aNobii: News from [person name]'s shelf

Wire, the Truth Be Told

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 7:10:07 PST

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. . All in the game. West Baltimore TraditionalTHE WIRE has been widely hailed as thegreatest television series of all time.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 7:52:24 PST

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A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover -- these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its we ...

The Great Gatsby

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 3:48:57 PST

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Considered one of the all-time great American works of fiction, Fitzgerald's glorious yet ultimately tragic social satire on the Jazz Age encapsulates the exuberance, energy and decadence of an era. After the war, the mysterious Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire pursues wealth, riches and the lady he lost to another man with stoic determination. He buys a mansion across from her house and throw ...

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 8:20:13 PST

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In his second collection of stories, as in his first, Carver's characters are peripheral people--people without education, insight or prospects, people too unimaginative to even give up. Carver celebrates these men and women.

Nice Work

Tue, 3 Jan 2012 8:28:48 PST

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When Vic Wilcox (MD of Pringle's engineering works) meets English lecturer Dr Robyn Penrose, sparks fly as their lifestyles and ideologies collide head on. What, after all, are they supposed to learn from each other? But in time both parties make some surprising discoveries about each other's worlds - and about themselves.

Small World

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 20:52:31 PST

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Philip Swallow, Morris Zapp, Persse McGarrigle and the lovely Angelica are the jet-propelled academics who are on the move, in the air and on the make in David Lodge's satirical Small World. It is a world of glamorous travel and high excitement, where stuffy lecture rooms are swapped for lush corners of the globe, and romance is in the air...

Changing Places

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 4:19:12 PST

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When Phillip Swallow and Professor Morris Zapp participate in their universities' Anglo-American exchange scheme, the Fates play a hand, and each academic finds himself enmeshed in the life of his counterpart on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Nobody is immune to the exchange: students, colleagues, even wives are swapped as events spiral out of control. And soon both sun-drenched Euphoric Stat ...

1Q84

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 1:39:39 PST

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Book Two of 1Q84 ends with Aomame standing on the Metropolitan Expressway with a gun between her lips. She has come tantalisingly close to meeting her beloved Tengo only to have him slip away at the last minute. The followers of the cult leader she assassinated are determined to track her down and she has been living in hiding, completely isolated from the world. However, Tengo has also resolved ...

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 6:18:35 PST

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"Belongs in the category ... of enduring American literature." Saturday Review Fair and long-legged, independent and articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person no mean feat for a black woman in the '30s. Janie's quest for identity takes her through three marriages and into a journey back to her roots.

1Q84

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 2:07:10 PST

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As I Lay Dying

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 2:51:45 PST

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As I Lay Dying is Faulkner's harrowing account of the Bundren family's odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Told in turns by each of the family members--including Addie herself--the novel ranges in mood from dark comedy to the deepest pathos. This edition follows the text of As I Lay Dying as corrected in 1985. It includes an editor's note by Noel Polk ...

Rebecca

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 23:22:52 PST

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"Last Night I Dreamt I Went To Manderley Again." So the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter remembered the chilling events that led her down the turning drive past ther beeches, white and naked, to the isolated gray stone manse on the windswept Cornish coast. With a husband she barely knew, the young bride arrived at this immense estate, only to be inexorably drawn into the life of the first Mrs. de Win ...

The Call of the Weird

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 6:25:16 PST

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For ten years Louis Theroux has been making programmes about off-beat characters on the fringes of US society. Now he revisits America and the people who have most fascinated him to try to discover what motivates them, why they believe the things they believe, and to find out what has happened to them since he last saw them. Along the way Louis thinks about what drives him to spend so much time a ...

A Companion to Marx's Capital

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 21:29:20 PST

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"My aim is to get you read a book by Karl Marx called Capital, Volume I, and to read it on Marx's own terms..." The biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression has generated a surge of interest in Marx's work in the effort to understand the origins of our current predicament. For nearly forty years, David Harvey has written and lectured on Capital, becoming one of the world's foremost ...

Capital. Volume 1

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 7:13:28 PST

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Capital, one of Marx's major and most influential works, was the product of thirty years close study of the capitalist mode of production in England, the most advanced industrial society of his day. This new translation of Volume One, the only volume to be completed and edited by Marx himself, avoids some of the mistakes that have marred earlier versions and seeks to do justice to the literary qu ...

