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| "Adopted at over 600 universities, colleges, and schools across the country, Eric Foner's Give Me Liberty! is making a difference in the American history survey course. Featuring a single author and a single, comprehensive theme, Give me Liberty! presents American history with unparalleled clarity and coherence. The study tools in the book and the companion print and electronic package ensure student success in the course. The Second Edition builds on the success of the first, retaining the unifying theme of freedom while becoming more comprehensive, and adding stronger coverage of Native American and immigration history. In addition, the pedagogy has been strengthened with new Voices of Freedom paired primary sources in each chapter, chapter-opening chronologies, key terms, and more. Overall the presentation remains concise and crisp, free of the encyclopedic detail that clogs so many other survey textbooks." |
Adobe Digital Edition [ 48.5 Mb ] Street Date: Friday, October 12, 2007

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| One of the most fascinating works of history ever written, Winston's Churchill's monumental The Second World War is a six-volume account of the struggle of the Allied powers in Europe against Germany and the Axis. Told through the eyes of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, The Second World War is also the story of one nation's singular, heroic role in the fight against tyranny. Pride and patriotism are evident everywhere in Churchill's dramatic account and for good reason. Having learned a lesson at Munich that they would never forget, the British refused to make peace with Hitler, defying him even after France had fallen and after it seemed as though the Nazis were unstoppable. Churchill remained unbowed throughout, as did the people of Britain in whose determination and courage he placed his confidence.
Patriotic as Churchill was, he managed to maintain a balanced impartiality in his description of the war. What is perhaps most interesting, and what lends the work its tension and emotion, is Churchill's inclusion of a significant amount of primary material. We hear his retrospective analysis of the war, to be sure, but we are also presented with memos, letters, orders, speeches, and telegrams that give a day-by-day account of the reactions-both mistaken and justified-to the unfolding drama. Strategies and counterstrategies develop to respond to Hitler's ruthless conquest of Europe, his planned invasion of England, and his treacherous assault on Russia. It is a mesmerizing account of the crucial decisions that have to be made with imperfect knowledge and an awareness that the fate of the world hangs in the balance.
The sixth and final volume of The Second World War, Triumph and Tragedy documents with moving, dramatic detail the endgame of the war and the uneasy meetings between Churchill, Stalin, and Truman convening to discuss the plan for rebuilding Europe in the aftermath of such upheaval and devastation. The volume opens with the Normandy invasion, and Churchill recalls with evident admiration and relief the heroic landing of the redoubtable Allied armies as they effect the most remarkable amphibious operation in military history. Through Churchill's recollections as well as his correspondence with Stalin, Roosevelt, Truman and others, we are given an insider's perspective into such signal events as the liberation of Paris, the death of Hitler, and the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan.
The "tragedy" of the title points to the mistrust and hostility that arose between the victorious forces in the wake of the Second World War. Churchill watches as the uneasy coalition that knit themselves together to put down the Axis threat begins to fray at Potsdam. From his vantage point, writing only a few years after the close of the war, Churchill describes the birth of the Cold War with dismay, fervently hoping that a greater, more destructive war is not on the horizon.
Churchill won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 due in no small part to this awe-inspiring work. |

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Sold by Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc. A star in a world of wealth and privilege....Fed up with Hollywood backstabbing, famous movie actress Madalyn Simon decided to escape the spotlight. Her new back-to-basics existence in an Alaskan cabin did take getting used to, but at least she was in control of her own destiny -- or so she thought. While snowmobiling on the frigid coast with her sister, the pair is taken hostage by a band of rough men who want them -- for reasons beyond imagining. A captive in a world of inescapable seductions....They are neo-Vikings from a hidden underworld, in search of women Outsiders to breed for the New Sweden clan. Their sexy leader, Otar, wants only one woman: Madalyn. Overpowered by his masculine strength and unmasked desire, Madalyn must become Otar's wife or face the marriage auction block. Now, in a world beyond dreams and as real as the hot flesh of her enticing warrior-husband, Madalyn discovers the power of an all-consuming passion -- as the fires of revolution threaten all she has come to love.... |
I really want to give this book 4 stars but i cant. I did enjoy this book and if you can suspend reality really well and just take it as it comes you may too. I enjoy a good story of strong vinking kidnaps beautiful woman and they fall in love, but it was the things in between that didn't quite go. Madelyn is supposed to be a great acclaimed actress but the titles of her movies that we know of are The Taming of the Shrewd, Song of the Viking, Attack of the Possessed Pirates and For the Love of A Garbageman....uh ok. And the women of this underground world, young and old, dress in see through dresses. And seeing his sister and mother dress like that doesn't seem to bother Otar one bit... alrighty then. And in my opinion Madelyn gives in a little too easily but despite the whole unbelieveable thing i still enjoyed it. not my favorate but still fun.
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IT'S A THIN LINE BETWEEN ALIVE AND UNDEAD.
Chess Putnam has a lot on her plate. Mangled human corpses have started to show up on the streets of Downside, and Chess's bosses at the Church of Real Truth have ordered her to team up with the ultra-powerful Black Squad agency to crack the grisly case.
Chess is under a binding spell that threatens death if she talks about the investigation, but the city's most notorious crime boss--and Chess's drug dealer--gets wind of her new assignment and insists on being kept informed. If that isn't bad enough, a sinister street vendor appears to have information Chess needs. Only he's not telling what he knows, or what it all has to do with the vast underground City of Eternity.
Now Chess will have to navigate killer wraiths, First Elders, and a lot of seriously nasty magic--all while coping with some not-so-small issues of her own. And the only man Chess can trust to help her through it all has every reason to want her dead.
