He also loves that the X-treme Games blow into the area for a month every year, bringing with them hundreds of athletes. Ecco Rasmussen loves boarding; he needs it in fact. He knows he'll never make it to the big times but as long as he can get on his board and go he doesn't care. The only fly in the ointment is his manager Blake Dobbs. The man is possessive and mean and believes he owns Ecco. Given the way he's isolated Ecco and holds all the money, not to mention the way he treats the boarder, Ecco figures maybe he does. When Henry and Ecco meet at the Branchberry Games, it's lust at first sight. An injury on Ecco's qualifying run gives them the opportunity to spend some quality time alone together at Henry's home, away from the crowds and out from under Blake's thumb. Will lust have the opportunity to turn into love? More importantly, what will Blake do when he finds out?

    No one visits and they never speak to each other. Until the day Zohra Dasgupta, a young postwoman, delivers an extraordinary letter - from a woman claiming to be the sister they thought had been murdered fifty years earlier.So begins an intriguing tale: is this woman an impostor? If she's not, what did happen all those years ago? And why are the brothers such recluses? Then there's Zohra. Once a bright, outgoing teenager, the only friend she will see from her schooldays is laidback Crispin, who has roped her in to the restoration of an old railway line on his father's land. For which, as it happens, they need some carriages . . .With wry humour and a cast of characters as delightful as they are damaged, Clare Morrall tells an engrossing story of past misdeeds and present reckoning, which shows that for all the wrong turnings we might take, sometimes it is possible to retrace our steps.

    When boys in his shapeshifter village Eladir get their fangs, they must endure a coming-of-age rite called the Choosing, so they can take on their animal form. The rite is performed on the full moon, but the trouble is the Choosing involves having sex with a girl, and Jerath’s only interested in boys. Even if he manages to somehow get through the rite, he doesn’t know if he’ll ever find a mate in his village, where opposite-sex couples are the norm.Even worse, he may miss the rite altogether after raiders attack his home and take several young men prisoner. Jerath will need the help of warriors if he’s to free the captive shapeshifters, so with his best friend, Serim, he flees south to find aid. Along the way, they meet Meren, a handsome warrior whose attraction to Jerath is instant and very much returned. But with the next full moon approaching and available time for the prisoners to undergo the Choosing running out, Jerath’s love life is far from his only worry.

    Unfortunately, that means spending Christmas without his temperamental partner, Benji, an author who prefers to stay home in Scotland, where his muse never lets him down. But before leaving, Nolan prepares a rather unusual Advent calendar for Benji. As Benji unlocks each little gift, he realizes that it’s hard to be creative, even in Scotland, when his heart has jumped the pond and taken his inspiration with it.

    These signify a place's authenticity, in contrast to the bland standardization of the suburbs and exurbs. But as Sharon Zukin shows in Naked City, the rapid and pervasive demand for authenticity -- evident in escalating real estate prices, expensive stores, and closely monitored urban streetscapes -- has helped drive out the very people who first lent a neighborhood its authentic aura: immigrants, the working class, and artists. Zukin traces this economic and social evolution in six archetypal New York areas -- Williamsburg, Harlem, the East Village, Union Square, Red Hook, and the city's community gardens -- and travels to both the city's first IKEA store and the World Trade Center site. She shows that for followers of Jane Jacobs, this transformation is a perversion of what was supposed to happen. Indeed, Naked City is a sobering update of Jacobs' legendary 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Like Jacobs, Zukin looks at what gives neighborhoods a sense of place, but argues that over time, the emphasis on neighborhood distinctiveness has become a tool of economic elites to drive up real estate values and effectively force out the neighborhood "characters" that Jacobs so evocatively idealized. "This is scholarship with its boots on the ground, challenging us to look at the familiar in a new light." --The Boston Globe "A highly readable narrative...a revelation, no matter where you live." --The Austin Chronicle "Provocative." --San Francisco Chronicle