Bowling Alone

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 7:12:51 PST

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Few people outside certain scholarly circles had heard the name Robert D Putnam before 1995. But then this self-described "obscure academic" hit a nerve with a journal article called "Bowling Alone". Suddenly he found himself invited to Camp David, his picture was in People magazine, and his thesis at the centre of a raging debate. In a nutshell, he argued that civil society was breaking down as ...

Cannery Row

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 2:10:07 PST

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John Steinbeck's paean to the Monterey County of his youth, "Cannery Row" contains an introduction by Susan Shillinglaw in "Penguin Modern Classics". In the din and stink that is "Cannery Row" a colourful blend of misfits - gamblers, whores, drunks, bums and artists - survive side by side in a jumble of adventure and mischief. Lee Chong, the astute owner of the well-stocked grocery store, is also ...

Introducing Marxism

Sat, 13 Aug 2011 22:42:36 PST

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Was Marx himself a 'Marxist'? Was his visionary promise of socialism betrayed by Marxist dictatorship? Is Marxism inevitably totalitarian? What did Marx really say? "Introducing Marxism" provides a fundamental account of Karl Marx's original philosophy, its roots in 19th century European ideology, his radical economic and social criticism of capitalism that inspired vast 20th century revolutions. ...

Cider with Rosie

Mon, 8 Aug 2011 16:16:39 PST

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Laurie Lee's evocative account of childhood in the sleepy Gloucestershire village of Slad retains its atmosphere of innocence in this BBC Radio 4 full-cast production, dramatised on radio for the first time. Recorded on location in Gloucestershire, it stars Niamh Cusack as Laurie s mother and Tim McInnerney as Laurie. This new dramatisation of Lee's 1959 classic is bursting with bustle and charm. ...

The White Masai

Wed, 3 Aug 2011 6:36:04 PST

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American Gods

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 22:55:42 PST

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Days before his release from prison, Shadow’s wife, Laura, dies in a mysterious car crash. Numbly, he makes his way back home. On the plane, he encounters the enigmatic Mr Wednesday, who claims to be a refugee from a distant war, a former god and king of America. Together they embark on a profoundly strange journey across the heart of the USA, whilst all around them a storm or preternatural and e ...

Super Sad True Love Story

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 23:34:08 PST

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In a very near future a functionally illiterate America is about to collapse. But don't tell that to poor Lenny Abramov, proud author of what may well be the world's last diary. Despite his job at an outfit called 'Post-Human Services', which attempts to provide immortality for its super-rich clientele, death is clearly stalking this cholesterol-rich morsel of a man. And why shouldn't it? Lenny's ...

Violence

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 18:12:26 PST

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Zizek argues that the physical violence we see is often generated by the systemic violence that sustains our political and economic systems. With the help of eminent philosophers like Marx, Engel and Lacan, as well as frequent references to popular culture, he examines the real causes of violent outbreaks like those seen in Israel and Palestine and in terrorist acts around the world. Ultimately, ...

Slaughterhouse-Five

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 22:14:54 PST

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Slaughterhous-Five is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.

To Kill a Mockingbird

Sun, 5 Jun 2011 7:59:00 PST

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The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award winning film, also a classic. Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill A Moc ...

Tears That Made the Clyde

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 14:26:59 PST

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Dying for Water

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 14:26:20 PST

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The Feminine Mystique

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 22:44:55 PST

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When Betty Friedan produced "The Feminine Mystique" in 1963, she could not have realized how the discovery and debate of her contemporaries' general malaise would shake up society. Victims of a false belief system, these women were following strict social convention by loyally conforming to the pretty image of the magazines, and found themselves forced to seek meaning in their lives only through ...

Discipline and Punish

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 23:43:10 PST

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In the Middle Ages there were gaols and dungeons, but punishment was for the most part a spectacle. The economic changes and growing popular dissent of the 18th century made necessary a more systematic control over the individual members of society, and this in effect meant a change from punishment, which chastised the body, to reform, which touched the soul. Foucault shows the development of the ...

The Body and Social Theory

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 3:57:15 PST

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Praise for the First Edition: `Essential to any collection of work on the body, health and illness, or social theory' - Choice `Sophisticated … and acutely perceptive of the importance of the complex dialectic between social institutions, culture and biological conditions' - Times Higher Education Supplement `Chris Shilling has done us all a splendid service in bringing together and illu ...