From the Paperback edition. |

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| When the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944, they sent virtually the entire Jewish population to Auschwitz. A Jew and a medical doctor, the prisoner Dr. Miklos Nyiszli was spared death for a grimmer fate: to perform "scientific research" on his fellow inmates under the supervision of the man who became known as the infamous "Angel of Death"--Dr. Josef Mengele. Nyiszli was named Mengele's personal research pathologist. In that capactity he also served as physician to the Sonderkommando, the Jewish prisoners who worked exclusively in the crematoriums and were routinely executed after four months. Miraculously, Nyiszli survived to give this horrifying and sobering account.
Auschwitz was one of the first books to bring the full horror of the Nazi death camps to the American public. Although much has since been written about the Holocaust, this eyewitness account remains, as the New York Review of Bookssaid in 1987, "the best brief account of the Auschwitz experience available." Of Bruno Bettelheim’s famous foreword Neal Ascherson has written, "Its eloquence and outrage must guarantee it a permanent place in Jewish historiography." |

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"There is an underside to every age about which history does not often speak, because history is written from records left by the privileged." "A brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those who have been exploited politically and economically and whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories." - Library Journal A classic since its original landmark publication in 1980, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is the first scholarly work to tell America's story from the bottom up—from the point of view of, and in the words of, America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. From Columbus to the Revolution to slavery and the Civil War—from World War Two to the election of George W. Bush and the "War on Terror" - A People's History of the United States is an important and necessary contribution to a complete and balanced understanding of American history. "One of the most important books I have ever read in a long life of reading...It is a wonderful, splendid book—a book that should be read by every American, student or otherwise, who wants to understand his country, its true history, and its hope for the future." - Howard Fast "Zinn's work is a vital corrective to triumphalist accounts." –Publishers Weekly "It has been Zinn's life work to illuminate the subjectivities others have ignored." - Boston Phoenix" |

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Bill Bryson is one of the world's most beloved and bestselling writers. In A Short History of Nearly Everything, he takes his ultimate journey into the most intriguing and consequential questions that science seeks to answer. It's a dazzling quest, the intellectual odyssey of a lifetime, as this insatiably curious writer attempts to understand everything that has transpired from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization. Or, as the author puts it, "...how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also what happened in between and since." This is, in short, a tall order. To that end, Bill Bryson apprenticed himself to a host of the world's most profound scientific minds, living and dead. His challenge is to take subjects like geology, chemistry, paleontology, astronomy, and particle physics and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people, like himself, made bored (or scared) stiff of science by school. His interest is not simply to discover what we know but to find out how we know it. How do we know what is in the center of the earth, thousands of miles beneath the surface? How can we know the extent and the composition of the universe, or what a black hole is? How can we know where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out? On his travels through space and time, Bill Bryson encounters a splendid gallery of the most fascinating, eccentric, competitive, and foolish personalities ever to ask a hard question. In their company, he undertakes a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only this superb writer can render it. Science has never been more involving, and the world we inhabit has never been fuller of wonder and delight.
Stylish [and] stunningly accurate prose. We learn what the material world is like from the smallest quark to the largest galaxy and at all the levels in between... brims with strange and amazing facts... destined to become a modern classic of science writing. THE NEW YORK TIMES Bryson has made a career writing hilarious travelogues, and in many ways his latest is more of the same, except that this time Bryson hikes through the world of science. PEOPLE Bryson is surprisingly precise, brilliantly eccentric and nicely eloquent... a gifted storyteller has dared to retell the world's biggest story. SEATTLE TIMES Hefty, highly researched and eminently readable. SIMON WINCHESTER, THE GLOBE AND MAIL All non-scientists (and probably many specialized scientists, too) can learn a great deal from his lucid and amiable explanations. NATIONAL POST "Bryson is a terrific stylist. You can't help but enjoy his writing, for its cheer and buoyancy, and for the frequent demonstration of his peculiar, engaging turn of mind.” OTTAWA CITIZEN Wonderfully readable. It is, in the best sense, learned. WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
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Adobe ePub [ 1.1 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, May 6, 2003 Adobe Digital Edition [ 1.6 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, May 6, 2003 Microsoft Reader [ 1.0 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, May 6, 2003 MobiPocket (OD) [ 1.2 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, May 6, 2003 eReader [ 0.6 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, May 6, 2003
I love Bill Bryson! This book tells you everything you need to know, to be a total knowitall. He makes it easy to understand. His style and humor make it fun to read.
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Chapter One NO MATTER HOW hard you try you will never be able to grasp just how tiny, how spatially unassuming, is a proton. It is just way too small.
A proton is an infinitesimal part of an atom, which is itself of course an insubstantial thing. Protons are so small that a little dib of ink like the dot on this i can hold something in the region of 500,000,000,000 of them, rather more than the number of seconds contained in half a million years. So protons are exceedingly microscopic, to say the very least.
Now imagine if you can (and of course you can't) shrinking one of those protons down to a billionth of its normal size into a space so small that it would make a proton look enormous. Now pack into that tiny, tiny space about an ounce of matter. Excellent. You are ready to start a universe.
I'm assuming of course that you wish to build an inflationary universe. If you'd prefer instead to build a more old-fashioned, standard Big Bang universe, you'll need additional materials. In fact, you will need to gather up everything there is--every last mote and particle of matter between here and the edge of creation--and squeeze it into a spot so infinitesimally compact that it has no dimensions at all. It is known as a singularity.
In either case, get ready for a really big bang. Naturally, you will wish to retire to a safe place to observe the spectacle. Unfortunately, there is nowhere to retire to because outside the singularity there is no where. When the universe begins to expand, it won't be spreading out to fill a larger emptiness. The only space that exists is the space it creates as it goes.
It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no "around" around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can't even ask how long it has been there--whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn't exist. There is no past for it to emerge from.
And so, from nothing, our universe begins.
