Thucydides, Xenophon retains a timeless attraction and analyzes war and democracy in light of America's decreasing willingness to intervene in places like Rwanda or Darfur. The pieces are well written, sometimes elegantly so, and closely reasoned. They address familiar material from original and stimulating perspectives. Hanson's arguments may not convince everyone, but cannot be dismissed. His critics and admirers will be pleased to have these pieces available under one cover. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistFolksinger Pete Seeger ain’t gonna study war no more, but classicist Hanson warns against skipping class in this set of essays reworked from his recent articles, book reviews, and book introductions. In Hanson’s estimation, amnesia about military history permeates America’s media, political, and intellectual leadership: out of fashion in the academy, military history was the specialty of just 1.9 percent of American history professors as of 2007. As he suggests reasons for this state of neglect, Hanson expatiates within specific essays, such as his preface to Donald Kagan’s The Peloponnesian War (2003), on the effects of historical forgetfulness. Hanson sees examples abounding in American leaders’ negative reactions to the Iraq War, responses that the author witheringly critiques for poor historical aptitude and poor understanding about the military and military operations. At bottom, Hanson argues that recoiling from learning about warfare ignores what he insists is its tragic nature: that war, inherent in human nature, can only be struggled against and not be wished away. Not a happy message to peace-studies idealists but one a balanced current-events collection should include. --Gilbert Taylor Views: 51
When things in the land down under start to heat up, murder steps in.Nikki and her boss-turned-boyfriend came to Australia to visit the Hahndorf Winery, but it seems theyve also walked onto a movie set. And when lead actress Lucy Swanson is found dead in her trailer, bitten by a poisonous snake, Nikki must comb the vineyards of the valley to catch a killer with a venomous streakbefore shes struck herself. Views: 51