Social Geography

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 3:56:11 PST

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Embodied Geographies

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 3:47:18 PST

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The lifecourse can be seen as a journal, and this book charts our progress, revealing how we cope witht he rough passages, the crises points that can be termed 'rites of passage' . Life crises involve learning about our bodies, about the places we live in, and about our identity. They challenge us to draw on our reserves of adaptability and can transform how we live our lives and how we see ourse ...

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 15:04:35 PST

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She was a schoolmistress with a difference. Proud, cultured, romantic, her ideas were progressive, even shocking. And when she decided to transform a group of young girls under her tutelage into the 'creme de la creme' of Marcia Blaine school, no one could have predicted the outcome.

Palo Alto

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 9:07:54 PST

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These linked stories, stark, vivid, and disturbing, are a compelling portrait of liveson the rough fringes of youth.

How the West was Lost

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 6:28:01 PST

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"How the West was Lost" charts how over the last 50 years the most advanced and advantaged countries of the world have squandered their dominant position through a sustained catalogue of fundamentally flawed economic policies. It is these decisions that, along the way, have resulted in an economic and geo-political see-saw, which is now poised to tip in favour of the emerging world. By forging cl ...

Man's Search for Meaning

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 7:45:01 PST

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The Communist Manifesto

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 19:35:15 PST

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"All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned...Working men of all countries, Unite!" This book truly changed the world, inspiring millions to revolution. Over 150 years after its publication, The Communist Manifesto continues to be the perfect starting point for anyone who feels that society could be better - and that there are alternatives to the injustices of capitalism. T ...

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Sun, 6 Feb 2011 7:56:39 PST

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This title includes a reading guide. Toru Okada's cat has disappeared and this has unsettled his wife, who is herself growing more distant every day. Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has started receiving. As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking be ...

1933 Was a Bad Year

Sun, 9 Jan 2011 9:29:46 PST

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Of Mice and Men

Thu, 6 Jan 2011 0:07:30 PST

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Sunset Song

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 5:00:11 PST

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Devastated by the First World War, Chris Guthrie must confront life as a widowed single mother while managing her recently destroyed farm. Sunset Song is a powerful testament to Scotland's agricultural past and life at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Amerika

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 4:59:54 PST

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Karl Rossman has been banished by his parents to America, following a family scandal. There, with unquenchable optimism, he throws himself into the strange experiences that lie before him as he slowly makes his way into the interior of the great continent. Although Kafka's first novel (begun in 1911 and never finished), can be read as a menacing allegory of modern life, it is also infused with a ...

A Meaningful Life

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 7:01:42 PST

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The State of Africa

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 6:33:44 PST

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Africa is forever on our TV screens, but the bad-news stories (famine, genocide, corruption) massively outweigh the good (South Africa). Ever since the process of decolonialisation began in the mid-1950s, and arguably before, the continent has appeared to be stuck in a process of irreversible decline. Constant war, improper use of natural resources and misappropriation of revenues and aid monies ...

One Day

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 6:17:51 PST

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15th July 1988. Emma and Dexter meet on the night of their graduation. Tomorrow they must go their separate ways. So where will they be on this one day next year? And the year after that? And every year that follows?

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 6:17:33 PST

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The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 6:16:11 PST

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The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories contains ten of Hemingway's most acclaimed and popular works of short fiction. Selected from Winner TakeNothing, Men Without Women, and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories, this collection includes "The Killers," the first of Hemingway's mature stories to be accepted by an American periodical; the autobiographical "Fathers and Sons," which ...

Arguments against G8

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 6:13:07 PST

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'One of the most important books in recent years. I cannot recommend it highly enough.' --Robert W. McChesney

Fight Club

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 6:12:42 PST

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An underground classic since its first publication in 1996, Fight Club is now recognized as one of the most original and provocative novels published in this decade. Chuck Palahniuk's darkly funny first novel tells the story of a godforsaken young man who discovers that his rage at living in a world filled with failure and lies cannot be pacified by an empty consumer culture. Relief for him and h ...

Survivor

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 6:12:10 PST

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From the author of the cult sensation Fight Club (now a major motion picture starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter) comes Survivor. "A turbo-charged, deliciously manic satire of contemporary American life." --Newsday "The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage," according to the "been there, done that" wisdom of Tender Branson, last surviving mem ...