In a single blinding pulse, a moment of glory much too swift and expansive for any form of words, the singularity assumes heavenly dimensions, space beyond conception. In the first lively second (a second that many cosmologists will devote careers to shaving into ever-finer wafers) is produced gravity and the other forces that govern physics. In less than a minute the universe is a million billion miles across and growing fast. There is a lot of heat now, ten billion degrees of it, enough to begin the nuclear reactions that create the lighter elements--principally hydrogen and helium, with a dash (about one atom in a hundred million) of lithium. In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe. It is a place of the most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful, too. And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.
When this moment happened is a matter of some debate. Cosmologists have long argued over whether the moment of creation was 10 billion years ago or twice that or something in between. The consensus seems to be heading for a figure of about 13.7 billion years, but these things are notoriously difficult to measure, as we shall see further on. All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0. We were on our...

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An accessible and highly entertaining single-volume history of Ancient Rome. This is the story of the greatest empire the world has ever known. Simon Baker charts the rise and fall of the world's first superpower, focusing on six momentous turning points that shaped Roman history. Welcome to Rome as you've never seen it before – awesome and splendid, gritty and squalid. From the conquest of the Mediterranean beginning in the third century BC to the destruction of the empire at the hands of barbarian invaders some seven centuries later, we discover the most critical episodes in Roman history: the spectacular collapse of the 'free' republic, the birth of the age of the 'Caesars', the violent suppression of the strongest rebellion against Roman power, and the bloody civil war that launched Christianity as a world religion. At the heart of this account are the dynamic, complex but flawed characters of some of the most powerful rulers in history: men such as Pompey the Great, Julius Caesar, Augustus, Nero and Constantine. Putting flesh on the bones of these distant, legendary figures, Simon Baker looks beyond the dusty, toga-clad caricatures and explores their real motivations and ambitions, intrigues and rivalries. The superb narrative, full of energy and imagination, is a brilliant distillation of the latest scholarship and a wonderfully evocative account of Ancient Rome. |
Adobe ePub [ 1.0 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, August 31, 2010

"Fascinating . . . One of the finest works of history written . . . A splendid and glittering performance." The New York Times
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Chapter One A Funeral
So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens--four dowager and three regnant--and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.
In the center of the front row rode the new king, George V, flanked on his left by the Duke of Connaught, the late king's only surviving brother, and on his right by a personage to whom, acknowledged The Times, "belongs the first place among all the foreign mourners," who "even when relations are most strained has never lost his popularity amongst us"--William II, the German Emperor. Mounted on a gray horse, wearing the scarlet uniform of a British Field Marshal, carrying the baton of that rank, the Kaiser had composed his features behind the famous upturned mustache in an expression "grave even to severity." Of the several emotions churning his susceptible breast, some hints exist in his letters. "I am proud to call this place my home and to be a member of this royal family," he wrote home after spending the night in Windsor Castle in the former apartments of his mother. Sentiment and nostalgia induced by these melancholy occasions with his English relatives jostled with pride in his supremacy among the assembled potentates and with a fierce relish in the disappearance of his uncle from the European scene. He had come to bury Edward his bane; Edward the arch plotter, as William conceived it, of Germany's encirclement; Edward his mother's brother whom he could neither bully nor impress, whose fat figure cast a shadow between Germany and the sun. "He is Satan. You cannot imagine what a Satan he is!"
This verdict, announced by the Kaiser before a dinner of three hundred guests in Berlin in 1907, was occasioned by one of Edward's continental tours undertaken with clearly diabolical designs at encirclement. He had spent a provocative week in Paris, visited for no good reason the King of Spain (who had just married his niece), and finished with a visit to the King of Italy with obvious intent to seduce him from his Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria. The Kaiser, possessor of the least inhibited tongue in Europe, had worked himself into a frenzy ending in another of those comments that had periodically over the past twenty years of his reign shattered the nerves of diplomats.
Happily the Encircler was now dead and replaced by George who, the Kaiser told Theodore Roosevelt a few days before the funeral, was "a very nice boy" (of forty-five, six years younger than the Kaiser). "He is a thorough Englishman and hates all foreigners but I do not mind that as long as he does not hate Germans more than other foreigners." Alongside George, William now rode confidently, saluting as he passed the regimental colors of the 1st Royal Dragoons of which he was honorary colonel. Once he had distributed photographs of himself wearing their uniform with the Delphic...

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A groundbreaking study that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492.
Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus's landing had crossed the Bering Strait twelve thousand years ago; existed mainly in small, nomadic bands; and lived so lightly on the land that the Americas was, for all practical purposes, still a vast wilderness. But as Charles C. Mann now makes clear, archaeologists and anthropologists have spent the last thirty years proving these and many other long-held assumptions wrong.
In a book that startles and persuades, Mann reveals how a new generation of researchers equipped with novel scientific techniques came to previously unheard-of conclusions. Among them:
• In 1491 there were probably more people living in the Americas than in Europe. • Certain cities--such as Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital--were far greater in population than any contemporary European city. Furthermore, Tenochtitlán, unlike any capital in Europe at that time, had running water, beautiful botanical gardens, and immaculately clean streets. • The earliest cities in the Western Hemisphere were thriving before the Egyptians built the great pyramids. • Pre-Columbian Indians in Mexico developed corn by a breeding process so sophisticated that the journal Science recently described it as "man's first, and perhaps the greatest, feat of genetic engineering." • Amazonian Indians learned how to farm the rain forest without destroying it--a process scientists are studying today in the hope of regaining this lost knowledge. • Native Americans transformed their land so completely that Europeans arrived in a hemisphere already massively "landscaped" by human beings.
Mann sheds clarifying light on the methods used to arrive at these new visions of the pre-Columbian Americas and how they have affected our understanding of our history and our thinking about the environment. His book is an exciting and learned account of scientific inquiry and revelation.
