Set in modern-day Houston, Texas, this is a funny and moving novel of voodoo, pregnancy, and family ties. While Toni sorts out the mess that Elena left behind, she must also come to terms with her childhood and with the supernatural and dangerous gift that she has inherited from her mother.

    And right after the organization had given him ""Not Just a send-off, a modern send-off...""an A-1 Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza of a funeral. They had also unwittingly put to rest a quarter of a million worth of heroin in Charlie's burial suit. And when Aloysius Eugene Engel, the organization's top man's right hand and reluctant grave digger finds the coffin empty it's the signal for a madcap series of events that almost make poor Aloysius a reluctant substitute for the corpse. Merriment, mayhem and a plot that really keeps you guessing...

    A famed scholar evokes the life of this complex culture on the eve of its extinction, when the Spanish arrived and conquered them--imprisoning Montezuma and strangling Atahualpa. "It is, without question, the most brilliant, the clearest and most readable portrayal of Aztec life available in any language."--The Observer.

    The newest play by the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Driving Miss Daisy.

    But six years later, when a skeletal Wiesenthal was liberated from the concentration camp at Mauthausen, he fully fathomed the crimes of the Nazis. Within days he had assembled a list of nearly 150 Nazi war criminals, the first of dozens of such lists he would make over a lifetime as a Nazi hunter. A hero in the eyes of many, Wiesenthal was also attacked for his unrelenting pursuit of the past, when others preferred to forget.For this new biography, rich in newsworthy revelations, historian and journalist Tom Segev has obtained access to Wiesenthal’s private papers and to sixteen archives, including records of the U.S., Israeli, Polish, and East German secret services. Segev is able to reveal the intriguing secrets of Wiesenthal’s life, including his stunning role in the capture of Adolf Eichmann, his relationship with Israel’s Mossad, his controversial investigative techniques, his unlikely friendships with Kurt Waldheim and Albert Speer, and the nature of his rivalry with Elie Wiesel.Segev’s challenge in writing this biography was Wiesenthal’s own complicated relationship to truth. Wiesenthal told many versions of his life, his suffering in the camps, and his involvement with the arrest of individual Nazis. Segev shows that in order to gain the information he sought and twist the arms of reluctant government figures, Wiesenthal needed to seem more influential than he really was.For two generations of Americans, Simon Wiesenthal was a Jewish superhero—depicted on film by Ben Kingsley and Laurence Olivier—and the muse for a Frederick Forsyth thriller. Now Segev demonstrates that the truth of Wiesenthal’s existence is as compelling as the fiction. Simon Wiesenthal is an unforgettable life of one of the great men of the twentieth century.

    in a rural western New York State. Dubbed the "Henry Ford of Natural History," by 1917 Craxton has become America's preeminent taxidermist. Into this magic box of a world-filled with eerily inanimate gibbons and bats, owls and peacocks, quetzals and crocodiles-wanders young Peg Griswood, daughter of Craxton's newest housekeeper. Part coming-of-age story, part gothic mystery, and part exploration of the intimate embrace between art and life, Joanna Scott's The Manikin is compulsively readable and beautifully written.

    But such simple actions are structured by complex relationships with our natural world. The contours of these relationships social, cultural, political, economic, and legal were established during America s first great period of urbanization in the nineteenth century, and Boston, one of the earliest cities in America, often led the nation in designing them. A richly textured cultural and social history of the development of nineteenth-century Boston, this book provides a new environmental perspective on the creation of America s first cities."Eden on the Charles" explores how Bostonians channeled country lakes through miles of pipeline to provide clean water; dredged the ocean to deepen the harbor; filled tidal flats and covered the peninsula with houses, shops, and factories; and created a metropolitan system of parks and greenways, facilitating the conversion of fields into suburbs. The book shows how, in Boston, different class and ethnic groups brought rival ideas of nature and competing visions of a city upon a hill to the process of urbanization and were forced to conform their goals to the realities of Boston s distinctive natural setting. The outcomes of their battles for control over the city s development were ultimately recorded in the very fabric of Boston itself. In Boston s history, we find the seeds of the environmental relationships that for better or worse have defined urban America to this day.

    Half-Japanese, adopted by African American parents, she returns to Tokyo, ostensibly to research her thesis on Japan's "sad, brutal reign of conformity." When she vanishes, Tom Hurley, who is half-Korean and half-white, is assigned to her case at the American embassy, as is local cop Kenzo Ota, who is 100 percent Japanese but deemed an outsider.

