Portland, Oregon homicide detective Catherine Hobbes finds herself in a deadly contest with an unpredictable adversary capable of changing her appearance and identity at will. Catherine must use everything she knows, as a homicide detective and as a woman, to stop a murderer who kills on impulse and with ease, and who becomes more efficient and elusive with each crime.
In The Second Assistant, readers across the country found a heroine they loved to love in Lizzie Miller, the smart and witty East Coast girl clinging for dear life to the bottom rung of the Hollywood ladder. But no more coffee runs and sorting thumbtacks by color for Lizzie; she's been promoted. As first assistant to Scott Wagner, now president of The Agency and one of Hollywood's premiere movers and shakers, she's making decisions and learning the ins and outs of the business. But unlike the other airhead assistants, she's not being wooed by the glamour and mystique of Lala Land. At least, that's what she tells herself. But with a fabulous boyfriend and visions of Harry Winston diamonds and a black AmEx dancing in her head, it is getting harder for Lizzie to keep her pumps firmly on the ground.
In The First Assistant, Clare Naylor and Mimi Hare have again joined forces to take a wry and hilarious look at the wheeling, dealing, schmoozing, and snubbing that make Hollywood the cutthroat capital of the world. Readers are hungry for more-and The First Assistant is just the romp into the red-carpet world that they crave.
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Cayce Pollard is a new kind of prophet - a world renowned "coolhunter" who predicts the hottest trends. While in London to evaluate the redesign of a famous corporate logo, she's offered a different assignment: find the creator of the obscure, enigmatic video clips being uploaded on the Internet - footage that is generating massive underground buzz worldwide.
Still haunted by the memory of her missing father - a Cold War security guru who disappeared in downtown Manhattan on the morning of September 11, 2001 - Cayce is soon traveling through parallel universes of marketing, globalization, and terror, heading always for the still point where the three converge. From London to Tokyo to Moscow, she follows the implications of a secret as disturbing - and compelling - as the twenty-first century promises to be ...
"Elegant, entrancing ... [Cayce's] globe-trotting gives Pattern Recognition its exultant, James Bond-ish edge..." ~The New York Times
"Gibson's usual themes are still intact - globalism, constant surveillance, paranoia, and pattern recognition - only with the added presence of real-world elements..." ~Booklist
It is 1642 in the Puritan town of Boston. Hester Prynne has been found guilty of adultery and has born an illegitimate child. In lieu of being put to death, she is condemned to wear the scarlet letter A on her dress as a reminder of her shameful act.
How is Animals in Translation different from every other animal book ever published?Animals in Translation is like no other animal book because of Temple Grandin. As an animal scientist and a person with autism, her professional training and personal history have created a perspective like no other thinker in the field, and this is her exciting, groundbreaking view of the intersection of autism and animal.
Unlike other well-known writers in the field of animal behavior -- When Elephants Weep by psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaleff Masson, How Dogs Think by psychologist and dog trainer Stanley Coren, and The Hidden Life of Dogs by anthropologist Elizabeth Marsha Thomas -- Temple Grandin is an animal scientist who has devoted the last 30 years of her life to the study of animals. Animals in Translation is the culmination of that life's work -- a book whose sweep is huge, including just about anything that gallops, trots, slithers, walks, or flies.
Temple Grandin is like no other author on the subject of animals because of her training and because of her autism; understanding animals is in her blood and her bones.
Animals in Translation ...