Choke

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 6:11:30 PST

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Victor Mancini has devised a complicated scam to pay for his mother's hospital care: pretend to be choking on a piece of food in a restaurant and the person who 'saves you' will feel responsible for you for the rest of their lives. Multiply that a couple of hundred times and you generate a healthy flow of cheques, week in, week out. Victor also works at a theme park with a motley group of losers, ...

Ultimatum

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 6:10:49 PST

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With tension escalating on almost every page and building to an astonishing climax,Matthew Glass's visionary and deeply unsettling thriller steers us into the ...

Human Traces

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 6:04:50 PST

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As young boys both Jacques Rebiere and Thomas Midwinter become fascinated with trying to understand the human mind. As psychiatrists, their quest takes them from the squalor of the Victorian lunatic asylum to the crowded lecture halls of the renowned Professor Charcot in Paris; from the heights of the Sierra Madre in California to the plains of unexplored Africa. As the concerns of the old centur ...

McMafia

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 5:49:00 PST

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When an appalling and seemingly inexplicable murder shattered the peace of a quiet English suburban street it revealed the extent to which organised crime has now seeped into our lives, often without our knowledge. In his groundbreaking book Misha Glenny takes us on a journey through the new world of international organised crime, from gun runners in Ukraine to money launderers in Dubai, by way o ...

The World According to Garp

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 0:04:49 PST

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This is the life and times of T. S. Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields — a feminist leader ahead of her times. This is the life and death of a famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a world of sexual extremes — even of sexual assassinations. It is a novel rich with "lunacy and sorrow"; yet the dark, violent events of the story do not undermine a comedy both ribald and robust. In mo ...

Screen Burn

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:54:09 PST

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Cruel, acerbic, impassioned, gleeful, frequently outrageous and always hilarious, Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn collects the best of the much-loved Guardian Guide columns in one easy-to-read-on-the-toilet package. Sit back and roar as Brooker rips mercilessly into Simon Cowell, Big Brother, Trinny and Susannah, Casualty, Davina McCall, Michael Parkinson...and almost everything else on television. ...

Dawn of the Dumb

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:54:07 PST

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Polite, pensive, mature, reserved ...Charlie Brooker is none of these things and less. Rude, unhinged, outrageous, and above all funny, "Dawn of the Dumb" is essential reading for anyone with a brain and a spinal cord. And hands for turning the pages. Picking up where his hilarious "Screen Burn" left off, "Dawn of the Dumb" collects the best of Charlie Brooker's recent TV writing, together with u ...

Psychogeography

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:53:47 PST

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Gang Leader for a Day

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:52:14 PST

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This book presents the story of one man's commitment to cross the line, tounderstand how the people he is studying live day to day.

Freakonomics. A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:51:35 PST

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The Corner

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:50:09 PST

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The crime-infested intersection of West Fayette and Monroe Streets is well-known - and cautiously avoided - by most of Baltimore. But this notorious corner's 24-hour open-air drug market provides the economic fuel for a dying neighborhood. David Simon, an award-winning author and crime reporter, and Edward Burns, a 20-year veteran of the urban drug war, tell the chilling story of this desolate cr ...

Homicide

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:49:51 PST

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The scene is Baltimore. Twice every three days another citizen is shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned to death. At the centre of this hurricane of crime is the city's homicide unit, a small brotherhood of men confronted by the darkest of American visions. David Simon was the first reporter ever to gain unlimited access to a homicide unit, and his remarkable book is both a compelling account of casework ...

The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:48:38 PST

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Troubled Environmental Health Officer Danny Skinner is engaged on a quest to uncover what he refers to as 'the bedroom secrets of the master chefs'. He regards the unraveling of this classified information as the key to learning genetic facts about himself and the crippling compulsions that threaten to wreck his young life. The ensuing journey takes him from Europe's festival city of Edinburgh to ...

Mayor Of Castro Street, The : The Life A

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:38:43 PST

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. .This is the definitive biography of Harvey Milk: the man whose personal life, publiccareer, and cold-blooded assassination mirrored the dramatic emergence ...