From the Hardcover edition. |
"A superbly written and very important book: by far the most comprehensive synthesis I've ever seen of the growing body of evidence that our most deep-rooted ideas about the peopling of the Western hemisphere and the kinds of societies that had developed there by the time of European contact are fundamentally wrong. Charles C. Mann is one of those rare writers who can make scholarly concepts exciting and accessible without trivializing them. In 1491 he has integrated the latest research in many different areas with his own insights and experiences to produce a fascinating and addictively readable tour through the 'New World' before its 'discovery.' His book is, above all, a wonderful, unsentimental act of restitution--challenging centuries of cultural contempt and willful blindness to show just how vigorous, various, densely populated and profoundly human the pre-Columbian Americas really were." James Wilson, author ofThe Earth Shall Weep: A Historyof Native America
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From the book Why Billington SurvivedTHE FRIENDLY INDIAN
On March 22, 1621, an official Native American delegation walked through what is now southern New England to negotiate with a group of foreigners who had taken over a recently deserted Indian settlement. At the head of the party was an uneasy triumvirate: Massasoit, the sachem (political-military leader) of the Wampanoag confederation, a loose coalition of several dozen villages that controlled most of what is now southeastern Massachusetts; Samoset, sachem of an allied group to the north; and Tisquantum, a distrusted captive, whom Massasoit had reluctantly brought along as an interpreter.
Massasoit was an adroit politician, but the dilemma he faced would have tested Machiavelli. About five years before, most of his subjects had fallen before a terrible calamity. Whole villages had been depopulated--indeed, the foreigners ahead now occupied one of the empty sites. It was all he could do to hold together the remnants of his people. Adding to his problems, the disaster had not touched the Wampanoag's longtime enemies, the Narragansett alliance to the west. Soon, Massasoit feared, they would take advantage of the Wampanoag's weakness and overrun them.
Desperate threats require desperate countermeasures. In a gamble, Massasoit intended to abandon, even reverse, a long-standing policy. Europeans had been visiting New England for at least a century. Shorter than the natives, oddly dressed, and often unbearably dirty, the pallid foreigners had peculiar blue eyes that peeped out of the masks of bristly, animal-like hair that encased their faces. They were irritatingly garrulous, prone to fits of chicanery, and often surprisingly incompetent at what seemed to Indians like basic tasks. But they also made useful and beautiful goods--copper kettles, glittering colored glass, and steel knives and hatchets--unlike anything else in New England. Moreover, they would exchange these valuable items for cheap furs of the sort used by Indians as blankets. It was like happening upon a dingy kiosk that would swap fancy electronic goods for customers' used socks--almost anyone would be willing to overlook the shopkeeper's peculiarities.
Over time, the Wampanoag, like other native societies in coastal New England, had learned how to manage the European presence. They encouraged the exchange of goods, but would only allow their visitors to stay ashore for brief, carefully controlled excursions. Those who overstayed their welcome were forcefully reminded of the limited duration of Indian hospitality. At the same time, the Wampanoag fended off Indians from the interior, preventing them from trading directly with the foreigners. In this way the shoreline groups put themselves in the position of classic middlemen, overseeing both European access to Indian products and Indian access to European products. Now Massasoit was visiting a group of British with the intent of changing the rules. He would permit the newcomers to stay for an unlimited time--provided that they formally allied with the Wampanoag against the Narragansett.
Tisquantum, the interpreter, had shown up alone at Massasoit's home a year and a half before. He spoke fluent English, because he had lived for several years in Britain. But Massasoit didn't trust him. He seems to have been in Massasoit's eyes a man without anchor, out for himself. In a conflict, Tisquantum might even side with the foreigners. Massasoit had kept Tisquantum in a kind of captivity since his arrival, monitoring his actions closely. And he...

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How do we make decisions--good and bad--and why are some people so much better at it than others?
That's the question Malcolm Gladwell asks and answers in the follow-up to his huge bestseller, The Tipping Point. Utilizing case studies as diverse as speed dating, pop music, and the shooting of Amadou Diallo, Gladwell reveals that what we think of as decisions made in the blink of an eye are much more complicated than assumed.
Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience and psychology, he shows how the difference between good decision-making and bad has nothing to do with how much information we can process quickly, but on the few particular details on which we focus. Leaping boldly from example to example, displaying all of the brilliance that made The Tipping Point a classic, Gladwell reveals how we can become better decision makers--in our homes, our offices, and in everyday life.
The result is a book that is surprising and transforming. Never again will you think about thinking the same way. |

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| Hamilton hits the ground running in her latest Meredith Gentry novel, this one set in Los Angeles, where a pregnant Meredith has been safely united with her fellow exiles from the faerie courts. The faerie princess/private eye's happiness is short-lived, however, when she catches wind of a serial killer who gets his kicks crafting hideous tableaux of butchered demi-fey. While Meredith hunts for the killer, her stable of guards struggle to protect her from herself. Just as full of steamy sex and wild magic as the previous seven volumes, this episode finds Meredith's powers, as well as her collection of gorgeous guards, expanding, with crowd-pleasing results. The friction among Meredith's men makes for good drama, and Hamilton doesn't shy away from difficult real-world issues like post-traumatic stress disorder and sexual abuse. Though newcomers will be lost, and mystery fans may feel the sex scenes crowd out the plot, veterans of the series will no doubt enjoy their return to Hamilton's meticulously constructed world. |
I liked this installment. You got to see her relationships develop more with her guards. There was a serial killer antagonist. I really enjoyed it and cannot wait to read the next one.
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Chapter One The smell of Eucalyptus always made me think of Southern California, my home away from home; now it might forever be entwined with the scent of blood. I stood there with the strangely hot wind rustling through the high leaves. It blew my summer dress in a tangle around my legs, and spread my shoulder-length hair in a scarlet web across my face. I grabbed my hair in handfuls so I could see, though maybe not being able to see would have been better. The plastic gloves pulled at my hair. They were designed so I didn't contaminate evidence, not for comfort. We were surrounded by a nearly perfect circle of the tall, pale tree trunks. In the middle of that natural circle were the bodies.