* redefines consciousness and argues that language is not a requirement for consciousness
* categorizes autism as a way station on the road from animals to humans
* explores the "Interpreter" in the normal human brain that filters out detail, creating an unintentional blindness that animals and autistics do not suffer from
* applies the autism theory of "hyper-specificity' to animals, meaning that there is no forest, only trees, trees, and more trees
* argues that the single worst thing you can do to an animal is make it feel afraid
* examines how humans and animals use their emotions, including to predict the future
* compares animals to autistic savants, in fact declaring that animals may be autistic savants, with special forms of genius that normal people cannot see
* explains that most animals have "super-human" skills: animals have animal genius
* reveals the abilities handicapped people, and animals, have that normal people don't
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Seventeen years ago, three women were killed, their bodies dumped in the wasteland of the L.A. River. The serial killer was never found, and the case was mysteriously closed. Now, all these years later, Detective Alex Delillo reopens the River Killer case to help solve her own brother's murder. Replete with a labyrinth-like plot, feverish suspense, and the simmering setting that is Los Angeles, Frost proves he can rival the best popular suspense authors in this, his second outing in a promising new series that Publishers Weekly called "a jaw-dropper that will leave readers clamoring for more."
Born of noble stock to parents marooned on the savage West African coast, the young lord Greystoke is orphaned in his first year of life. Named Tarzan by the great apes that raise him, he must learn the law of the jungle to survive. As he matures, his strength and agility develop to match those of the beasts that he is surrounded by, yet he realizes that he is different. He combines higher intelligence, superhuman strength and his jungle training to become the unconquerable Lord of the Jungle! But, when a group of civilized people invade his paradise, his life is changed forever, for with them is Jane. Jane is the first woman Tarzan has ever seen and he must have her as his own! How can this uncivilized ape-man hope to win her?
It spoils people's clothes to squeeze under a gate; the proper way to get in, is to climb down a pear tree, said Little Benjamin Bunny. Hear Peter Rabbit outwit old Mr. McGregor and Squirrel Nutkin come within a tail's length of being an owl's dinner. Listen as a family of mice save the kind tailor of Gloucester and how Peter and Benjamin Bunny battle a barn cat. Learn how two bad mice and one fierce rabbit are set on the road to honesty.
Edna Pontellier is married, twenty-eight, and at the cross road of her life. She is passionate and artistic, but has no one who understands her deep yearnings. But her life changes when she spends a summer away from her husband at a small coastal retreat.
Tarzan, after valiantly giving up the woman he loved to another man, leaves the deceitful world of civilization and returns to his beloved African jungle. Upon his return, buried in the mists of his Jungle, Tarzan discovers Opar, the city of gold, presumably the remains of Atlantis. But beneath it's tranquil façade, he encounters La, the high priestess of the Flaming God, brutal men, savage women and a blood stained altar of sacrifice. Tarzan must lead a tribe of primitive warriors through the ancient crypts if he wants to escape the grip of Opar!
Who is the devil you know?
Is it your lying, cheating ex-husband?
Your sadistic high school gym teacher?
Your boss who loves to humiliate people in meetings?
The colleague who stole your idea and passed it off as her own?
In the pages of The Sociopath Next Door, you will realize that your ex was not just misunderstood. He’s a sociopath. And your boss, teacher, and colleague? They may be sociopaths too.
We are accustomed to think of sociopaths as violent criminals, but in The Sociopath Next Door, Harvard psychologist Martha Stout reveals that a shocking 4 percent of ordinary people—one in twenty-five—has an often undetected mental disorder, the chief symptom of which is that that person possesses no conscience. He or she has no ability whatsoever to feel shame, guilt, or remorse. One in twenty-five everyday Americans, therefore, is secretly a sociopath. They could be your colleague, your neighbor, even family. And they can do literally anything at all and feel absolutely no guilt.
How do we recognize the remorseless? One of their chief characteristics is a kind of glow or charisma that makes sociopaths more charming or interesting than the other people around them. They’re more spontaneous, more intense, more complex, or even sexier than everyone else, making them tricky to identify and leaving us easily seduced. Fundamentally, sociopaths are different because they cannot love. Sociopaths learn early on to show sham emotion, but underneath they are indifferent to others’ suffering. They live to dominate and thrill to win.
The fact is, we all almost certainly know at least one or more sociopaths already. Part of the urgency in reading The Sociopath Next Door is the moment when we suddenly recognize that someone we know—someone we worked for, or were involved with, or voted for—is a sociopath. But what do we do with that knowledge? To arm us against the sociopath, Dr. Stout teaches us to question authority, suspect flattery, and beware the pity play. Above all, she writes, when a sociopath is beckoning, do not join the game.
