Published annually since 1868, this compendium of information is the authoritative source for all your entertainment, reference, and learning needs. The 2015 edition of The World Almanac reviews the events of 2014 and will be your go-to source for any questions on any topic in the upcoming year. Praised as a ''treasure trove of political, economic, scientific and educational statistics and information'' by The Wall Street Journal, The World Almanac® contains thousands of facts that are unavailable publicly elsewhere. The World Almanac® and Book of Facts will answer all of your trivia needs—from history and sports to geography, pop culture, and much more. Features include:• The Year in Review: The World Almanac® takes a look back at 2014 while providing all the information you'll need in 2015. • 2014—Top 10 News Topics: The editors of The World Almanac® list the top stories that held their attention in 2014. • 2014—Election Results: Complete state-by-state results from 2014 midterm elections. • 2014—Year in Sports: Hundreds of pages of trivia and statistics that are essential for any sports fan, featuring complete coverage of the Men's World Cup in Brazil, 2014 World Series, Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, and much more. • 2014—Year in Pictures: Striking full-color images from around the world in 2014, covering news, entertainment, science, and sports. • World Almanac Editors' Picks: Time Capsule: The World Almanac® lists the items that most came to symbolize the year 2014, from news and sports to pop culture. • Offbeat News Stories: The World Almanac® editors found some of the strangest news stories of the year. • The World at a Glance: This annual feature of The World Almanac® provides a quick look at the surprising stats and curious facts that define the changing world today. • American Veterans: A Statistical Feature: After a year in which the performance of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs came under scrutiny, this statistical feature reveals important information on the health, employment, education, and future prospects of American veterans. • Health Care Statistics: Details about U.S. health care policy, including ongoing implementation of health care reform and the first statistics on federal and state health insurance marketplace enrollment, consumer costs, and much more. • World Almanac® Editors' Picks: Most Controversial Sports Team Owners: From Walter O’Malley to George Steinbrenner to Donald Sterling, the owners of sports teams have the power to change the game. The editors of The World Almanac® choose the most controversial franchise owners of past and present pro sports. • and much more.

    The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe reviews the unreliable and unverifiable--but highly significant--stories that have framed this Hollywood legend, all the while revealing the meanings behind the American myths that have made Marilyn what she is today.In incisive and passionate prose, cultural critic Sarah Churchwell uncovers the shame, belittlement, and anxiety that we bring to the story of a woman we supposedly adore and, in the process, rescues a Marilyn Monroe who is far more complicated and credible than the one we think we know.

    Nancy worked for Elvis from 1967 until his untimely death in 1977. Read her stories of what those years were like, of what the routines were at Graceland, and what it meant to be close to Elvis and his family on a daily basis. Read the sad account of her rushing upstairs, after a frantic call from Ginger Alden, and finding him on the bathroom floor. This book presents that picture, one that every Elvis fan will want to see."

    Michael Swango: a deadly doctor who took genuine pleasure in poisoning his patients and colleagues. Killed at least 60 in an intercontinental murder spree.The Lainz Angels of Death: four lethal nurses who turned the geriatric ward at an Austrian hospital into their private killing field. Gwendolyn Graham & Cathy Wood: lesbian lovers who got their kicks by suffocating the elderly patients under their care. Teet Haerm: police pathologist who spent his nights hunting prostitutes in Stockholm, Sweden. Haerm actually performed autopsies on many of the women he’d killed.Orville Lynn Majors: an ICU nurse with a deep-seated hatred for his elderly patients, Majors is suspected of over 100 murders.Kimberly Saenz: addicted to prescription drugs and with her life falling apart around her, Saenz struck out at helpless patients, injecting them with bleach.Donald Harvey: dubbed the “Angel of Death,” Harvey killed at least seventy hospital patients by suffocation, poisoning, drug overdoses and other methods.Thomas Neill Cream: London's East End had barely recovered from Jack the Ripper when Dr. Cream arrived on the scene, dispensing agonizing death with his special little pills.˃˃˃ Plus 10 more sensational true crime cases….Scroll up and grab a copy today. Book Series by Robert Keller Most of my works cover serial killers, while the “Murder Most Vile” series covers individual true crime stories. These are the main collections; American Monsters 50 American Serial Killers You’ve Probably Never Heard Of Murder Most Vile Human Monsters British Monsters Australian Monsters Canadian Monsters German Monsters Cannibal Killers Plus various other standalone books, including the The Deadly Dozen, which is available as a free download on Amazon, and Serial Killers Unsolved, which you can get for free when signing up to my mailing list. Robert Keller’s True Crime eBook Categories: Serial Killers True Crime Serial Killer Biographies Murder and Mayhem True Murder Cases Serial Killer Case Files True Crime Short Stories

    In her movies she projected a unique and fascinating persona — a child-woman who was both innocent and full of sexuality, someone men desired, but women found unthreatening. In real life, she was a beautiful and complex woman with deep insecurities, and who just wanted to be loved.Marilyn Monroe: Unseen Archives charts Marilyn's fascinating life, from her unhappy childhood, through her years as a superstar, to her tragic and untimely death in 1962. The collection of photographs documents the important events in her life: her early years, her movies, her marriages to baseball star Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller, her battles with the studio and her decline in health. They not only include movie stills and portraits, but also many other less well known pictures taken during her career. The photographs are accompanied by detailed and informative captions, which give a rounded portrait of one of the world's greatest movie stars.