The spicy smell of the Eucalyptus could almost hide the scent of blood. If it had been this many adult human-sized bodies the Eucalyptus wouldn't have had a chance, but they weren't adult-sized. They were tiny by human standards, so tiny, the size of dolls; none of the corpses were even a foot tall, and some were less than five inches. They lay on the ground with their bright butterfly and moth wings frozen as if in mid-movement. Their dead hands were wrapped around wilted flowers like a cheerful game gone horribly wrong. They looked like so many broken Barbie dolls, except that Barbie dolls never lay so lifelike, or so perfectly poised. No matter how hard I'd tried as a little girl, their limbs remained stiff and unyielding. The bodies on the ground were stiff with rigor mortis, but they'd been laid out carefully, so they had stiffened in strangely graceful, almost dancing poses.
Detective Lucy Tate came to stand beside me. She was wearing a pants suit complete with jacket and a white button-up shirt that strained a little across the front because Lucy, like me, had too much figure for most button-up shirts. But I wasn't a police detective so I didn't have to pretend I was a man to try to fit in. I worked at a private detective agency that used the fact that I was Princess Meredith, the only American-born fey royal, and back working for the Grey Detective Agency: Supernatural Problems; Magical Solutions. People loved paying money to see the princess, and have her hear their problems; I'd begun to feel a little like a freak show until today. Today I would have loved to be back in the office listening to some mundane matter that didn't really need my special brand of help, but was just a human rich enough to pay for my time. I'd have rather been doing a lot of things than standing here staring down at a dozen dead fey.
"What do you think?" she asked.
What I really thought was that I was glad the bodies were small so that the trees covered most of the smell, but that would be admitting weakness, and you didn't do that on the rare occasions you got to work with the police. You had to be professional and tough or they thought less of you, even the female cops, maybe especially them.
"They're laid out like something from a children's storybook down to the dancing poses and the flowers in their hands."
Lucy nodded. "It's not just like, it is."
"Is what?" I asked, looking at her. Her dark brunette hair was cut shorter than mine, and held back by a thick band so that nothing obscured her vision, as I still fought with my own hair. She looked cool and professional.
She used one plastic-gloved hand to hold out a plastic-wrapped page. She held it out to me, though I knew not to touch it even with the gloves. I was a civilian, and I had been very aware of that as I walked through all the police on the way to the center of all this activity. The police were never...

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| In the tradition of Black Hawk Down and Jarhead comes a searing portrait of young men fighting a modern-day war. A powerhouse work of nonfiction, Generation Kill expands on Evan Wright's acclaimed three-part series that appeared in Rolling Stone during the summer of 2003. His narrative follows the twenty-three marines of First Recon who spearheaded the blitzkrieg on Iraq. This elite unit, nicknamed ""First Suicide Battalion,"" searched out enemy fighters by racing ahead of American battle forces and literally driving into suspected ambush points. Evan Wright lived on the front lines with this platoon from the opening hours of combat, to the fall of Baghdad, through the start of the guerrilla war. He was welcomed into their ranks, and from this bird's-eye perspective he tells the unsettling story of young men trained by their country to be ruthless killers. He chronicles the triumphs and horrors-physical, moral, emotional, and spiritual-that these marines endured while achieving victory in a war many questioned before it began. Wright's book is a timely account of war; even more important, it is a timeless description of the human drama taking place on today's battlefields. Written with brutal honesty, raw intensity, and startling intimacy, Generation Kill is destined to become a classic and take its place in the canon of the most captivating and authentic works of war literature. |

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| One of the most fascinating works of history ever written, Winston's Churchill's monumental The Second World War is a six-volume account of the struggle of the Allied powers in Europe against Germany and the Axis. Told through the eyes of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, The Second World War is also the story of one nation's singular, heroic role in the fight against tyranny. Pride and patriotism are evident everywhere in Churchill's dramatic account and for good reason. Having learned a lesson at Munich that they would never forget, the British refused to make peace with Hitler, defying him even after France had fallen and after it seemed as though the Nazis were unstoppable. Churchill remained unbowed throughout, as did the people of Britain in whose determination and courage he placed his confidence.
Patriotic as Churchill was, he managed to maintain a balanced impartiality in his description of the war. What is perhaps most interesting, and what lends the work its tension and emotion, is Churchill's inclusion of a significant amount of primary material. We hear his retrospective analysis of the war, to be sure; but we are also presented with memos, letters, orders, speeches, and telegrams that give a day-by-day account of the reactions-both mistaken and justified-to the unfolding drama. Strategies and counterstrategies develop to respond to Hitler's ruthless conquest of Europe, his planned invasion of England, and his treacherous assault on Russia. It is a mesmerizing account of the crucial decisions that have to be made with imperfect knowledge and an awareness that the fate of the world hangs in the balance.
The Gathering Storm is the first volume of The Second World War. In some ways a continuation of The World Crisis, Churchill's history of World War I, The Gathering Storm is his attempt to come to grips with the terrible circumstances that gave rise to Nazi Germany and a second, even more destructive world conflict. As he notes in his preface, Churchill was perhaps the only person who held such prominent positions of power in both world wars, so he is remarkably well-qualified to tell the tragic story of war to peace to war. The Gathering Storm considers the stipulations and consequences of the Treaty of Versailles, the rise of Adolf Hitler, the capitulation at Munich and the entry of the British into the war. The volume is pervaded by Churchill's somber feeling that the Second World War was largely a senseless and avoidable conflict, but it sets the stage for the heroism and glory that are to follow.
