For Frederick and the inhabitants of his world, reincarnation is real, but people are always reborn in the country in which they died. Now Frederick seeks to pull off his greatest heist yet—enter a maximum security prison, where souls are trapped through reincarnation, and assemble the greatest criminal team that has ever lived. But for Frederick, the heist is just the beginning of a plan centuries in the making: a plan of revenge for unforgivable crimes committed a millennium before. And in this world, even death cannot keep Frederick from success.

    Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, the Summer Solstice, Nick Joaquin, Cave and Shadows, May Day Eve, the Woman Who Had Two Navels. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: The A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, known also as A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino: An Elegy in Three Scenes is a literary play written in English by Filipino National Artist for Literature and one of the Philippines best postwar author, poet, and playwright Nick Joaquin in 1950. It was described as Joaquins most popular play, as the "most important Filipino play in English," and as probably the best-known Filipino play Apart from being regarded also as the national play of the Philippines because of its popularity, it also became one of the important reads in English classes in the Philippines. Joaquins play was described by Anita Gates, a reviewer from New York Times, as an "engaging, well plotted metaphor for the passing of Old Manila." Set in the Filipino world of pre-World War II Intramuros of Old Manila in October 1941, the play explores the many aspects of Philippine high society by telling the story of the Marasigan sisters, Candida and Paula, and their father, the painter Don Lorenzo Marasigan. Due to an artistic drought on Don Lorenzo's part, the family has to make ends meet by relying on the financial support provided by their brother Manolo and sister Pepang, who were urging them to sell the house. Later on, they also had to take a male boarder, in the person of Tony Javier. Don Lorenzo, who refused to sell, donate, or even exhibit his self-portrait in public, was only content in staying inside his room, a stubbornness that already took a period of one year. The painting has attracted the attention and curiosity of journalists su...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=2206106

    Determined to understand the process by which living animals become food, Lovenheim did the only thing he could think of: He bought a calf—make that twin calves, number 7 and number 8—from the dairy farm where they were born and asked for permission to spend as much time as necessary hanging around and observing everything that happened in the lives of these farm animals. Portrait of a Burger as a Young Calf is the provocative true story of Peter Lovenheim’s hands-on journey into the dairy and beef industries as he follows his calves from conception to possible consumption. In the process, he gets to know the good, hard-working people who raise our cattle and make milk products, beef, and veal available to consumers like you and me. He supplies us with a “fly on the wall” view of how these animals are used to put food on America’s very abundant tables.Constantly vigilant about wanting to be an observer who never interferes, Lovenheim allows the reader to see every aspect of a cow’s life, without passing judgment. Reading this book will forever change the way you think about food and the people and animals who provide it for us.From the Hardcover edition.

    In The Gentle Subversive, Mark Hamilton Lytle offers a compact life of Carson, illuminating the road that led to this vastly influential book. Lytle explores the evolution of Carson's ideas about nature, her love for the sea, her career as a biologist, and above all her emergence as a writer of extraordinary moral and ecological vision. We follow Carson from her childhood on a farm outside Pittsburgh, where she first developed her love of nature (and where, at age eleven, she published her first piece in a children's magazine), to her graduate work at Johns Hopkins and her career with the Fish and Wildlife Service. Lytle describes the genesis of her first book, Under a Sea Wind, the incredible success of The Sea Around Us (a New York Times Bestseller for over a year), and her determination to risk her fame in order to write her poison book: Silent Spring. The author contends that despite Carson's demure, lady-like demeanor, she was subversive in her thinking and aggressive in her campaign against pesticides. Carson became the spokeswoman for a network of conservationists, scientists, and concerned citizens who had come to fear the mounting dangers of the human assault on nature. What makes this story particularly compelling is that Carson took up this cause at the very moment when she herself faced a losing battle against cancer. Succinct and engaging, The Gentle Subversive is a story of success, celebrity, controversy, and vindication. It will inspire anyone interested in protecting the natural world or in women's struggle to find a voice in society.

