NSHipster: Obscure Topics in Cocoa & Objective C


Mattt Thompson - 2013
    In cultivating a deep understanding and appreciation of Objective-C, its frameworks and ecosystem, one is able to create apps that delight and inspire users. Combining articles from NSHipster.com with new essays, this book is the essential guide for modern iOS and Mac OS X developers.

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews


Geoff Dyer - 2011
    All the while he has been writing some of the wittiest, most incisive criticism we have on an astonishing array of subjects—music, literature, photography, and travel journalism—that, in Dyer's expert hands, becomes a kind of irresistible self-reportage.Otherwise Known as the Human Condition collects twenty-five years of essays, reviews, and misadventures. Here he is pursuing the shadow of Camus in Algeria and remembering life on the dole in Brixton in the 1980s; reflecting on Richard Avedon and Ruth Orkin, on the status of jazz and the wonderous Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, on the sculptor ZadKine and the saxophonist David Murray (in the same essay), on his heroes Rebecca West and Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski, on haute couture and sex in hotels. Whatever he writes about, his responses never fail to surprise. For Dyer there is no division between the reflective work of the critic and the novelist's commitment to lived experience: they are mutually illuminating ways to sharpen our perceptions. His is the rare body of work that manages to both frame our world and enlarge it.

Double Life: The Shattering Affair between Chief Judge Sol Wachtler and Socialite Joy Silverman


Linda Wolfe - 1994
    He was the top justice of New York’s highest court. She was a stunning socialite and his wife’s step-cousin. In 1993 Sol Wachtler was convicted of blackmail and extortion against Joy Silverman, his former mistress. How did a respected jurist and one of the most prominent men in America end up serving time in prison? Linda Wolfe starts at the beginning—from Wachtler’s modest Brooklyn upbringing through his courtship and marriage to Joan Wolosoff, the only child of a wealthy real estate developer.   Joy Fererh was three and a half when her father walked out. When she and Sol met, he was fifty-five and nearing the pinnacle of his legal career. She was a thirtysomething stay-at-home mother who, with Sol’s help, made a career for herself as a Republican Party fundraiser. They kept their affair a secret—until an explosive mix of sex, power, betrayal, and prescription-drug abuse set the stage for the tabloid headlines of the decade.

Tamora Pierce


Donna Dailey - 2006
    Biography of Tamora Pierce, who has written twenty-three young adult fantasy novels, in addition to many short stories, articles, and radio plays.

Mr. Suicide


Nicole Cushing - 2015
    How many times in your life have you wanted to slap someone? Really, literally strike them? You can’t even begin to count the times. Hundreds. Thousands. You’re not exaggerating. You’re not engaging in… whatchamacallit? Hyperbole? You’re not engaging in hyperbole. Maybe the impulse flashed through your brain for only a moment, like lightning, when someone tried to skip ahead of you in line at the cafeteria. Hell, at more than one point in your life you’ve wanted to kill someone; really, literally kill someone. That’s not just an expression. Not hyperbole. Then it was gone and replaced by the civilized thought: You can’t do that. Not out in public. But you’ve had the thought… From Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author Nicole Cushing comes Mr. Suicide, a novel of the Great Dark Mouth.

Cook Like a Local: Flavors That Can Change How You Cook and See the World: A Cookbook


Chris Shepherd - 2019
    In his restaurant, he calls out the names of the cooks--Vietnamese, Korean, Indian, and others--who have inspired him, and in his book, he teaches you how to work with those flavors and cultures with respect and creativity. Houston's culinary reputation as a steakhouse town was put to rest by Chris Shepherd, the Robb Report's Best Chef of the Year. A cook with insatiable curiosity, he's trained not just in fine-dining restaurants but in Houston's Korean grocery stores, Vietnamese noodle shops, Indian kitchens, and Chinese mom-and-pops. His food, incorporating elements of all these cuisines, tells the story of the city, and country, in which he lives. An advocate, not an appropriator, he asks his diners to go and visit the restaurants that have inspired him, and in this book he brings us along to meet, learn from, and cook with the people who have taught him.The recipes include signatures from his restaurant--favorites such as braised goat with Korean rice dumplings, or fried vegetables with caramelized fish sauce. The lessons go deeper than recipes: the book is about how to understand the pantries of different cuisines, how to taste and use these flavors in your own cooking. Organized around key ingredients like soy, dry spices, or chiles, the chapters function as master classes in using these seasonings to bring new flavors into your cooking and new life to flavors you already knew. But even beyond flavors and techniques, the book is about a bigger story: how Chris, a son of Oklahoma who looks like a football coach, came to be "adopted" by these immigrant cooks and families, how he learned to connect and share and truly cross cultures with a sense of generosity and respect, and how we can all learn to make not just better cooking, but a better community, one meal at a time.

The Enders Hotel: A Memoir


Brandon R. Schrand - 2008
    But to one family who bought it as an attempt to renew themselves it was home, a place they desperately tried to hold on to and yet, after seventeen years of living there, the very place from which they wanted to escape. Growing up under its leaking roof, Brandon R. Schrand watched a cast of broken characters pass through the hotel doors—an alcoholic artist, a forgotten boxing champ, an ex-con, a homeless family—and tried to find his own identity among those revolving faces. Haunted by a father he had never seen, he tested the faces of those drifters for familiarity. Winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, The Enders Hotel reveals the promises and warnings of western boomtown life—stories of alcoholism, murder, betrayal, hope, and finally, redemption.

Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life


Hermione Lee - 2013
    Her novels were short, spare masterpieces, self-concealing, oblique and subtle. She won the Booker Prize for her novel Offshore in 1979, and her last work, The Blue Flower, was acclaimed as a work of genius. The early novels drew on her own experiences – a boat on the Thames in the 1960s; the BBC in war time; a failing bookshop in Suffolk; an eccentric stage-school. The later ones opened out to encompass historical worlds which, magically, she seemed to possess entirely: Russia before the Revolution; post-war Italy; Germany in the time of the Romantic writer Novalis. Fitzgerald’s life is as various and as cryptic as her fiction. It spans most of the twentieth century, and moves from a Bishop’s Palace to a sinking barge, from a demanding intellectual family to hardship and poverty, from a life of teaching and obscurity to a blaze of renown. She was first published at sixty and became famous at eighty. This is a story of lateness, patience and persistence: a private form of heroism. Loved and admired, and increasingly recognised as one of the outstanding novelists of her time, she remains, also, mysterious and intriguing. She liked to mislead people with a good imitation of an absent-minded old lady, but under that scatty front were a steel-sharp brain and an imagination of wonderful reach. This brilliant account – by a biographer whom Fitzgerald herself admired – pursues her life, her writing, and her secret self, with fascinated interest.

The Crystal Spheres


David Brin - 1984
    Instead of being late-comers -- might humanity have come upon the scene too early? This haunting tale was voted one of the "most beautiful of the eighties." Winner of the 1985 Hugo Award.

Seven Principles of Good Government


Gary E. Johnson - 2012
    He made headlines during his tenure as governor for supporting school vouchers, a freeze on all taxes, real cuts in government agency funding and the decriminalization of marijuana. In 2012, he is running for President of the United States on the Libertarian Party ticket. He will be campaigning aggressively through the fall in all 50 states.

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: An American Woman's Life


Linda Wagner-Martin - 2004
    Using cultural and gender studies as contexts, Wagner-Martin brings new information to the story of the Alabama judge's daughter who, at seventeen, met her husband-to-be, Scott Fitzgerald. Swept away from her stable home life into Jazz Age New York and Paris, Zelda eventually learned to be a writer and a painter; and she came close to being a ballerina. An evocative portrayal of a talented woman's professional and emotional conflicts, this study contains extensive notes and new photographs.

As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art


Rebecca Solnit - 2001
    The organic world, to Solnit, gives rise to the social, political, and philosophical landscapes we inhabit. As Eve Said to the Serpent skillfully weaves the natural world with the realm of art--its history, techniques, and criticism--to offer a remarkable compendium of Solnit's research and ruminations.The nineteen pieces in this book range from the intellectual formality of traditional art criticism to highly personal, lyrical meditations. All are distinguished by Solnit's vivid, original style that blends imaginative associations with penetrating insights. These thoughts produce quirky, intelligent, and wryly humorous content as Solnit ranges across disciplines to explore nuclear test sites, the meaning of national borders, deserts, clouds, and caves--as well as ideas of the feminine and the sublime as they relate to our physical and psychological terrains.Sixty images throughout the book display the work of the contemporary artists under discussion, including landscape photographers, performance artists, sculptors, and installation artists. Alongside her text, Solnit's gallery of images provides a vivid excursion into new ways of perceiving landscape, bodies, and art. Animals and the human body appear together with space and terra firma as Solnit reconfigures the blurred lines that define nature.

Dakshin: Vegetarian Cuisine from South India


Chandra Padmanabhan - 1992
    Filled with tempting recipes and beautiful photographs, Dakshin: Vegetarian Cooking from South India presents the finest cooking from the region. Drawn from the states of Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh, and the union territory of Pondicherry, the recipes in this vegetarian cookbook bring traditional South Indian cooking within reach of any cook in any kitchen. From sambars and rasams, to cooling desserts and sweet treats, Dakshin takes you through the elements of South Indian meals, including chutneys and pickles, rice dishes, pakoras, payasams, poriyals, kootus, bondas, and vadais. With its use of fresh produce and a healthy and balanced approach to eating, Dakshin is an ideal Indian cookbook for today's lifestyle — for vegetarians and non-vegetarians alike — and the perfect introduction to South Indian Cuisine.

Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season


David Shields - 1999
    In Black Planet, David Shields explores how, in a predominantly black sport, white fans--including especially himself--think about and talk about black heroes, black scapegoats, black bodies.During the 1994-95 NBA season, Shields went to the Seattle SuperSonics' home games; watched their away games on TV; listened to interviews and call-in shows; talked, or tried to talk, to players, coaches, and agents; attended charity events; corresponded with members of the Sonics newsgroup on the Web. He kept a journal and over the next few years transformed that journal into this book, which is focused sharply on white spectators' relationship to black athletes, in particular Shields' own identification with Gary Payton, the team's language-besotted point-guard.Through the apparently simple vehicle of a daily diary running from November 5, 1994 to May 5, 1995, and ranging from a dispute between two fans over the sale of a ticket to the national media frenzy surrounding Charles Barkley's jest "That's why I hate white people," David Shields confronts the nature of racism (including his own)--the otherness in ourselves that we project onto strangers. He takes us via sports passion deep into the American racial divide.From the Hardcover edition.

Choices: Taking Control of Your Life and Making It Matter


Melody Beattie - 2002
    “Melody Beattie gives you the tools to discover the magnificence and splendor of your being.” — Deepak Chopra, author of Jesus and Buddha “Beattie understands being overboard, which helps her throw bestselling lifelines to those still adrift.” — Time magazineFrom the New York Times bestselling author of Codependent No More, The Language of Letting Go, Finding Your Way Home, Journey to the Heart, and Stop Being Mean to Yourself, comes Choices: powerful wisdom and insight about how to make the best choices in our lives from the author who revolutionized how we look at relationships.