Churchill won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 due in no small part to this awe-inspiring work. |

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The fast-paced story of two Ivy-League outcasts who concocted a scheme to meet girls, and ended up inventing Facebook At Harvard, social acceptance and success with the opposite sex had to be applied for. In the absence of family money or innate charisma, misfit and maths prodigy Eduardo Saverin dreamed of joining one of Harvard's elite Final clubs. His best friend, painfully shy computer genius Mark Zuckerberg, turned instead to his natural talents, hacking into the university's computer system to create a rateable database of every female student on campus. Narrowly escaping expulsion after 80% of Harvard's population voted in just two hours, crashing the entire computer system, Mark and Eduardo together refocused the site into something less controversial – 'The Facebook' – which spread like a wildfire across campuses around the country. Within months hundreds of thousands of college kids had signed up. Suddenly Eduardo and Mark were getting nods not just from the female population, but from venture capitalists too. It was then, amidst the dizzying levels of cash and the promise of unbelievable power, that the first cracks in their friendship started to appear, and what began as a simple argument spiralled into an out-and-out war. The great irony is that Facebook succeeded by bringing people together – but its very success tore two best friends apart. |
The Accidental Billionaires is the perfect pairing of author and subject. It's pure summer fun—a juicy, fast-paced, unputdownable Mezrich tale that adds to his canon of lad lit. And Hollywood has come calling again: I'm currently working with Dana Brunetti, Scott Rudin, Mike Deluca, and Aaron Sorkin on the movie adaptation of The Accidental Billionaires. If the book is any indication, the film is going to be a must see. — Kevin Spacey (Star and Producer of the hit movie 21)
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Chapter 1: October 2003
It was probably the third cocktail that did the trick. It was hard for Eduardo to tell for sure, because the three drinks had come in such rapid succession — the empty plastic cups were now stacked accordion style on the windowsill behind him — that he hadn’t been able to gauge for certain when the change had occurred. But there was no denying it now, the evidence was all over him. The pleasantly warm flush to his normally sallow cheeks; the relaxed, almost rubbery way he leaned against the window — a stark contrast to his usual calcified, if slightly hunched posture; and most important of all, the easy smile on his face, something he’d practiced unsuccessfully in the mirror for two hours before he’d left his dorm room that evening. No doubt at all, the alcohol had taken effect, and Eduardo wasn’t scared anymore. At the very least, he was no longer overwhelmed with the intense urge to get the [expletive] out of there.
To be sure, the room in front of him was intimidating: the immense crystal chandelier hanging from the arched, cathedral ceiling; the thick red velvet carpeting that seemed to bleed right out of the regal mahogany walls; the meandering, bifurcated staircase that snaked up toward the storied, ultrasecret, catacombed upper floors. Even the windowpanes behind Eduardo’s head seemed treacherous, lit from behind by the flickering anger of a bonfire consuming most of the narrow courtyard outside, twists of flame licking at the ancient, pockmarked glass.
This was a terrifying place, especially for a kid like Eduardo. He hadn’t grown up poor — he’d spent most of his childhood being shuttled between upper-middle-class communities in Brazil and Miami before matriculating at Harvard — but he was a complete stranger to the sort of old-world opulence this room represented. Even through the booze, Eduardo could feel the insecurities rumbling deep down in the pit of his stomach. He felt like a freshman all over again, stepping into Harvard Yard for the first time, wondering what the hell he was doing there, wondering how he could possibly belong in a place like that. How he could possibly belong in a place like this.
He shifted against the sill, scanning the crowd of young men that filled most of the cavernous room. A mob, really, bunched together around the pair of makeshift bars that had been set up specifically for the event. The bars themselves were fairly shoddy — wooden tables that were little more than slabs, starkly out of character in such an austere setting — but nobody noticed, because the bars were staffed by the only girls in the room; matching, bust-heavy blondes in low-cut black tops, brought in from one of the local all-female colleges to cater to the mob of young men.
The mob, in many ways, was even more frightening than the building itself. Eduardo couldn’t tell for sure, but he guessed there had to be about two hundred of them — all male, all dressed in similar dark blazers and equally dark slacks. Sophomores, mostly; a mix of races, but there was something very similar about all the faces — the smiles that seemed so much easier than Eduardo’s, the confidence in those two hundred pairs of eyes — these kids weren’t used to having to prove themselves. They belonged. For most of them, this party — this place — was just a formality.
Eduardo took a deep breath, wincing slightly at the bitter tinge to the air. The ash from the bonfire outside was making its way through the windowpanes, but he didn’t move away from his perch against the sill, not yet. He wasn’t ready yet. Instead, he let his attention settle on the group of blazers closest to him — four kids of medium build. He didn’t recognize any of them from his classes; two of the kids were blond and preppy-looking, like they’d just stepped off a train from Connecticut. The third was Asian, and seemed a little older, but it was hard to tell for sure. The fourth, however — African American and very polished-looking, from his grin to his perfectly coiffed hair — was definitely a senior.
Eduardo felt his back stiffen, and he glanced toward the black kid’s tie. The color of the material was all the verification Eduardo needed. The kid was a senior, and it was time for Eduardo to make his move.
Eduardo straightened his shoulders and pushed off of the sill. He nodded at the two Connecticut kids and the Asian, but his attention remained focused on the older kid — and his solid black, uniquely decorated tie.
“Eduardo Saverin.” Eduardo introduced himself, vigorously shaking the kid’s hand. “Great to meet you.”
The kid responded with his own name, Darron something, which Eduardo filed away in the back of his memory. The kid’s name didn’t really matter; the tie alone told him everything he needed to know. The purpose of this entire evening lay in the little white birds that speckled the solid black material. The tie designated him as a member of the Phoenix-S K; he was one of twenty or so hosts of the evening’s affair, who were scattered among the two hundred sophomore men.
“Saverin. You’re the one with the hedge fund, right?”