    Every new year is the hottest in human history, while forest, reef, ice, tundra, and species are disappearing forever. It is easy to lose all hope.Who will stop the planet from committing ecological suicide? The UN? Governments? Activists? Corporations? Engineers? Scientists? Whoever, environmental laws need to be enforceable and enforced. Step forward a fresh breed of passionately purposeful environmental lawyers. They provide new rules to legislatures, see that they are enforced, and keep us informed. They tackle big business to ensure money flows into cultural change, because money is the grammar of business just as science is the grammar of nature.At the head of this new legal army stands James Thornton, who takes governments to court, and wins. And his client is the Earth.With Client Earth, we travel from Poland to Ghana, from Alaska to China, to see how citizens can use public interest law to protect their planet. Foundations and philanthropists support the law group ClientEarth because they see, plainly and brightly, that the law is a force all parties recognize. Lawyers who take the Earth as their client are exceptional and inspirational. They give us back our hope.

    With passion and pride, Ray Anderson, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of one of the world's largest interior furnishings companies, recounts his awakening to the importance of environmental issues and outlines the steps his petroleum-dependent company, Atlanta-based Interface, Inc., is taking in its quest to become a sustainable enterprise - one that will never have to take another drop of oil from the earth.

    Shere began his journey with a tour of a traditional coal-fueled power plant in his home state of Indiana, but continued on, traveling from coast to coast as he spoke to scientists, scholars and innovators. Immersing himself in the green energy world, he installed solar panels, drove through a wind farm, investigated turbines deep in the East River, and interviewed scientists who create fuel from algae and grass. He also examined the role of renewable energy in history, including surprising and entertaining stories of innovations—like plant-based fuels and giant windmills—and the curious involvement of great thinkers like Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Nicola Tesla. Jeremy Shere's natural curiosity and serious research of energy technology in history and of today is leavened by lively writing and a Michael Pollan-esque approach, to create an intriguing vision of the future.

    Based on a major conference sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and the Smithsonian Institution, Biodiversity creates a systematic framework for analyzing the problem and searching for possible solutions.

    And then there are the expectations: from calligraphy invitations to satin chair-covers, all those things that Must Be Done or everyone will be Horribly Offended. Or will they?A Practical Wedding helps you create the wedding you want—without going broke or crazy in the process. After all, what really matters on your wedding day, what you’ll remember ‘til you’re old and gray, is not so much how it looked as how it felt. In this refreshing guide, expert Meg Keene shares her secrets to planning a beautiful celebration that reflects your taste and your relationship. You’ll discover:The real purpose of engagement (hint: it’s not just about the planning) How to pinpoint what matters most to you and your partner DIY-ing your wedding: brilliant or crazy? Affording a wedding without having to cut your guest list How to communicate decisions with your family Why that color-coded spreadsheet is actually worth it Wedding Zen can be yours. Meg walks you through everything from choosing a venue to writing vows, complete with stories and advice from women who have been in the trenches, the Team Practical brides. So here’s to the joyful wedding, the sensible wedding, the unbelievably fun wedding! A Practical Wedding is your complete guide to getting married with grace.

    Taking as a starting point a drawing he made in Medellin in 2006—as well as its caption, “I swear I saw this”—Taussig considers the fieldwork notebook as a type of modernist literature and the place where writers and other creators first work out the imaginative logic of discovery. Notebooks mix the raw material of observation with reverie, juxtaposed, in Taussig’s case, with drawings, watercolors, and newspaper cuttings, which blend the inner and outer worlds in a fashion reminiscent of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs’s surreal cut-up technique. Focusing on the small details and observations that are lost when writers convert their notes into finished pieces, Taussig calls for new ways of seeing and using the notebook as form. Memory emerges as a central motif in I Swear I Saw This as he explores his penchant to inscribe new recollections in the margins or directly over the original entries days or weeks after an event. This palimpsest of afterthoughts leads to ruminations on Freud’s analysis of dreams, Proust’s thoughts on the involuntary workings of memory, and Benjamin’s theories of history—fieldwork, Taussig writes, provokes childhood memories with startling ease. I Swear I Saw This exhibits Taussig’s characteristic verve and intellectual audacity, here combined with a revelatory sense of intimacy. He writes, “drawing is thus a depicting, a hauling, an unraveling, and being impelled toward something or somebody.” Readers will exult in joining Taussig once again as he follows the threads of a tangled skein of inspired associations.

