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All Quiet on the Western Front
Brief Summary
This is the testament of Paul Bäumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army of World War I.
These young men become enthusiastic soldiers, but their world of duty, culture, and progress breaks into pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches.
Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the hatred that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against one another – if only he can come out of the war alive.
ISBN:9780449213940
Author:Erich Maria Remarque
A Moment of Weakness
Brief Summary
As children, Jade Conner and Tanner Eastman were best friends—until scandal drove them apart. Then, one golden summer, they find each other again. Through endless days they share their hearts and souls and dreams of forever. Then, in a moment of weakness, they make a decision that will tear them apart for nearly a decade.
In their own separate corners of the country, Jade and Tanner have become fighters for religious freedom. Now Jade’s unfaithful husband is determined to destroy her in a custody battle that will rock the nation and shake people’s understanding of faith and freedom.
Could Jade lose her only child because of her faith? Only one man can help her in her darkest hour. And only one old woman knows the secret about that summer and the truth that can set them all free.
ISBN:9781576736166
Author:Karen Kingsbury
50 Great Myths of Human Evolution Und...
Brief Summary
50 Great Myths of Human Evolution uses common misconceptions to explore basic theory and research in human evolution and strengthen critical thinking skills for lay readers and students.
• Examines intriguing—yet widely misunderstood—topics, from general ideas about evolution and human origins to the evolution of modern humans and recent trends in the field
• Describes what fossils, archaeology, and genetics can tell us about human origins
• Demonstrates the ways in which science adapts and changes over time to incorporate new evidence and better explanations
• Includes myths such as "Humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs;” "Lucy was so small because she was a child;” "Our ancestors have always made fire;” and "There is a strong relationship between brain size and intelligence”
• Comprised of stand-alone essays that are perfect for casual reading, as well as footnotes and references that allow readers to delve more deeply into topics
ISBN:9780470673928
Author:John H. Relethford
40001 Best Baby Names
Brief Summary
Nothing is more personal than a name and the naming of a baby is taken very seriously by all parents-to-be.
With an extensive, easy-to-use alphabetical listing of every boy's and girl's name imaginable, 40,001 Best Baby Names, unique among the plethora of baby name books on the market, also includes fun, individualized lists, such as: good names for race-car drivers, names that spawn nasty nicknames, names for children who are handsome or beautiful, nerd/dork/wallflower names, death row names, names for smart kids and much, much more! With 40,001 baby names to choose from, in an accessible, enjoyable format, 40,001 best Baby Names is the essential resource for all parents-to-be.
ISBN:9780091900007
Author:Diane Stafford
Between Past and Future
Brief Summary
Arendt’s penetrating observations of the modern world, based on a profound knowledge of the past, constitute a major contribution to political philosophy.
In this book she describes the perplexing crises which modern society faces as a result of the loss of meaning of the traditional key words of politics: justice, reason, responsibility, virtue, and glory.
Through a series of eight exercises, she shows how we can redistill once more the vital essence of these concepts.
ISBN:9780143104810
Author:Hannah Arendt
Defend the Realm The Authorized Histo...
Brief Summary
An unprecedented publishing event: to mark the centenary of its foundation, the British Security Service, MI5, has for the first time opened its archives to an independent historian. The book reveals the precise role of the Security Service in twentieth-century British history, from its foundation by Captain Kell of the British Army in October 1909, through two world wars, up to and including its present roles in counterespionage and counterterrorism.
The book describes how MI5 has been managed, what its relationship has been with government, where it has triumphed, and where it has failed. In all of this no restriction has been placed on the judgments made by the author.
Defend the Realm also adds significantly to our knowledge of many celebrated events and notorious individuals and definitively lays to rest a number of persistent myths. Above all, it shows the place of this previously extremely secretive organization within the United Kingdom. Few books could make such an immediate and extraordinary increase to our understanding of British history over the past century.