Eduardo blushed, but inside he was thrilled that the Phoenix member recognized his name. It was a bit of an exaggeration — he didn’t have a hedge fund, he’d simply made some money investing with his brother during his sophomore summer — but he wasn’t going to correct the mistake. If the Phoenix members were talking about him, if somehow they were impressed by what they’d heard — well, maybe he had a chance.
It was a heady thought, and Eduardo’s heart started to beat a little harder as he tried to spread just the right amount of [expletive] to keep the senior interested. More than any test he’d taken freshman or sophomore year, this moment was going to define his future. Eduardo knew what it would mean to gain entrance to the Phoenix — for his social status during his last two years of college, and for his future, whatever future he chose to chase.
Like the secret societies at Yale that had gotten so much press over the years, the Final Clubs were the barely kept secret soul of campus life at Harvard; housed in centuries-old mansions spread out across Cambridge, the eight all-male clubs had nurtured generations of world leaders, financial giants, and power brokers. Almost as important, membership in one of the eight clubs granted an instant social identity; each of the clubs had a different personality, from the ultraexclusive Porcellian, the oldest club on campus, whose members had names like Roosevelt and Rockefeller, to the prepped-out Fly Club, which had spawned two presidents and a handful of billionaires, each of the clubs had its own distinct, and instantly defining, power. The Phoenix, for its part, wasn’t the most prestigious of the clubs, but in many ways it was the social king of the hill; the austere building at 323 Mt. Auburn Street was the destination of choice on Friday and Saturday nights, and if you were a member of the Phoenix, not only were you a part of a century-old network, you also got to spend your weekends at the best parties on campus, surrounded by the hottest girls culled from schools all over the 02138 zip code.
“The hedge fund is a hobby, really,” Eduardo humbly confided as the small group of blazers hung on his words. “We focus mostly on oil futures. See, I’ve always been obsessed with the weather, and I made a few good hurricane predictions that the rest of the market hadn’t quite picked up on.”
Eduardo knew he was walking a fine line, trying to minimize the geekiness of how he’d actually outguessed the oil market; he knew the Phoenix member wanted to hear about the three hundred thousand dollars Eduardo had made trading oil, not the nerdish obsession with meteorology that had made the trades possible. But Eduardo also wanted to show off a little; Darron’s mention of his “hedge fund” only confirmed what Eduardo had already suspected, that the only reason he was in that room in the first place was his reputation as a budding businessman.
Hell, he knew he didn’t have much else going for him. He wasn’t an athlete, didn’t come from a long line of legacies, and certainly wasn’t burning up the social scene. He was gawky, his arms were a little too long for his body, and he only really relaxed when he drank. But still, he was there, in that room. A year late — most people were “punched” during the fall of their sophomore year, not as juniors like Eduardo — but he was there just the same.
The whole punch process had taken him by surprise. Just two nights before, Eduardo had been sitting at his desk in his dorm room, working on a twenty-page paper about some bizarre tribe that lived in the Amazonian rain forest, when an invitation had suddenly appeared under his door. It wasn’t anything like a fairy-tale golden ticket — of the two hundred mostly sophomores who were invited to the first punch party, only twenty or so would emerge as new members of the Phoenix — but the moment was as thrilling to Eduardo as when he had opened his Harvard acceptance letter. He’d been hoping for a shot at one of the clubs since he’d gotten to Harvard, and now, finally, he’d gotten that shot.
Now it was just up to him — and, of course, the kids wearing the black, bird-covered ties. Each of the four punch events — like tonight’s meet-and-greet cocktail party — was a sort of mass interview. After Eduardo and the rest of the invitees were sent home to their various dorms spread across the campus, the Phoenix members would convene in one of the secret rooms upstairs to deliberate their fates. After each event, a smaller and smaller percentage of the punched would get the next invitation — and slowly, the two hundred would be weeded down to twenty.
If Eduardo made the cut, his life would change. And if it took some creative “elaboration” of a summer spent analyzing barometric changes and predicting how those changes would affect oil distribution patterns — well, Eduardo wasn’t above a little applied creativity.
“The real trick is figuring out how to turn three hundred thousand into three million.” Eduardo grinned. “But that’s the fun of hedge funds. You get to be real inventive.”
He delved into the [expletive] with full enthusiasm, carrying the whole group of blazers with him. He’d honed his [expletive] skills over numerous prepunch parties as a freshman and sophomore; the trick was to forget that this was no longer a dry run — that this was the real thing. In his head, he tried to pretend he was back at one of those less important mixers, when he wasn’t yet being judged, when he wasn’t trying to end up on some all-important list. He could remember one, in particular, that had gone incredibly well; a Caribbean-themed party, with faux palm trees and sand on the floor. He tried to put himself back there — remembering the less imposing details of the decor, remembering how simple and easy the conversation had come. Within moments, he felt himself relaxing even more, allowing himself to become enrapt in his own story, the sound of his own voice.
He was back at that Caribbean party, down to the last detail. He remembered the reggae music bouncing off the walls, the sound of steel drums biting at his ears. He remembered the rum-based punch, the girls in flowered bikinis.
He even remembered the kid with the mop of curly hair who had been standing in a corner of the room, barely ten feet away from where he was now, watching his progress, trying to get up the nerve to follow his lead and approach one of the older Phoenix kids before it was too late. But the kid had never moved from the corner; in fact, his self-defeating awkwardness had been so palpable, it had acted like a force field, carving out an area of the room around him, a sort of reverse magnetism, pushing anyone nearby away.
Eduardo had felt a tinge of sympathy at the time — because he had recognized that kid with the curly hair — and because there was no way in hell a kid like that was ever going to get into the Phoenix. A kid like that had no business punching any of the Final Clubs — God only knew what he had been doing there at the prepunch party in the first place. Harvard had plenty of little niches for kids like that; computer labs, chess guilds, dozens of underground organizations and hobbies catering to every imaginable twist of social impairment. One look at the kid, and it had been obvious to Eduardo that he didn’t know the first thing about the sort of social networking one had to master to get into a club like the Phoenix.