    A desirefor sustainable, clean, wholesome food and superior soil quality has ledmore and more suburban and city dwellers to keep laying hens in theirbackyards and gardens.Learn how you can: Be close to your food source with a continuous supply of fresh, heart-healthy eggs to feed yourself and others. Take the best care of your chickens and find out where to buy them. Learn how to be a chicken whisperer. Improve your garden soil for super yields, superior flavor, andoptimal nutrition. Recycle food, grass clippings and yard waste, make compostand help reduce trash going to landfills, saving millions ofmunicipal taxpayer dollars. Help save millions of municipal tax payer dollars by divertingfood and yard waste from landfills; instead create compost -with the help of your flock. Raise baby chicks with items you already have. Avoid getting roosters and why you don't want them. Learn how to be a Poultry Primary Health Care Practitioner. Make and use effective and inexpensive treatments for your flockas described in the Poultry's Pharmacy.Learn how others: Have built urban chicken tractors, hen huts, condos and chickenchateaus to blend in with neighborhood landscape and architecture. Join in urban eco-agro-tourism with annual coop & gardenhome tours for fund raising. Start or join local poultry clubs. Keep small flocks to help preserve endangered breeds of chickens. Draft and pass local laws allowing laying hens withintheir town's limits.By the co-author of Chicken Tractor, Backyard Market Gardening and DayRange Poultry. City Chicks is a remarkable trend-setting book for poultrylovers and urban agriculturists.The imaginative and entertaining style of writing is combined withhands-on, real-life experience to bring you one of the most complete andauthorative books on micro-flock management.

    Anyone wanting a primer on the secret of China's economic success need look no further than China Development Bank (CDB)--which has displaced the World Bank as the world's biggest development bank, lending billions to countries around the globe to further Chinese policy goals. In "China's World Bank," Bloomberg authors Michael Forsythe and Henry Sanderson outline how the bank is at the center of China's domestic economic growth and how it is helping to expand China's influence in strategically important overseas markets.100 percent owned by the Chinese government, the CDB holds the key to understanding the inner workings of China's state-led economic development model, and its most glaring flaws. The bank is at the center of the country's efforts to build a world-class network of highways, railroads, and power grids, pioneering a lending scheme to local governments that threatens to spawn trillions of yuan in bad loans. It is doling out credit lines by the billions to Chinese solar and wind power makers, threatening to bury global competitors with a flood of cheap products. Another $45 billion in credit has been given to the country's two biggest telecom equipment makers who are using the money to win contracts around the globe, helping fulfill the goal of China's leaders for its leading companies to "go global."Bringing the story of China Development Bank to life by crisscrossing China to investigate the quality of its loans, "China's World Bank" travels the globe, from Africa, where its China-Africa fund is displacing Western lenders in a battle for influence, to the oil fields of Venezuela.Offers a fascinating insight into the China Development Bank (CDB), the driver of China's rapid economic developmentTravels the globe to show how the CDB is helping Chinese businesses "go global"Written by two respected reporters at Bloomberg NewsAs China's influence continues to grow around the world, many people are asking how far it will extend. "China's World Bank" addresses these vital questions, looking at the institution at the heart of this growth.

    In The Climate Fix, Pielke offers a way to repair climate policy, shifting the debate away from meaningless targets and toward a revolution in how the world’s economy is powered, while de-fanging the venomous politics surrounding the crisis. The debate on global warming has lost none of its power to polarize and provoke in a haze of partisan vitriol. The Climate Fix will bring something new to the discussions: a commonsense perspective and practical actions better than any offered so far.

    It seeks to clarify such questions as: does correctness matter?; and is it more important to speak fluently and write imaginatively or to communicate one's message?

    For the sex trade? Or for something worse?They soon learn that something from hell has moved into the sacred Mayan ruins at Kundal.As Robert plunges like an arrow into the heart of this darkness, he must also diagnose a mysterious coma in order to save his friend, and fight his fierce desire to return to New York and Sharon Reede, the love of his life.