ISBN:9780307263636
Author:Christopher Andrew
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
Brief Summary
Great Britain's geopolitical role has undergone many changes over the last four centuries. Once a maritime superpower and ruler of half the world, Britain now occupies an isolated position as an economically fragile island often at odds with her European neighbors.
Lawrence James has written a comprehensive, perceptive and insightful history of the British Empire.
Spanning the years from 1600 to the present day, this critically acclaimed book combines detailed scholarship with readable popular history.
ISBN:9780312169855
Author:Lawrence James
White Tears by Hari Kunzru
Brief Summary
A feverish new tale from the bestselling author of The Impressionist: two ambitious young musicians are drawn into a dark underworld, haunted by the ghosts of a repressive past
Two twenty-something New Yorkers: Seth, awkward and shy, and Carter, the trust fund hipster. They have one thing in common: an obsession with music. Rising fast on the New York producing scene, they stumble across an old blues song long forgotten by history -- and everything starts to unravel. Carter is drawn far down a path that allows no return, and Seth has no choice but to follow his friend into the darkness.
Trapped in a game they don't understand, Hari Kunzru's characters move unsteadily across the chessboard, caught between black and white, performer and audience, righteous and forsaken. But we have been here before, oh so many times over, and the game always ends the same way.
Electrifying, subversive and wildly original, White Tears is a ghost story and a love story, a story about lost innocence and historical guilt.
This unmissable novel penetrates the heart of a nation's darkness, encountering a suppressed history of greed, envy, revenge and exploitation, and holding a mirror up to the true nature of America today.
ISBN:9780451493699
Author:Hari Kunzru
The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr So...
The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, a vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators and also of heroism, a Stalinist anti-world at the heart of the Soviet Union where the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair.
The work is based on the testimony of some two hundred survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn's own eleven years in labor camps and exile. It is both a thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power.
This edition has been abridged into one volume at the author's wish and with his full co-operation.
Killers of the Flower Moon The Osage ...
Brief Summary
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.
Then, one by one, they began to be killed off. One Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, watched as her family was murdered. Her older sister was shot. Her mother was then slowly poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more Osage began to die under mysterious circumstances.
In this last remnant of the Wild West—where oilmen like J. P. Getty made their fortunes and where desperadoes such as Al Spencer, "the Phantom Terror,” roamed – virtually anyone who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll surpassed more than twenty-four Osage, the newly created F.B.I. took up the case, in what became one of the organization’s first major homicide investigations. But the bureau was then notoriously corrupt and initially bungled the case.
Eventually the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including one of the only Native American agents in the bureau. They infiltrated the region, struggling to adopt the latest modern techniques of detection. Together with the Osage they began to expose one of the most sinister conspiracies in American history.
A true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history.
ISBN:9780385534253
Author:David Grann
The Power of One
Brief Summary
In 1939, as Hitler casts his enormous, cruel shadow across the world, the seeds of apartheid take root in South Africa. There, a boy called Peekay is born.
His childhood is marked by humiliation and abandonment, yet he vows to survive and conceives heroic dreams, which are nothing compared to what life actually has in store for him.
He embarks on an epic journey through a land of tribal superstition and modern prejudice where he will learn the power of words, the power to transform lives and the power of one.
ISBN:9780345410054
Author:Bryce Courtenay
Palace of Treason Dominika Egorova Tw...
Brief Summary
From the bestselling, Edgar Award–winning author of the "terrifically good” (The New York Times) Red Sparrow, a pulse-pounding novel about star-crossed Russian agent Dominika Egorova and CIA’s Nate Nash in a desperate race to the finish.
Captain Dominika Egorova of the Russian Intelligence Service (SVR) has returned from the West to Moscow and the Center, the headquarters of her service. She finds things worse than when she left. She despises the men she serves, the oligarchs, and crooks, and thugs of Putin’s Russia. What no one knows is that Dominika is working for CIA as Washington’s most sensitive penetration of SVR and the Kremlin.