    It is the inside history of America’s inevitable wartime rise as a great power, written in wonderfully readable prose by White House speechwriter and prize-winning playwright Robert Sherwood.

    Like William Clarke Quantrill and "Bloody Bill" Anderson, Samuel Hildebrand was a proud Missouri bushwhacker. In this long out of print book, Hildebrand describes raids and executions his band of men carried out. He remained at the end of the war and unreconstructed rebel and fervent racist. Like many of his southern brethren who fought, he never owned slaves but kept a captured black man with him after the war. This self-serving but fascinating account is a valuable addition to the canon of Civil War literature. In it, Hildebrand claims that others have tried to tell his story but have gotten it wrong, so he has a notarized statement by prominent men included as verification of authenticity. Every memoir of the American Civil War provides us with another view of the catastrophe that changed the country forever. For the first time ever, this long-out-of-print book is available as an affordable, well-formatted book for e-readers and smartphones. Be sure to LOOK INSIDE or download a sample.

    He kept a day-by-day journal of his overland journey. Abbey provides a wealth of information about what it was like to travel overland by wagon in 1850.

    He spoke to his pregnant wife on the telephone before he began his evacuation after the South Tower fell. Sensing something ominous, Pasquale crouched down and huddled into a corner of the stairwell as the 110-story tower came crashing down around him. He survived the tower collapse and woke up in the open air hours later on The Pile, a stack of debris seven stories high. The firemen who rescued Pasquale shared his remarkable story of survival with the media, as did others who cared for him that day. His story became a myth, an urban legend, and an enigma that gave rise to much speculation. Here he tells his story in captivating detail of falling and "surfing' the collapse of the North Tower.Visit www.911surfer.com for more details.

    Army, the last to be deployed before the end of World War Two. Arriving in Europe in late 1944, they were immediately, and with very little battle experience, thrust into battle at St Vith. The Battle of St. Vith was part of the Battle of the Bulge, which began on December 16, 1944, and represented the right flank in the advance of the German 5th Panzer Army, toward the ultimate objective of Antwerp. The inexperienced American troops were faced with adverse weather conditions, difficult terrain and a desperate German opponent fighting for their lives and the quickly-disappearing hope of victory. The defense of St Vith is recognized as one the most important Allied victories of this period, driving the Germans away from their goal of Antwerp and halting the last great German offensive of the war. Compiled from records and first-hand accounts from the officers and soldiers of the 106th Division, Colonel Dupuy’s account of the final days of 1944 is a must-read for WW2 enthusiasts and fans of regimental histories. Colonel R. Ernest Dupuy (1887- 1976) was a soldier, newspaperman and military historian. He worked as a journalist in New York before enlisting in the army. Serving in both wars, he retired in 1947. Continuing his writing career, he specialized in writing military history, and authored or co-authored many books on the U.S. Army, West Point, and military affairs. St Vith: Lion in the Way was first published in 1949.

    He has been her only family. But now Scott too is dead--or so believe the local police and everyone in Arden's community. Arden, however, is convinced that Scott has staged his snowmobile accident and purposely disappeared. She will search until she finds him. As Arden obsessively continues her detective hunt, she is forced to examine her feelings of loss and isolation, and to finally realize that these feelings existed long before Scott's accident. Whether or not her brother reappears, where should Arden turn for the support that usually comes from family? The page-turning mystery leads to a heart-tugging conclusion that is at once hopeful and sad, piercing and satisfying.

    Drawing on a wealth of contemporary documents, Mary Beth Norton tells the story of the Pinion clan, whose two-generation record of theft, adultery, and infanticide may have made them our first dysfunctional family. She reopens the case of Mistress Ann Hibbens, whose church excommunicated her for arguing that God had told husbands to listen to their wives. And here is the enigma of Thomas, or Thomasine Hall, who lived comfortably as both a man and a woman in 17th century Virginia. Wonderfully erudite and vastly readable, Founding Mothers & Fathers reveals both the philosophical assumptions and intimate domestic arrangements of our colonial ancestors in all their rigor, strangeness, and unruly passion."An important, imaginative book. Norton destroys our nostalgic image of a 'golden age' of family life and re-creates a more complex past whose assumptions and anxieties are still with us."--Raleigh News and Observer