Sophie's World

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:33:14 PST

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When 14-year-old Sophie encounters a mysterious mentor who introduces her to philosophy, mysteries deepen in her own life. Why does she keep getting postcards addressed to another girl? Who is the other girl? And who, for that matter, is Sophie herself? To solve the riddle, she uses her new knowledge of philosophy, but the truth is far stranger than she could have imagined. A phenomenal worl ...

A View from the Bridge and All My Sons

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:32:26 PST

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Powerful, passionate and frighteningly relevant, the drama of Arthur Miller deals in the hard currency of 'social' realism and tragedy. "All My Sons" (1947), which brought Miller his first major success, is a merciless exposure of wartime profiteering and the capitalist ethic. The ideological conflict of father and son is a compelling one, and points to the way Miller develops his later drama, wh ...

Much Ado About Nothing

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:28:01 PST

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Set in a courtly world of masked revels and dances, this play turns on the archetypal story if a lady falsely accused of unfaithfulness, spurned by her bridegroom, and finally vindicated and reunited with him. Villainy, schemes, and deceit threatens to darken the brilliant humor and sparkling wordplay--but the hilarious counterplot of a warring couple, Beatrice and Benedick, steals the scene as t ...

The Tempest

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:25:20 PST

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Romeo and Juliet

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:24:58 PST

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Heartfelt

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:23:11 PST

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A lifelong Hibs fan takes on the challenge that TV's "Faking It" and "Wifeswap" were too scared to even contemplate as he tries to follow his team's hated rivals Hearts for an entire season. With gritty realism and riveting detail, Aidan Smith demonstrates the importance of loyalty in being a fan. Going undercover, he swaps his colours, drinks in rivals' pubs and even sings their songs, trying to ...

Pale Fire

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:08:47 PST

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The American poet John Shade is dead; murdered. His last poem, Pale Fire, is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical, Ki ...

Lolita

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:06:42 PST

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Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, out of love, 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets'. This seduction is one of many dimensions in Nabokov's dizzying masterpiece, which is suffused with a savage humour and rich, elaborate verbal textures.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:04:23 PST

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The Birth of the Clinic

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:03:13 PST

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In this remarkable book Michel Foucault, one of the most influential thinkers of recent times, calls us to look critically at specific historical events in order to uncover new layers of significance. In doing so, he challenges our assumptions not only about history, but also about the nature of language and reason, even of truth. The scope of such an undertaking is vast, but by means of his uniq ...

The End of Poverty

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:01:51 PST

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Jeffrey Sachs draws on his remarkable 25 years' experience to offer a thrilling and inspiring vision of the keys to economic success in the world today. Marrying vivid storytelling with acute analysis, he sets the stage by drawing a conceptual map of the world economy and explains why, over the past 200 years, wealth and poverty have diverged and evolved across the planet, and why the poorest nat ...

The White Man's Burden

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:01:29 PST

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We are all aware of the extreme hunger and poverty that afflict the world's poor. We hear the facts, see the images on television, buy the T-shirt and are moved as individuals and governments to dig deep into our pockets. Yet what happens to all this aid? Why after 50 years and $2.3 trillion are there still children dying for lack of twelve cents medicine? Why are there so many people still livin ...

The Bottom Billion

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:00:00 PST

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In this elegant and impassioned synthesis from one of the world's leading experts on Africa and poverty, economist Paul Collier writes persuasively that although nearly five billion of the world's people are beginning to climb from desperate poverty and to benefit from globalization's reach to developing countries, there is a "bottom billion" of the world's poor whose countries, largely immune to ...

Dead Aid

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 22:59:40 PST

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There is no doubt: we want to help. The well-documented horrors of extreme poverty around the world have created a moral imperative that people have responded to in their millions. Yet the poverty persists. At a time of unprecedented global prosperity, children are starving to death. Are we not being generous enough? Or is the problem somehow insoluble, an inevitable outcome of historical circums ...

Things Fall Apart

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 22:59:22 PST

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Okonowo is the greatest warrior alive. His fame has spread like a bushfire in West Africa and he is one of the most powerful men of his clan. But he also has a fiery temper. Determined not to be like his father, he refuses to show weakness to anyone - even if the only way he can master his feelings is with his fists. When outsiders threaten the traditions of his clan, Okonowo takes violent action ...

Lanark

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:50:31 PST

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"Lanark", a modern vision of hell, is set in the disintegrating cities of Unthank and Glasgow, and tells the interwoven stories of Lanark and Duncan Thaw. A work of extraordinary imagination and wide range, its playful narrative techniques convey a profound message, both personal and political, about humankind's inability to love, and yet our compulsion to go on trying. Widely recognised as a mod ...

