Eight-year-old Alex Pruitt gets stuck at home with the chicken pox. There's nothing to do except play with his telescope, or mess around with the stupid toy car that his cranky neighbor gave him as payment for shoveling her driveway. Then Alex's mother is called to her office, leaving Alex home alone. That's when he looks through the telescope and sees burglars breaking into a neighbor's house! No one believes him, so when the burglars return, it's up to Alex to defend the neighborhood! Then he discovers a U. S. Air Force microchip in his toy car--and realizes that the burglars are really after him! Views: 21
Subtitled "A Novel of Many Manners," Evelyn Waugh's famous first novel lays waste the "heathen idol" of British sportmanship, the cultured perfection of Oxford and inviolable honor code of English upper classes. Paul Pennyfeather, innocent victim of a drunken orgy, is expelled from Oxford College, which costs him a career in the church. He turns to teaching, frequently the last resort of failures, and at Llanabba Castle meets a friend, Beste-Chetwynde. But Margot, Beste-Chetwynde's mother, introduces him to the questionable delights of high society. Suddenly, and improbably, he is engaged to marry Margot. Just as they are about to say "I do," Scotland Yard arrives and arrests Peter for his involvement in Margot's white slave-trading ring. Views: 20
A chilling memoir of the Tri-State Crematory incidentIn February 2002, hundreds of abandoned and decayed bodies were discovered at the Tri-State Crematory in rural Georgia, making it the largest mass desecration in modern American history. The perpetrator--a well-respected family man and a former hometown football star--had managed to conceal the horror for five years. Among the bodies found at the Tri-State Crematory was that of Brent Hendricks's father. To quell the psychic disturbance surrounding the desecration, Hendricks embarked on a pilgrimage to the crematory site in Georgia. In A Long Day at the End of the World, he reveals his very complicated relationship with the South as he tries to reconcile his love-hate feelings for the culture with his own personal and familial history there, and his fascination with the disturbed landscape. In achingly beautiful prose, Hendricks explores his fraught relationship with his father--not just the... Views: 20
The life of Abi Jones, the Mud Girl, might be the last thing any teenager would choose. But it s her life, and Abi has to find out whether she s got the courage and intelligence to live it well. Views: 20
Ally Hilfiger, daughter of designer Tommy Hilfiger, shares her story of battling, and eventually recovering from, Lyme disease.Ally was seven years old when she was bitten by a tick and contracted Lyme disease, but she didn't know it for eleven years. For the next decade, she suffered from constant physical pain in her muscles and joints, strep throat, and recurrent flu. Eventually worn out from the mysterious maladies plaguing her body, tired of her own forms of self medication—pot, alcohol—and drained from the notoriety she gained by producing and starring on her own reality show, Rich Girls, Ally ended up in a psych ward where she began her journey to diagnosis and recovery.BITE ME is Ally's story, but its themes will be familiar to the 300,000 Americans diagnosed with Lyme disease each year, many of whom, like Ally, wondered for years what was wrong with them. Ally also offers readers hope and ideas for how they can transition from victim... Views: 20
"A compulsively readable, totally unforgettable memoir that recounts a sensitive college student's experience working on an emergency ambulance in hell, aka New York City." — James PattersonIn 1967, Mike Scardino was an eighteen year-old pre-med student with a problem - his parents couldn't afford to pay his college tuition. Luckily, Mike's dad hooked him up with a lucrative, albeit unusual, summer job, one he's never forgotten. Bad Call is Mike's visceral, fast-moving, and mordantly funny account of the summers he spent working as an "ambulance attendant" on the mean streets of late 1960s New York, at a time when emergency medicine looked nothing like it does today. Fueled by adrenaline and Sabrett's hot dogs, he crossed third rails to pick up injured trainmen, encountered a woman attacked by rats, attended to victims of a plane crash at JFK airport, was nearly murdered, and got an early and indelible education in the impermanence... Views: 20
A young man returns home to Delhi after several years abroad and resumes his place among the city's cosmopolitan elite - a world of fashion designers, media moguls and the idle rich. But everything around him has changed - new roads, new restaurants, new money, new crime - everything, that is, except for the people, who are the same, only maybe slightly worse. Then he meets Aakash, a charismatic and unpredictable young man on the make, who introduces him to the squalid underside of this sprawling city. Together they get drunk and work out, visit temples and a prostitute, and our narrator finds himself disturbingly attracted to Aakash's world. But when Aakash is arrested for murder, the two of them are suddenly swept up in a politically sensitive investigation that exposes the true corruption at the heart of this new and ruthless society. In a voice that is both cruel and tender, The Temple-goers brings to life the dazzling story of a city quietly burning with rage. Views: 20
A woman steps over the line into the unthinkable in this brilliant, powerful, and unforgettable new novel by the author of The Lovely Bones and Lucky. For years Helen Knightly has given her life to others: to her haunted mother, to her enigmatic father, to her husband and now grown children. When she finally crosses a terrible boundary, her life comes rushing in at her in a way she never could have imagined. Unfolding over the next twenty-four hours, this searing, fast-paced novel explores the complex ties between mothers and daughters, wives and lovers, the meaning of devotion, and the line between love and hate. It is a challenging, moving, gripping story, written with the fluidity and strength of voice that only Alice Sebold can bring to the page. Views: 20
"I'm writing to you about the death of Mr. Dearborn. You bet the murderer's laughing up his sleeve now that he's got away with it."An inquest is held in South Devon on the death of a man apparently killed in a motor accident on Dartmoor: the verdict is "Death from misadventure." But soon afterwards Scotland Yard and the Devon Chief Constable receive anonymous letters alleging that the verdict was wrong; that the death was caused by blows inflicted by a person, or persons, unknown.The Chief Constable asks for help from Scotland Yard. Richardson is detailed, as Chief Inspector C.I.D., to unravel the case. A discharged quarryman is suspected by the local police; Richardson clears him. He finds the writer of the anonymous letters, but he also finds that the dead man had shrouded his own past in mystery and was going under an assumed name. It looks like the most difficult case he has had to unravel, but Chance steps in to provide him with a clue...The Dartmoor... Views: 20
