Pirate Raiders, a Threatened Heir, and a High Seas LitRPG Swashbuckler Cari Dix is tired of playing by the rules. Let everyone else race to rescue the fate of an Empire. She chooses a return to the high seas and her raider ship, the Vengeance. Then Cari discovers a secret that could change the world and once again save the heir to the Crystal Throne. The chase is on for Raider Captain Cari Dix. Her parents, Hal and Mona, follow along behind, trying to catch up to their daughter, lost in the game of Fantasma. Come along for book 2 in this real-life swashbuckling romp of a lifetime, returning to the gamelit world of Fantasma once again. Play along with Cari as she once again fights to save the last of the Empire's heirs in this pirate role-playing adventure. Click to buy Accidental Raider now. Views: 13
The winner of the National Book Award, Ursula K. Le Guin has created a profound and transformational literature. The award-winning stories in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea range from the everyday to the outer limits of experience, where the quantum uncertainties of space and time are resolved only in the depths of the human heart. Astonishing in their diversity and power, they exhibit both the artistry of a major writer at the height of her powers and the humanity of a mature artist confronting the world with her gift of wonder still intact. Views: 13
An acclaimed journalist travels the globe to solve the mystery of her ancestry, confronting the question at the heart of the American experience of immigration, race, and identity: Who are my people? Alex Wagner has always been fascinated by stories of exile and migration. Her father's ancestors immigrated to the United States from Ireland and Luxembourg. Her Buddhist mother fled Rangoon in the 1960s, escaping Burma's military dictatorship. In her professional life, Wagner reported from the Arizona-Mexico border, where agents, drones, cameras, and military hardware guarded the line between two nations. She listened to debates about whether the United States should be a melting pot or a salad bowl. She knew that moving from one land to another—and the accompanying recombination of individual and tribal identities—was the story of America. And she was happy that her own mixed-race ancestry and late twentieth-century education had taught her that... Views: 13
A heartwarming amateur detective story set in Depression-era St. Louis from beloved author A. E. Hotchner.Street-savvy, almost-thirteen-year-old Aaron Broom is guarding his father's car when he witnesses a robbery gone wrong in a jewlery store across the street. To Aaron's shock, his father, a travelling watch salesman in the wrong place at the wrong time, is fingered as the prime suspect in the murder. Despite seeing the real killer flee the scene, Aaron can't do much to help in the moment—no one will take a kid's word for it. Undaunted, Aaron enlists an unlikely band of friends and helpful adults to clear his father's name. Aaron's unusual mission is complicated by the painful realities of the Depression: His father's longtime business folded, leaving the family in financial straits; his mother is in a sanatorium after nearly dying of tuberculosis. So Aaron is forced to fend for himself while his father is held in wrongful custody. He ducks truant... Views: 13
For almost a century, New York City's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has presided over the dead. Over the years, the OCME has endured everything-political upheavals, ghastly murders, bloody gang wars, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and non-stop battles for power and influence-and remains the final authority in cases of sudden, unexplained, or violent death.
Founded in 1918, the OCME has evolved over decades of technological triumphs and all-too human failure to its modern-day incarnation as the foremost forensics lab in the world, investigating an average caseload of over 15,000 suspicious deaths a year. This is the behind-the-scenes chronicle of public service and private vendettas, of blood in the streets and back-room bloodbaths, and of the criminal cases that made history and headlines.
**From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In its ninety years, the OCME of New York City has investigated over one million deaths and earned recognition as "the finest facility of its kind in North America, and as good as any in the world." Evans (The Casebook of Forensic Detection: How Science Solved 100 of the World's Most Baffling Crimes) makes a fascinating story of its operation, complete with clues to be discovered, internal intrigue, cut-throat politics and lots of local color. He writes with vibrant detail about eccentric criminals such as Abraham Becker and his friend Reuben Norkin who, in 1922, accused each other of murdering Becker's wife-a deed for which both were brought to justice-and a surgeon who killed the patients of his rivals-and who nonetheless was acquitted. Highpoints include the epic battle between Elliot Gross and Michael Baden for the post of Chief Medical Examiner and the thousand-suspect murder of a violinist backstage at Lincoln Center. The book ends with a tribute to the bravery and tireless efforts of the OCME staff who identified victims from 9/11. Evans keeps things clicking while sticking to the facts; true crime buffs will not want to miss it.