Poor Things

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:49:44 PST

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Set in and around Glasgow and the Mediterranean of the early 1880s, this novel describes the triangle of affection between two doctors and a clever woman who has been created - not born - at the age of 25. This book won the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and "The Guardian" Fiction Prize.

The Thirty-nine Steps

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:49:01 PST

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Adventurer Richard Hannay has just returned from South Africa and is thoroughly bored with his London life - until a murder is committed in his flat, just days after the victim had warned him of an assassination plot that could bring Britain to the brink of war. An obvious suspect for the police and an easy target for the killers, Hannay goes on the run in his native Scotland, where he must use a ...

First As Tragedy, Then As Farce

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:43:46 PST

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From the tragedy of 9/11 to the farce of the financial meltdown-but underlying both is the irrationality of global capitalism.

The Bell Jar

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:43:32 PST

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The Bell Jar chronicles the breakdown of the brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful Esther Greenwood, a woman slowly going under -- maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's demise with such intensity that the character's insanity becomes completely real, even rational -- as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Suc ...

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:43:15 PST

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In 1982, having sold his jazz bar to devote himself to writing, Murakami began running to keep fit. A year later, he'd completed a solo course from Athens to Marathon, and now, after dozens of such races, he reflects upon the influence the sport has had on his life and on his writing. Equal parts travelogue, training log, and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers his four-month preparation f ...

Kafka on the Shore

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:42:26 PST

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Kafka on the Shore follows the fortunes of two remarkable characters. Kafka Tamura runs away from home at fifteen, under the shadow of his father's dark prophesy. The aging Nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his pleasantly simplified life suddenly turned upside down. Their parallel odysseys are enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and ...

Norwegian Wood

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:41:50 PST

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When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between t ...

The Grapes of Wrath

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:35:44 PST

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Arcadia

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:34:07 PST

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Arcadia is a brilliantly inventive play that moves back and forth between centuries, populated by a varied and vastly entertaining cast of characters who discuss such topics as the nature of truth and time, the difference between the classical and the romantic temperament, and the disruptive influence of sex on our orbits in life-according to the author, "the attraction which Newton left out.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:33:57 PST

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Two minor characters from "Hamlet" offer a novel view of the melancholy Dane.

The Devil's Disciple

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:33:26 PST

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Product Description The Devil's Disciple A Melodrama in Three Acts; Like several of Shaw's early plays, The Devil's Disciple first produced in 1897 and published in his collection Three Plays for Puritans in 1901 takes an existing popular theatrical form, in this case melodrama, and adapts it to serve Shaw's dramatic purposes. In the preface to Three Plays for Puritans he writes: It does not con ...

Brave new world

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:33:01 PST

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Generation X

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:28:59 PST

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Andy, Dag and Claire have been handed a society beyond their means. Twentysomethings, brought up with divorce, Watergate and Three Mile Island, and scarred by the 80s fallout of yuppies, recession, crack and Ronald Reagan, they represent the new generation- Generation X. Fiercely suspicious of being lumped together as an advertiser's target market, they have quit dreary careers and cut themselves ...

JPod

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:28:26 PST

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Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workers whose surnames end in 'J' are bureaucratically marooned in JPod. JPod is a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive Vancouver game design company. The six workers daily confront the forces that define our era: global piracy, boneheaded marketing staff, people smuggling, the rise of China, marijuana grow-ops, Jeff Probst, and the ashes of the 19 ...

Tender is the Night

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:26:48 PST

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Subterraneans

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 20:53:27 PST

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Maggie Cassidy

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 20:52:10 PST

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On the Road

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 20:51:43 PST

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On The Road, the most famous of Jack Kerouac's works, is not only the soul of the Beat movement and literature, but one of the most important novels of the century. Like nearly all of Kerouac's writing, On The Road is thinly fictionalised autobiography, filled with a cast made of Kerouac's real life friends, lovers and fellow travellers. Narrated by Sal Paradise, one of Kerouac's alter-egos, ...

The Dharma Bums

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 20:50:23 PST

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Last Night in Twisted River

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 20:34:12 PST

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In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable's girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County - to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto - pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logge ...