Complicating the mortal risks Dominika must take is the fact that she is in love with her CIA handler, Nate Nash, a lust that is as dangerous to both of them as committing espionage in Moscow. Dominika’s life is further complicated when Russian President Putin casts ice-blue eyes in her direction. As she expertly dodges exposure, Dominika deals with a murderously psychotic boss, survives an Iranian assassination attempt, and tries to rescue an arrested double agent—and thwart Putin’s threatening flirtations. These things never end well.
ISBN:9781405920834
Author:Jason Matthews
Down and Out in Paris and London
Brief Summary
This unusual fictional account - in good part autobiographical - narrates without self-pity and often with humor the adventures of a penniless British writer among the down-and-out of two great cities.
The Parisian episode is fascinating for its expose of the kitchens of posh French restaurants, where the narrator works at the bottom of the culinary echelon as dishwasher, or plongeur.
In London, while waiting for a job, he experiences the world of tramps, street people, and free lodging houses. In the tales of both cities we learn some sobering Orwellian truths about poverty and society.
ISBN:9780156262248
Author:George Orwell
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
Brief Summary
Howard Belsey, a Rembrandt scholar who doesn't like Rembrandt, is an Englishman abroad and a long-suffering professor at Wellington, a liberal New England arts college. He has been married for thirty years to Kiki, an American woman who no longer resembles the sexy activist she once was.
Their three children passionately pursue their own paths: Levi quests after authentic blackness, Zora believes that intellectuals can redeem everybody, and Jerome struggles to be a believer in a family of strict atheists. Faced with the oppressive enthusiasms of his children, Howard feels that the first two acts of his life are over and he has no clear plans for the finale. Or the encore.
Then Jerome, Howard's older son, falls for Victoria, the stunning daughter of the right-wing icon Monty Kipps, and the two families find themselves thrown together in a beautiful corner of America, enacting a cultural and personal war against the background of real wars that they barely register. An infidelity, a death, and a legacy set in motion a chain of events that sees all parties forced to examine the unarticulated assumptions which underpin their lives.
How do you choose the work on which to spend your life? Why do you love the people you love? Do you really believe what you claim to? And what is the beautiful thing, and how far will you go to get it?
Set on both sides of the Atlantic, Zadie Smith's third novel is a brilliant analysis of family life, the institution of marriage, intersections of the personal and political, and an honest look at people's deceptions. It is also, as you might expect, very funny indeed.
ISBN:9780143037743
Author:Zadie Smith
In the Company of Cheerful Ladies
Brief Summary
Mma Ramotswe's normally unshakable composure is rattled when a visitor forces her to confront a secret from her past.
In the newest addition to the universally beloved No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, the charming and ever-resourceful Precious Ramotswe finds herself overly beset by problems. She is already busier than usual at the detective agency when added to her concerns are a strange intruder in her house on Zebra Drive and the baffling appearance of a pumpkin.
And then there is Mma Makutsi, who decides to treat herself to dance lessons, only to be partnered with a man who seems to have two left feet. Nor are things running quite as smoothly as they usually do at Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. Mma Ramotswe’s husband, the estimable Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, is overburdened with work even before one of his apprentices runs off with a wealthy woman. But what finally rattles Mma Ramotswe’s normally unshakable composure is a visitor who forces her to confront a secret from her past. . . .
All this unfolds against the sunlit background of Mma Ramotswe’s beloved homeland, Botswana–a land of empty spaces, echoing skies, and an endless supply of soothing bush tea.
ISBN:9780375422713
Author:Alexander McCall Smith
John Crows Devil
Brief Summary
This stunning debut novel tells the story of a biblical struggle in a remote Jamaican village in 1957. With language as taut as classic works by Cormac McCarthy, and a richness reminiscent of early Toni Morrison, Marlon James reveals his unique narrative command that will firmly establish his place as one of today's freshest, most talented young writers.
