According to current thinking, anyone who fails to succeed must have something wrong with them. The pressure to achieve and be happy is taking a heavy toll, resulting in a warped view of the self, disorientation, and despair. People are lonelier than ever before. Today’s pay-for-performance mentality is turning institutions such as schools, universities, and hospitals into businesses, while individuals are being made to think of themselves as one-person enterprises. Love is increasingly hard to find, and we struggle to lead meaningful lives. In What about Me?, Paul Verhaeghe’s main concern is how social change has led to this psychic crisis and altered the way we think about ourselves. He investigates the effects of thirty years’ acceptance of neo-liberalism, free-market forces, and privatisation, and the resulting relationship between our engineered society and individual identity. It turns out that who we are is, as always, determined by the context in which we live.From his clinical experience as a psychotherapist, Verhaeghe shows the profound impact that social change is having on mental health, even to the extent of affecting the nature of the disorders from which we suffer. But his book ends on a note of cautious optimism. We can once again become masters of our fate — if we accept the challenge. Views: 31
On a crisp, fall night, Serena Westwood wakes to the faint stirs of her crying baby. Bottle in hand, she tiptoes to the other side of the house, sneaks up to the crib, looks in. A wave of panic grips her as her real nightmare begins. Inside the crib, there is no baby. Views: 31
Finalist for the National Book Award: A breathtaking saga from Puerto Rico's greatest literary voiceThis riveting, multigenerational epic tells the story of two families and the history of Puerto Rico through the eyes of Isabel Monfort and her husband, Quintín Mendizabal. Isabel attempts to immortalize their now-united families—and, by extension, their homeland—in a book. The tale that unfolds in her writing has layers upon layers, exploring the nature of love, marriage, family, and Puerto Rico itself.Weaving the intimate with the expansive on a teeming stage, Ferré crafts a revealing self-portrait of a man and a woman, two fiercely independent people searching for meaning and identity. As Isabel declares: "Nothing is true, nothing is false, everything is the color of the glass you're looking through."A book about freeing oneself from societal and cultural constraints, The House on the Lagoon also grapples with bigger issues of life, death, poverty, and racism.... Views: 31
FIENDISHLY CLEVER AND GRIPPING HISTORICAL THRILLER SET IN THE LAST DAYS OF WW2 1945. The Red Army tears through Europe towards Berlin, exacting vengeance on a biblical scale, while the British and the Americans close in from the west. Victory over Hitler seems certain. But deep inside the Kremlin, Stalin worries about a new enemy. When the war is over, how will the Soviet Union protect itself against the overweening American behemoth? Meanwhile, ever more desperate, Hitler paces up and down his study in the Berchtesgaden. He knows he needs a miracle to avoid unthinkable and humiliating defeat. For both, the atom bomb is the answer. And both are willing to sacrifice their best spies to get it. Views: 31
Why would anyone want him dead?Rock musician Andy Rivers has hordes of adoring fans and campaigns for one good cause after another. So why would anyone want him dead? It begins harmlessly enough: mild vandalism, funeral flowers left on the bonnet of his car, but suddenly it becomes clear that Andy's persecutor is deadly serious. Views: 31
The epic, unforgettable love story of a man determined to protect the woman he loves from the town desperate to destroy her--this visceral and haunting debut heralds the arrival of a major new voice in fictionEphram Jennings has never forgotten the beautiful girl with the long braids running through the piney woods of Liberty, their small East Texas town. Young Ruby, "the kind of pretty it hurt to look at," has suffered beyond imagining, so as soon as she can, she flees suffocating Liberty for the bright pull of 1950s New York. Ruby quickly winds her way into the ripe center of the city--the darkened piano bars and hidden alleyways of the Village--all the while hoping to see the red hair and green eyes of her mother. When the funeral of her childhood best friend forces her to return home, thirty-year-old Ruby Bell will find herself reliving the devastating violence of her girlhood. With the terrifying realization that she might not be strong enough to fight her... Views: 31