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From Booklist
Tapping into the popular interest in murder cases solved by forensic pathology, Evans tours the history of New York City’s pros in the detection of suspicious deaths. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) has had only seven leaders since its creation in 1918, and their tenures structure Evans’ readable narrative. The first was Charles Norris, whom Evans credits with putting the OCME on professionalized, incorruptible feet. Amid his delivery of pithy portraits of Norris and his successors, emphasizing their manner of coping with NYC’s maw of media and politics, Evans delves into a representative sensational case that occurred on their watch. Whether by intent or by chance, most of Evans’ selections involve a classic framework of murder, a woman done in by a predatory man. Rendering these grim stories with verve, Evans shows how a forensic detail cleared the case if not always persuading a jury to convict. Culminating with the OCME’s ultimate crisis in responding to the mass murder of 9/11, Evans again taps a loyal readership amassed by titles such as The Father of Forensics (2006). --Gilbert Taylor Views: 13
Andrew Marshall is a Pentagon legend. For more than four decades he has served as Director of the Office of Net Assessment, the Pentagon's internal think tank, under twelve defense secretaries and eight administrations. Yet Marshall has been on the cutting edge of strategic thinking even longer than that. At the RAND Corporation during its golden age in the 1950s and early 1960s, Marshall helped formulate bedrock concepts of US nuclear strategy that endure to this day; later, at the Pentagon, he pioneered the development of net assessment"—a new analytic framework for understanding the long-term military competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. Following the Cold War, Marshall successfully used net assessment to anticipate emerging disruptive shifts in military affairs, including the revolution in precision warfare and the rise of China as a major strategic rival of the United States.In The Last Warrior, Andrew Krepinevich and Barry... Views: 13
The wedding of the season! Events manager Sylvie Smith is organizing a glittering fund-raising event: a wedding show in a stately home. She has even been roped into pretending to be a bride… a bride who's five months pregnant! The bride everyone is talking about! It should be every girl's dream to design a wedding with no expense spared, but it's not Sylvie's. Longbourne Court was her ancestral home, and she's just discovered that the new owner is Tom McFarlane-her baby's secret father. Now Tom's standing in front of her, looking at her bump… Views: 13
I knew I was in Paris, I knew that was the Seine beneath me, the sky above, but when I looked around for help, the grand apartment buildings of the Quai Voltaire stared back at me, indifferent. Alicia Drake, author of the critically acclaimed biography The Beautiful Fall, evokes contemporary life in the City of Lights lavishness of Edward St. Aubyn and the sophistication of Julia Pierpont's Among Ten Thousand Things. I Love You Too Much is a novel of extraordinary intelligence and heart, a devastating coming of age story told from the sidelines of Parisian perfection. In the sixth arrondissement everything is perfect and everyone is lonely. This is the Paris of thirteen-year-old Paul. Shy and unloved, he quietly observes the lives of the self-involved grown-ups around him: his glamorous Maman, Séverine, her younger musician lover, Gabriel, and his fitness-obsessed Papa, Philippe. Always overlooked, it's only a matter of time... Views: 13
In May 2007, leaving China's Great Wall is Car 84, one of 128 antique autos racing in the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge. It's guided by one Dina Bennett, the world's least likely navigator: a daydreamer prone to carsickness, riddled with self-doubt, and married to a thrill-seeking perfectionist who is half-human, half-racecar. What could possibly go wrong? Writing for every woman who's ever doubted herself and any man who's wondered what the woman traveling with him is thinking, Dina brings the reader with her as she deftly sidesteps rock-throwing Mongolians and locks horns with Russians left over from the Interpol era—not to mention getting a sandstorm facial and racing rabbits on a curvy country road. Come along for the ride with a dashboard diva! (with 24 photographs) Views: 13
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERYou've never read a book like The Reason I Jump. Written by Naoki Higashida, a very smart, very self-aware, and very charming thirteen-year-old boy with autism, it is a one-of-a-kind memoir that demonstrates how an autistic mind thinks, feels, perceives, and responds in ways few of us can imagine. Parents and family members who never thought they could get inside the head of their autistic loved one at last have a way to break through to the curious, subtle, and complex life within. Using an alphabet grid to painstakingly construct words, sentences, and thoughts that he is unable to speak out loud, Naoki answers even the most delicate questions that people want to know. Questions such as: "Why do people with autism talk so loudly and weirdly?" "Why do you line up your toy cars and blocks?" "Why don't you make eye contact when you're talking?" and "What's the reason you jump?" (Naoki's answer: "When I'm jumping,... Views: 13