In the village of Gibbeah--where certain women fly and certain men protect secrets with their lives--magic coexists with religion, and good and evil are never as they seem. In this town, a battle is fought between two men of God.
The story begins when a drunkard named Hector Bligh (the "Rum Preacher") is dragged from his pulpit by a man calling himself "Apostle" York. Handsome and brash, York demands a fire-and-brimstone church, but sets in motion a phenomenal and deadly struggle for the soul of Gibbeah itself. John Crow's Devil is a novel about religious mania, redemption, sexual obsession, and the eternal struggle inside all of us between the righteous and the wicked.
ISBN:9781888451825
Author:Marlon James
Katherine Carlyle by Rupert Thomson
Brief Summary
Katherine Carlyle is Rupert Thomson’s breakthrough novel. Written in the beautifully spare, lucid, and cinematic prose Thomson is known for, and powered by his natural gift for storytelling, it uses the modern techniques of IVF to throw new light on the myth of origins. It is a profound and moving novel about identity, the search for personal meaning, and how we are loved.
Unmoored by her mother’s death and feeling her father to be an increasingly distant figure, Katherine Carlyle abandons the set course of her life and starts out on a mysterious journey to the ends of the world. Instead of going to college, she disappears, telling no one where she has gone.
What begins as an attempt to punish her father for his absence gradually becomes a testing ground of his love for her, a coming-to-terms with the death of her mother, and finally the mise-en-scène for a courageous leap to true empowerment.
ISBN:9781590517383
Author:Rupert Thomson
Letters to a Young Poet
Brief Summary
In 1903, a student at a military academy sent some of his verses to a well-known Austrian poet, requesting an assessment of their value. The older artist, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), replied to the novice in this series of letters — an amazing archive of remarkable insights into the ideas behind Rilke's greatest poetry.
The ten letters reproduced here were written during an important stage in Rilke's artistic development, and they contain many of the themes that later appeared in his best works.
The poet himself afterwards stated that his letters contained part of his creative genius, making this volume essential reading for scholars, poetry lovers, and anyone with an interest in Rilke, German poetry, or the creative impulse.
ISBN:9780486422459
Author:Rainer Maria Rilke
Despots Accomplice Donald Trumps Atta...
Brief Summary
For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the world is steadily becoming less democratic. The true culprits are dictators and counterfeit democrats. But, argues Klaas, the West is also an accomplice, inadvertently assaulting pro-democracy forces abroad as governments in Washington, London and Brussels chase pyrrhic short-term economic and security victories.
Friendly fire from Western democracies against democracy abroad is too high a price to pay for a myopic foreign policy that is ultimately making the world less prosperous, stable and democratic.
The Despot's Accomplice draws on years of extensive interviews on the frontlines of the global struggle for democracy, from a poetry-reading, politician-kidnapping general in Madagascar to Islamist torture victims in Tunisia, Belarusian opposition activists tailed by the KGB, West African rebels, and tea-sipping members of the Thai junta. Cumulatively, their stories weave together a tale of a broken system at the root of democracy's global retreat.
ISBN:9780190903237
Author:Brian Klaas
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
Brief Summary
Paul Kennedy’s international bestseller is a sweeping account of five hundred years of fluctuating economic muscle and military might.
Kennedy’s masterwork begins in the year 1500, at a time of various great centers of power including Minh China, the Ottomans, the rising Mughal state, the nations of Europe. But it was the latter which, through competition, economic growth and better military organization, came to dominate the globe until challenged later by Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Now China, boosted by its own economic prowess, rises to the fore. Throughout this brilliant work, Kennedy persuasively demonstrates the interdependence of economic and military power, showing how an imbalance between the two has historically led to spectacular political disaster.
Erudite and brilliantly original, The Rise and fall of the Great Powers is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the politics of power.
ISBN:9780679720195
Author:Paul Kennedy
