The wide-ranging and delightful history of celebratedplant breeder Luther Burbank and the business of farm and garden inearly twentieth- century America At no other time in history has there been morecuriosity or concern about the food we eat-and genetically modifiedfoods, in particular, have become both pervasive and suspect. Acentury ago, however, Luther Burbank's blight-resistant potatoes,white raspberries, and plumcots-a plum-apricot hybrid-werecelebrated as triumphs in the best tradition of American ingenuityand perseverance. In his experimental grounds in Santa Rosa,California, Burbank bred and cross-bred edible and ornamentalplants-for both home gardens and commercial farms-until they werebigger, hardier, more beautiful, and more productive than everbefore. A fascinating portrait of an American original, TheGarden of Invention is also a colorful and engrossing tale ofthe intersection of gardening, science and business in the yearsbetween the Civil War and the Great Depression.
Who's testing whom? When Kris Kelvin arrives at the planetSolaris to study the ocean that covers its surface, he is forced toconfront a painful, hitherto unconscious memory embodied in theliving physical likeness of a long-dead lover. Others examining theplanet, Kelvin learns, are plagued with their own repressed andnewly corporeal memories. Scientists speculate that the Solarisocean may be a massive brain that creates these incarnate memories,its purpose in doing so unknown.The first of Lem's novels to bepublished in America and now considered a classic, SOLARIS raises aquestion: Can we truly understand the universe around us withoutfirst understanding what lies within?
Julia and Valentina Poole are normal American teenagers — normal, at least, for identical “mirror” twins who have no interest in college or jobs or possibly anything outside their cozy suburban home. But everything changes when they receive notice that an aunt whom they didn’t know existed has died and left them her amazing flat in a building by Highgate Cemetery in London. They feel that at last their own lives can begin … but they have no idea that they’ve been summoned into a tangle of fraying lives, from the OCD-suffering crossword setter who lives above them to their aunt’s mysterious and elusive lover who lives below them, and even to their aunt herself, who never got over her estrangement from the mother of the girls — her own twin — and who can’t even seem to quite leave her flat….
Synopsis In 1918 Ernest Hemingway went to war, to the ''war to end all wars''. He volunteered for ambulance service in Italy, was wounded and twice decorated. Out of his experiences came A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway''s de*ion of war is unforgettable. He recreates the fear, the comradeship, the courage of his young American volunteer and the men and women he meets in Italy with total conviction. But A Farewell to Arms is not only a novel of war. In it Hemingway has also created a love story of immense drama and uncompromising passion.
Rusty Sabich is a prosecuting lawyer in Chicago who enters a nightmare world when Carolyn, a beautiful attorney with whom he has been having an affair, is found raped and strangled. He stands accused of the crime. This 'insider' book by a Chicago lawyer was one of the great novels of the 1980s, selling more than nine million copies, and was made into a famous film starring Harrison Ford. It's a supremely suspenseful and compelling courtroom drama about ambition, weakness, hypocrisy and American justice.
A gripping look at terrorist violence during theReconstruction era Between 1867, when the defeated South was forced toestablish new state governments that fully represented both blackand white citizens, and 1877, when the last of these governmentswas overthrown, more than three thousand African Americans andtheir white allies were killed by terrorist violence. Drawing onoriginal letters and diaries as well as published racist diatribesof the time, acclaimed historian Stephen Budiansky concentrates hisvivid, fast paced narrative on the efforts of five heroic men—twoUnion officers, a Confederate general, a Northern entrepreneur, anda former slave—who showed remarkable idealism and courage as theystruggled to establish a “New South” in the face of overwhelminghatred and organized resistance. The Bloody Shirt sheds newlight on the violence, racism, division, and heroism ofReconstruction, a largely forgotten but epochal chapter in Americanhistory.
The untold true story of the murders that inspired theiconic musical Chicago . With a thrilling, fast-paced narrative,award-winning journalist Douglas Perry vividly captures thesensationalized circus atmosphere that gave rise to the concept ofthe celebrity criminal- and gave Chicago its most famous story. The Girls of Murder City recounts two scandalous, sex-fueledmurder cases and how an intrepid "girl reporter" named MaurineWatkins turned the beautiful, media-savvy suspects-"Stylish Belva"and "Beautiful Beulah"-into the talk of the town. Fueled by richperiod detail and a cast of characters who seemed destined for thestage, The Girls of Murder City is a crackling tale thatsimultaneously presents the freewheeling spirit of the Jazz Age andits sober repercussions.
Fatherland is set in an alternative world where Hitler has wonthe Second World War. It is April 1964 and one week before Hitler's75th birthday. Xavier March, a detective of the Kriminalpolizei, iscalled out to investigate the discovery of a dead body in a lakenear Berlin's most prestigious suburb. As March discovers theidentity of the body, he uncovers signs of a conspiracy that couldgo to the very top of the German Reich. And, with the Gestapo justone step behind, March, together with an American journalist, iscaught up in a race to discover and reveal the truth -- a truththat has already killed, a truth that could topple governments, atruth that will change history. "From the Paperback edition."