But then, as now, Eduardo had been too busy chasing his dream to spend much time thinking about the awkward kid in the corner.
Certainly, he had no way of knowing, then or now, that the kid with the curly hair was one day going to take the entire concept of a social network and turn it on its head. That one day, the kid with the curly hair struggling through that prepunch party was going to change Eduardo’s life more than any Final Club ever could.

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The deepest cave on earth was a prize that had remained unclaimed for centuries, long after every other ultimate discovery had been made: both poles by 1912, Everest in 1958, the Challenger Deep in 1961. In 1969 we even walked on the moon. And yet as late as 2000, the earth's deepest cave--the supercave--remained undiscovered. This is the story of the men and women who risked everything to find it, earning their place in history beside the likes of Peary, Amundsen, Hillary, and Armstrong.
In 2004, two great scientist-explorers are attempting to find the bottom of the world. Bold, heroic American Bill Stone is committed to the vast Cheve Cave, located in southern Mexico and deadly even by supercave standards. On the other side of the globe, legendary Ukrainian explorer Alexander Klimchouk--Stone's polar opposite in temperament and style, but every bit his equal in scientific expertise, physical bravery, and sheer determination--has targeted Krubera, a freezing nightmare of a supercave in the Republic of Georgia, where underground dangers are compounded by the horrors of separatist war in this former Soviet republic.
Blind Descent explores both the brightest and darkest aspects of the timeless human urge to discover--to be first. It is also a thrilling epic about a pursuit that makes even extreme mountaineering and ocean exploration pale by comparison. These supercavers spent months in multiple camps almost two vertical miles deep and many more miles from their caves' exits. They had to contend with thousand-foot drops, deadly flooded tunnels, raging whitewater rivers, monstrous waterfalls, mile-long belly crawls, and much more. Perhaps even worse were the psychological horrors produced by weeks plunged into absolute, perpetual darkness, beyond all hope of rescue, including a particularly insidious derangement called The Rapture.
James M. Tabor was granted unprecedented access to logs, journals, photographs, and video footage of these expeditions, as well as many hours of personal interviews with surviving participants. Blind Descent is an unforgettable addition to the classic literature of discovery and adventure. It is also a testament to human survival and endurance--and to two extraordinary men whose relentless pursuit of greatness led them to heights of triumph and depths of tragedy neither could have imagined.
Includes a 16-pg full-color insert
From the Hardcover edition. |
"Heart-stopping and relentlessly gripping. Tabor takes us on an odyssey into unfathomable worlds beneath us, and into the hearts of rare explorers who will do anything to get there first." Robert Kurson, author of ShadowDivers
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Chapter One
STOP.
We have a fatality.
BILL STONE, HALF A MILE DEEP and three miles from the entrance in a Mexican supercave called Cheve, did stop. Red-and-white plastic survey tape hung across the narrow passage he had been ascending. The message, scrawled on notebook paper, was affixed to the tape at chest level, where it could not be missed. Afloat in the cave's absolute darkness, the white paper burned so brightly in the beam of Stone's headlamp that it almost hurt his eyes. The time was shortly before midnight on Friday, March 1, 1991, though that made no particular difference--it was always midnight in a cave.
Stone, a hard-driving man with a doctorate in structural engineering, stood six feet, four inches tall and weighed two hundred hard-muscled pounds. He was one of the leaders (two veteran cavers, Matt Oliphant and Don Coons, were the others) of an expedition trying to make the last great terrestrial discovery by proving that Cheve (pronounced CHAY-vay) was the deepest cave on earth. He had brown hair, a long hatchet face, a strong neck, intense blue eyes, and a prow of a nose angling out between them. Stone was not classically handsome, but it was a striking, unsubtle face men and women alike looked at twice.
Not just now, though. Having been underground for almost a week nonstop, he was gaunt, haggard, and hollow-eyed, his cheeks rough with scraggly beard, and he resembled somewhat the Jesus of popular imagination. A week underground was long, but not extremely so by supercaving standards, where stays of three weeks or more in the vast underground labyrinths were not unusual.
With three companions, he was halfway through the grueling, two-day climb back to the surface from the cave's deepest known point, something like 4,000 vertical feet and 7 miles from the entrance. The note and tape had been strung just before the expedition's Camp 2, where four others were staying. They explained to Stone what had happened. At about 1:30 p.m. that day, a caver from Indiana named Chris Yeager, twenty-five years old, had entered the cave with an older, more experienced man from New York, Peter Haberland. Yeager had been caving for just two years, and going into Cheve was,
for him, like a climber who had been on only small Vermont mountains suddenly tackling Everest. This is not a specious comparison. Experts affirm that exploring a supercave such as Cheve is like climbing Mount Everest--in reverse.
Not long after he arrived in camp, more experienced cavers nicknamed Yeager "the Kid." Seriously concerned about the younger man's safety, a veteran, elite cave explorer named Jim Smith sat Yeager down for what should have been a sobering, thirty-minute lecture: don't go into the cave without a guide, carry only a light daypack at first, learn the route in segments, get "acclimatized" to the underground world before going in for a long stay. The warnings fell on deaf ears. Yeager started his first trip with a fifty-five-pound pack, planning on a seven-day stay.
Yeager's problems began soon. Just three hours into the cave, he did not properly secure his rappel rack (a specialized metal device resembling a big paper clip with transverse bars, built for sliding down long, wet ropes with heavy loads in caves) to his climbing harness. As a result, he dropped it. The rappel rack is a critical piece of equipment for extreme cave exploration, probably second in importance only to lights. Without his, Yeager could not continue.
Yeager used his partner's rack to descend to the area where his had landed. Given that a rappel rack is...
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