    They had packed up their family in Vancouver, BC, and moved to Delft to experience the biking city as residents rather than as visitors. A year earlier they had become unofficial ambassadors for Dutch cities with the publication of their first book Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality.   In Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives, Melissa and Chris Bruntlett chronicle their experience living in the Netherlands and the benefits that result from treating cars as visitors rather than owners of the road. They weave their personal story with research and interviews with experts and Delft locals to help readers share the experience of living in a city designed for people.   In the planning field, little attention is given to the effects that a “low-car” city can have on the human experience at a psychological and sociological level. Studies are beginning to surface that indicate the impact that external factors—such as sound—can have on our stress and anxiety levels. Or how the systematic dismantling of freedom and autonomy for children and the elderly to travel through their cities is causing isolation and dependency.   In Curbing Traffic, the Bruntletts explain why these investments in improving the built environment are about more than just getting from place to place more easily and comfortably. The insights will help decision makers and advocates to better understand and communicate the human impacts of low-car cities: lower anxiety and stress, increased independence, social autonomy, inclusion, and improved mental and physical wellbeing.   The book is organized around the benefits that result from thoughtfully curbing traffic, resulting in a city that is: child-friendly, connected, trusting, feminist, quiet, therapeutic, accessible, prosperous, resilient, and age-friendly.   Planners, public officials, and citizen activists should have a greater understanding of the consequences that building for cars has had on communities (of all sizes). Curbing Traffic provides relatable, emotional, and personal reasons why it matters and inspiration for exporting the low-car city.

    Paperback by General James Gavin is the story of air combat in World War II.

    Kai is a Japanese-American anthropology student who believes romance and marriage are empty societal constructs. When they meet by chance in San Francisco, they're swept away by their mutual attraction. But if they want a relationship to survive, they both must learn to see past their differences to accept each other for who they are.

    This landmark enterprise of the 1950s literally changed the face of America for eternity. In 1919, Dwight D. Eisenhower needed sixty-two days to travel from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. Now, eighty years and 42,500 miles of paved roads later, the trip can be made in less than seventy-two hours.Divided Highways is the fascinating history behind the efforts to make cement trails across America, told through the stories of the people who dreamed up, mapped out, paved -- and even tried to stop -- the interstate highways. Popular historian Tom Lewis details man's triumph over nature in an engaging, sweeping style. Award-winning film director Ken Burns says: He tells the story of how we get from point A to point B in America. And just as our lives should be, Lewis makes the journey more interesting and meaningful than the destination.

    Seth is sixteen, in the closet, and about ready to give up on life. But for his brother Jory, making an unexpected visit home from college, nothing is more trouble than it's worth to keep his little brother alive.Author and Editor royalties from this book will go to The Trevor Project.

    How did this happen and what can we do about it? Everyone needs and deserves housing. But today our homes are being transformed into commodities, making the inequalities of the city ever more acute. Profit has become more important than social need. The poor are forced to pay more for worse housing. Households are subjected to eviction and foreclosure. Communities face gentrification and displacement. And the benefits of decent housing are only available for those who can afford it. In Defense of Housing is the definitive statement by leading urban planner Peter Marcuse and sociologist David Madden. They diagnose the causes and consequences of the housing crisis and detail the need for progressive alternatives. Minor policy changes will not solve they problem, they argue. Rather, the housing crisis has deep political and economic roots, and therefore requries a radical response.

    He supplements his disability checks with money made writing romance novels under a female pseudonym, ironic as he has grown very nervous around women since a certain suicide bomber. When he meets Gabriel Herne, legless phone psychic, the sparks startle him. It's everything he's written about and never believed.Swept into a whirlwind romance, Sean has to learn about his newfound bisexuality and his lover's pagan faith at the same time. And when he has a religious experience of his own, he discovers everything changes in its time, just like the Wheel of the Year.NOTE: This novel contains erotic scenes of hot men celebrating pagan holidays in an accurate depiction of the Wheel of the Year.

    Although it sounds nice, who would understand the hardships that come with it?And thus, he should simply leave, conceal his identity, and disappear into the depth of this flourishing mortal world.

    Now it lives only in history and in myth. Since 1945, the territory has been divided between Poland and Russia, stretching from the border between Russia and Lithuania in the east and south, and through Poland in the west. In Forgotten Land, Max Egremont offers a vivid account of this region and its people through the stories of individuals who were intimately involved in and transformed by its tumultuous history, as well as accounts of his own travels and interviews he conducted along the way.Forgotten Land is a story of historical identity and character, told through intimate portraits of people and places. It is a unique examination of the layers of history, of the changing perceptions and myths of homeland, of virtue and of wickedness, and of how a place can still overwhelm those who left it years before.

    Not one soul survived the attack. Feng Xiao, Second Commandant of the House of Blades, was ordered by the Emperor to investigate the matter in person.On the distant border, a storm brewed as major forces gathered from all sides in Liugong town. The strong rubbed shoulders with the strong; the skilled crossed paths with the skilled.Here, the ever-successful Second Commandant Feng ran into a wall for the first time – all because of a feeble Taoist priest with ailing health.Some things would never be known if no fights were ever picked. Only through their skirmishes did Feng Xiao realise that this sick bastard seemed to have way more aliases and personas than he himself ever did.(-novelupdates.com)