Not everyone was eager to share the planet Earth with the Zentraedi survivors of the First Robotech War. There was little prospect of a lasting peace, as the tensions in the Southlands gave rise to two opposing forces, and each vowed to fight until the other was eradicated. Caught beween the two rivals was the Robotech Defense Force. Rick Hunter, Lisa Hayes, Max and Miriya Sterling, Breetai, and others who would all have their parts to play in the period that came to be called the Malcontent Uprisings.... Views: 31
This history of US-led international drug control provides new perspectives on the economic, ideological, and political foundations of a Cold War American empire. US officials assumed the helm of international drug control after World War II at a moment of unprecedented geopolitical influence embodied in the growing economic clout of its pharmaceutical industry. We Sell Drugs is a study grounded in the transnational geography and political economy of the coca-leaf and coca-derived commodities market stretching from Peru and Bolivia into the United States. More than a narrow biography of one famous plant and its equally famous derivative products—Coca-Cola and cocaine—this book situates these commodities within the larger landscape of drug production and consumption. Examining efforts to control the circuits through which coca traveled, Suzanna Reiss provides a geographic and legal basis for considering the historical construction of designations of legality and illegality. The book also argues that the legal status of any given drug is largely premised on who grew, manufactured, distributed, and consumed it and not on the qualities of the drug itself. Drug control is a powerful tool for ordering international trade, national economies, and society’s habits and daily lives. In a historical landscape animated by struggles over political economy, national autonomy, hegemony, and racial equality, We Sell Drugs insists on the socio-historical underpinnings of designations of legality to explore how drug control became a major weapon in asserting control of domestic and international affairs.About the AuthorSuzanna Reiss is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. Views: 31
(Plantation Trilogy Book 1)Bristow does “a grand job of storytelling” (the New York Times) in this memorable novel of the late eighteenth-century pioneers who settled the Louisiana wilderness, establishing a civilization of charm, luxury, and tragic injustice For his service in the king’s army during the French and Indian War, Judith Sheramy’s father, a Puritan New Englander, is granted a parcel of land in far-off Louisiana. As the family ventures down the Mississippi to make a new home in the wilderness, Judith meets Philip Larne, an adventurer who travels in the finest clothes Judith has ever seen. He is a rogue, a killer, and a thief—and the first thing he steals is Judith’s heart.Three thousand acres of untamed jungle, overrun with jaguars, Indians, and pirates, wait for Philip in Louisiana. He and Judith will struggle with their stormy marriage and the challenges of the American Revolution as they strive to build an empire for future generations.This is the first novel in Gwen Bristow’s Plantation Trilogy, which also includes The Handsome Road and This Side of Glory. Views: 31
The gruesome murder of a young French physician draws aristocratic investigator Sebastian St. Cyr and his pregnant wife, Hero, into a dangerous, decades-old mystery as a wrenching piece of Sebastian's past puts him to the ultimate test. Regency England, January 1813: When a badly injured Frenchwoman is found beside the mutilated body of Dr. Damion Pelletan in one of London's worst slums, Sebastian finds himself caught in a high-stakes tangle of murder and revenge. Although the woman, Alexi Sauvage, has no memory of the attack, Sebastian knows her all too well from an incident in his past - an act of wartime brutality and betrayal that nearly destroyed him. As the search for the killer leads Sebastian into a treacherous web of duplicity, he discovers that Pelletan was part of a secret delegation sent by Napoleon to investigate the possibility of peace with Britain. Despite his powerful father-in-law's warnings, Sebastian plunges deep into the mystery of the "Lost Dauphin," the boy prince who disappeared in the darkest days of the French Revolution, and soon finds himself at lethal odds with the Dauphin's sister - the imperious, ruthless daughter of Marie Antoinette - who is determined to retake the French crown at any cost. With the murderer striking ever closer, Sebastian must battle new fears about Hero's health and that of their soon-to-be born child. When he realizes the key to their survival may lie in the hands of an old enemy, he must finally face the truth about his own guilt in a past he has found too terrible to consider.... Views: 31