    It also explores the real Woody Allen, the critically acclaimed filmmaker from the Upper East Side, and his amusing movie persona of a neurotic and lovable loser.Shrewdly and effectively deconstructing Woody, John Baxter's biography illuminates Allen's preoccupation with sex and mortality, his personal quirks and obsessions, his manipulation of celebrity, and his cinematic achievement as chronicler and court jester of Manhattan's intellectual elite."A splendidly written, exhaustive account and a major achievement" - The Observer"Astute and highly entertaining biography" - Daily Telegraph"A bracing corrective to the usual po-faced, sycophantic studies of the cult of Woody" - Mail on Sunday"Full of interesting information for cinema enthusiasts" - The Spectator"The saga [of Woody and Mia] makes compulsive reading" - The Guardian

    From studio archives and other primary source material never before published or made known, emerges an engrossing portrait, not only of Gable but of the bygone Hollywood in which he worked.

    Opening with his childhood in working-class Belfast, in a neighborhood of drinkers and dreamers, Branagh describes the fires of early ambition that drew him to the stage and to the plays of Shakespeare. At age twenty-four he founded his own actor's troupe with the goal of performing those plays; at twenty-eight, he directed and starred in the movie of "Henry V," the role that won him international fame. "Beginning" is crammed with colorful anecdotes and insights into the actor's and director's craft, including: Stories about Olivier, Gielgud, Finney, Jacobi, and a private audience with Prince Charles to research the role of Henry VAd-libbing Shakespeare when props are missingThe differences in performing on stage, television, and large-screen filmsA near-miss in landing the role of Mozart in the film "Amadeus": an actor's dream turned nightmareRaising millions from scratch and filming "Henry V" in seven weeksWritten with great humor and a natural storyteller's gift, "Beginning" is an intriguing book for anyone interested in theater and film.

    The most ambitious and personal account ever written about Hollywood's most gracious star-Audrey Hepburn by Barry Paris is a "moving portrayal" (The New York Times Book Review) that truly captures the woman who captured our hearts...With the insights of family and friends who never before spoke to a Hepburn biographer-and never-before-published photographs-Paris has created an in-depth portrait of the actress, from her childhood in Nazi-occupied Europe, through her legendary career, and into her UN ambassadorship.

    The best-selling banjo method in the world! Earl Scruggs's legendary method has helped thousands of banjo players get their start. The Revised and Enhanced Edition features more songs, updated lessons, and many other improvements. It includes everything you need to know to start playing banjo, including: a history of the 5-string banjo, getting acquainted with the banjo, Scruggs tuners, how to read music, chords, how to read tablature, right-hand rolls and left-hand techniques, banjo tunings, exercises in picking, over 40 songs, how to build a banjo, autobiographical notes, and much more! The book/audio version includes recordings of Earl Scruggs playing and explaining over 60 examples! Audio is accessed online using the unique code inside the book and can be streamed or downloaded. The audio files include PLAYBACK+, a multi-functional audio player that allows you to slow down audio without changing pitch, set loop points, change keys, and pan left or right.

    Now, more than thirty years later, he tells the story of how his own government failed him...For give hellish years, American soldier Frank Anton was held as a POW in Vietnam. Subject to disease, starvation, and physical and psychological torture, Anton and his fellow prisoners held out hope that the U.S. government would find and rescue them.When he was finally freed in 1973, Anton returned to the United States bruised and battered. And the most devastating blow of all had yet to even be struck. Upon his release, Anton and debriefed by the government and saw both aerial photographs of the prison camps where he was held and a close-us picture of himself walking the grueling Ho Chi Minh Trail. The government had known all along where and when Anton and his fellow soldiers were being held--and made no attempt to rescue them.now, in this harrowing first-person account and shocking expose, Frank Anton recounts his years as a POW and the aftermath--devoting his life to understanding why and how his own government left him and others to suffer and possibly die in the Vietnamese prison camps. And the answers he's uncovered will forever astound and disturb you.With eight pages of dramatic photosA main selection of the Military Book Club

    She and her husband, Harvey Loomis, used as their guidebooks medieval texts, including the first official biography of the saint, completed in 1229, just three years after he died. Theirs was not a spiritual journey but one based on admiration for a man whose legend continues to inspire and fascinate millions around the world. From Assisi–a small Umbrian town that now draws five million visitors a year, making it second only to Rome as an Italian pilgrimage destination–Saint Francis crisscrossed Italy for twenty years. And so too does the author travel through the “green heart” of Italy to such hill towns and cities as Siena, Bologna, Venice, Gubbio, and Rome, and to the many mountaintop Franciscan sanctuaries from La Verna and Le Celle di Cortona in Tuscany to the Rieti Valley.Along the way, Francke movingly depicts the many miracles Francis performed and draws us into the splendid beauty of the landscape that inspired the saint’s love for nature and regard for all living things. Unlike Francis, however, whose asceticism caused him to add ashes to his food to deaden its earthly pleasure, Francke and her husband indulge in the fabled Umbrian cuisine, from wild boar to the region’s famed black truffles, and the incomparable local wines.On the Road with Francis of Assisi embraces the spirit and person of its legendary subject, and invites the reader to marvel at his spiritual intensity and follow in his footsteps through the timeless beauty of Italy.From the Hardcover edition.