Paha Sapa, a young Sioux warrior, first encounters GeneralGeorge Armstrong Custer as Custer lies dying on the battlefield atLittle Bighorn. He believes--as do the holy men of his tribe--thatthe legendary general's ghost entered him at that moment and willremain with him until Sapa convinces him to leave. In BLACK HILLS, Dan Simmons weaves the stories of Paha Sapa andCuster together seamlessly, depicting a violent and tumultuous timein the history of Native Americans and the United States Army.Haunted by the voice of the general his people called "Long Hair,"Paha Sapa lives a long life, driven by a dramatic vision heexperiences in the Black Hills that are his tribe's homeland. As anexplosives worker on the massive Mount Rushmore project, he mayfinally be rid of his ghosts--on the very day FDR comes to SouthDakota to dedicate the Jefferson face.
With the vision of a historian and the voice of a novelist,prize-winning author John Demos explores the social, cultural, andpsychological roots of the scourge that is witch-hunting, both inthe remote past and today. The Enemy Within chronicles the mostprominent witch-hunts of the Western world-women and men who weretargeted by suspicious neighbors and accused of committing horrificcrimes by supernatural means-and shows how the fear of witchcrafthas fueled recurrent cycles of accusation, persecution, andpurging. A unique and fascinating book, it illumines the dark sideof communities driven to rid themselves of perceived evil, nomatter what the human cost.
Trurl and Klaupacius are constructor robots who try toout-invent each other. They travel to the far corners of the cosmosto take on freelance problem-solving jobs, with dire consequencesfor their employers. "The most completely successful of hisbooks... here Lem comes closest to inventing a real universe"(Boston Globe). Illustrations by Daniel Mr--z. Translated byMichael Kandel.
All is never what it seems. Schuyler Van Alen is a Blue Blood,one of the city's glamorous vampire elite. Or so she thinks. Herblood legacy has just been called into question: is she a BlueBlood or is it the more sinister Silver Blood that runs throughher veins? The stakes are high, the Battle is bloody; and throughit all Schuyler must choose between duly and passion, love andfreedom.
In this follow-up to The Lion's Game, John Corey, former NYPD Homicide detective and special agent for the Anti-Terrorist Task Force, is back. And, unfortunately for Corey, so is Asad Khalil, the notorious Libyan terrorist otherwise known as "The Lion." Last we heard from him, Khali had claimed to be defecting to the US only to unleash the most horrific reign of terrorism ever to occur on American soil. While Corey and his partner, agent Kate Mayfield, chased him across the country, Khalil methodically eliminated his victims one by one and then disappeared without a trace. Now, years later, Khalil has returned to America to make good on his threats and take care of unfinished business. "The Lion" is a killing machine once again loose in America with a mission of revenge, and John Corey will stop at nothing to achieve his own goal -- to find and kill Khahil.
Through the eyes of many Fairacre friends, we trace Mrs.Pringle's life and her stormy standing as the redoubtable cleanerof the town's school. However maddening she is, life at Fairacrewould be poorer without her.
St Vladimir's Academy isn't just any boarding school - hidden away, it's a place where vampires are educated in the ways of magic and half-human teens train to protect them. Rose Hathaway is a Dhampir, a bodyguard for her best friend Lissa, a Moroi Vampire Princess. They've been on the run, but now they're being dragged back to St Vladimir's where the girls must survive a world of forbidden romances, a ruthless social scene and terrifying night time rituals. But most of all, staying alive.
Denis Johnson meets Flannery O'Connor in this luminouscollection of short stories about the collision of cultures,genders, and generations in the American Southwest. Set mainly amidIndian reservations and uranium mills, these twelve stories createa kaleidoscopic view of family, myth, love, landscape, and loss ina place where infinite skies and endless roads suggest a world ofpossibility, yet dreams are deceiving, like an oasis, just beyondreach. Whether it's a young woman pushed quite literally to theedge on a desolate mountain pass, an orphaned brother and sistertrying to patch together an existence one stitch at a time, a copwho suspects his kleptomaniac wife is stealing from other peoplematerially and emotionally or a wily roadside hypnotist whosealleged power is both wonderful and strange, Ann Cummins'scharacters want to transcend the circumstances of their lives, tobelieve in the eventuality of change. Again and again, Ann Cumminsgenerates imagery of white-hot intensity and pushes the limits ofbot
Soon to be a major motion picture from Academy Award(r)--winning director Clint Eastwood, starring Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman. After being released from prison and winning South Africa's first free election, Nelson Mandela presided over a country still deeply divided by fifty years of apartheid. His plan was ambitious if not far-fetched: Use the national rugby team, the Springboks-long an embodiment of white supremacist rule-to embody and engage a new South Africa as they prepared to host the 1995 World Cup. The string of wins that followed not only defied the odds, but capped Mandela's miraculous effort to bring South Africans together in a hard-won, enduring bond. Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa in 1994. Mandela set about trying to unite the country with the help of the national rugby team, the Springboks, who would host the Rugby World Cup in 1995. Morgan Freeman stars as Nelson Mandela alongside Matt Damon in the movie based on this book. Clint Eastwood is the director. Th