It is the ruthless versus the rest of us, and The Sociopath Next Door will show you how to recognize and defeat the devil you know.
A detective faces a horrifying choice between love and duty in this hair-raising debut. Reminiscent of the best in today's suspense-from Jeffery Deaver's roller-coaster twists to James Patterson's cinematic pacing-Run the Risk introduces a blazing new talent in Scott Frost. As one of the writers behind Twin Peaks, he knows something about creating eerie and atmospheric tension. In this brilliant novel, he gives us a heroine who faces a challenge no one can ever be completely prepared for and a story as urgently and viscerally told as any in recent memory.
A Lively, indispensable, cutting-edge exploration of our stake in India's gambit to transform itself from a developing country into a global powerhouse in record time.
India is everywhere---Indian studios produce animated features and special effects for Hollywood movies; Indian software manages our health records; and Indian customer service centers answer our calls. A country of English speakers and a free-market democracy, with the youngest population on Earth, India is not only the fast-growing market for the next new thing but a source for the technological innovation that will drive the global economy.
Yet India is also in a race against time to bring the benefits of the twenty-first century to the 800 million Indians who live on less than $2 per day, and it must do so in a way that is environmentally sustainable and politically viable on a scale never before achieved. If India succeeds, it will not only save itself, it may save us all. If it fails, we will all suffer. As goes India, so goes the world.
Like China, Inc., Planet India will capture and catalyze the growing interest in this rising power. With in-depth research, interviews, and provocative analysis, Mira Kamdar offers a penetrating view of India and its cultural and economic impact on the United States and the world. From Bollywood to the Indian diaspora to India's effect on global politics, she reports on the people, companies, and places shaping the new India. Kamdar examines the challenges India faces while celebrating India's tremendous vitality and the opportunities this Asian democracy has to shape its own and all of our destinies.
The fascinating, often surprising story of how a simple black rock has altered the course of history. Prized as "the best stone in Britain" by Roman invaders who carved jewelry out of it, coal has transformed societies, powered navies, fueled economies, and expanded frontiers. It made China a twelfth-century superpower, inspired the writing of the Communist Manifesto, and helped the northern states win the American Civil War.
Yet the mundane mineral that built our global economy - and even today powers our electrical plants - has also caused death, disease, and environmental destruction. As early as 1306, King Edward I tried to ban coal (unsuccessfully) because its smoke became so obnoxious. Its recent identification as a primary cause of global warming has made it a cause célèbre of a new kind.
In this remarkable book, Barbara Freese takes us on a rich historical journey that begins three hundred million years ago and spans the globe. From the "Great Stinking Fogs" of London to the rat-infested coal mines of Pennsylvania, from the impoverished slums of Manchester to the toxic city streets of Beijing, Coal is a captivating narrative about an ordinary substance that has done extraordinary things - a simple black rock that could well determine our fate as a species.
"Engrossing and sometimes stunning... [a] strongly argued and thoroughly researched book... Coal, to borrow a phrase, is king."
- New York Times Book Review March 9, 2003
"Freese's writing is a bit like coal smooth and glinting, burning with a steady warmth...An intriguing, cautionary tale."
- Kirkus Reviews starred review, 11/15/02
The Uses of Enchantment weaves a spell in which the power of a young woman's sexuality, and her desire to wield it, has a devastating effect on all involved. The riveting cat-and-mouse power games between doctor and patient, and between abductor and abductee, are gradually, dreamily revealed, along with the truth about what actually happened in 1985. Heidi Julavits is in full command of her considerable gifts, and has crafted a dazzling narrative sure to garner her further acclaim as one of the best novelists working today.
Drawing from the oral storytelling traditions of India and Africa, Noble prizewinner Rudyard Kipling's vigorous, amusing tales offer imaginative answers to unanswered questions about animals and provide little pearls of wisdom. These classic tales, filled with playfully clever animals and people have entertained young and old alike for over a hundred years.