    I didn't know that if a girl broke your heart, another girl, virtuous at least in spirit, could mend it on the same night. And I didn't know that the enthalpy decrease in a converging passage could be transformed into jet kinetic energy if a divergent passage was added. The other boys discovered their own truths when we built our rockets, but those were mine."So begins Homer "Sonny" Hickam Jr.'s extraordinary memoir of life in Coalwood, West Virginia - a hard-scrabble little mining company town where the only things that mattered were coal mining and high school football and where the future was regarded with more fear than hope. Looking back after a distinguished NASA career, Hickam shares the story of his youth, taking readers into the life of the little mining town of Coalwood and the boys who would come to embody its dreams. In 1957 a young man watched the Soviet satellite Sputnik shoot across the Appalachian sky and soon found his future in the stars. 'Sonny' and a handful of his friends, Roy Lee Cook, Sherman O'Dell and Quentin Wilson were inspired to start designing and launching the home-made rockets that would change their lives forever.Step by step, with the help (and occasional hindrance) of a collection of unforgettable characters, the boys learn not only how to turn scrap into sophisticated rockets that fly miles into the sky, but how to sustain their dreams as they dared to imagine a life beyond its borders in a town that the postwar boom was passing by.A powerful story of growing up and of getting out, of a mother's love and a father's fears, Homer Hickam's memoir Rocket Boys proves, like Angela's Ashes and Russell Baker's Growing Up before it, that the right storyteller and the right story can touch readers' hearts and enchant their souls.A uniquely endearing book with universal themes of class, family, coming of age, and the thrill of discovery, Homer Hickam's Rocket Boys is evocative, vivid storytelling at its most magical.In 1999, Rocket Boys was made into a Hollywood movie named October Sky starring Chris Cooper, Jake Gyllenhaal and Laura Dern. October Sky is an anagram of Rocket Boys. It is also used in a period radio broadcast describing Sputnik 1 as it crossed the 'October sky'. Homer Hickam stated that "Universal Studios marketing people got involved and they just had to change the title because, according to their research, women over thirty would never see a movie titled Rocket Boys" so Universal Pictures changed the title to be more inviting to a wider audience. The book was later re-released with the name October Sky in order to capitalize on interest in the movie.

    John Miller, her biographer, has augmented Judi Dench's own photos with images depicting 50 years of distinguished work in film, theater, and television. From her childhood in York and her first work as an actress in her teens, to recent informal shots backstage and private family photos, these images show Judi Dench as never seen before.

    Personally, I think the eye-catching cover shot of me in my pajamas is reason enough. (By the way, those are my real kids on the cover, and yes, those are my actual ankles. No, I'm not retaining water.)What you're holding in your hands is a very funny and sometimes remarkably poignant look at fathers, not from the mother's point of view or the child's, but from the dad's side. Which is why it's called Tales from the Dad Side.It's filled with stories of what it's like to be a dad and a son, from a child's first day of kindergarten to the awkward sex talk and right up to the day the always-practical dad tries to pay for college with bonus miles. I was there for every landmark in my children's lives, except the day I was on the riding lawn mower and missed my son's first words, which my wife insists were “trust fund.”As children get older, the lessons of the father get harder, like teaching my son how to shave just as my father taught me, with a rusty double-edged safety razor. At the end of my dad's lesson, I emerged from the bathroom nicked and gouged, looking like an extra from a Quentin Tarantino film. My more civilized son is a Norelco man. With my high-school-age daughters, I promised them a day on which I'd take them anywhere and do anything with them they wanted, expecting them to ask for dinner and a movie; I was horrified when they told me they wanted all of us to get manicures and pedicures together. That was not the answer I was expecting; it was like discovering Lou Dobbs was an illegal alien.Over the course of raising three children, I have learned with my wife that fathers are different from mothers. That could be the greatest understatement since Noah turned on the Weather Channel and found out that the next forty days called for a 20 percent chance of light rain.The truth is, fatherhood is like Wikipedia: some parts based in fact, others just made up along the way. And while bookstores are filled with tales of mothers, their children and families, there are few from the dad's side. Now, as a public service, I'm doing my part to right this wrong.I sincerely hope this answers your questions. If perhaps it's not exactly your cup of tea, I bet you've got a father or mother in your life who'd like the stone-cold truth about dads. Besides, for the same money, you can either put three gallons of gas in your car or take home this book, which has a highway rating of 29 smiles an hour.Steve Doocy