The DIY Bride: 40 Fun Projects for Your Ultimate One-Of-A-Kind Wedding


Khris Cochran - 2007
    The DIY Bride helps brides put their stamp on the big day without breaking the bank. Written by the creator of the number one Web site for wedding crafts, DIYBride.com, this fun, easy guide showcases unique, easy-to-do craft projects that range from beautiful handmade announcements and invitations to personalized favors and much more. Khris Cochran includes valuable cost-comparison sidebars that clearly detail the huge savings involved. She also shows brides how to involve their friends and families in the project-making process, making this a fun journey for all. The DIY Bride is an essential purchase for any woman who dreams of an unforgettable wedding--from the inside out.

A Life of Picasso, Vol. 1: The Early Years, 1881-1906


John Richardson - 1991
    "To understand it, you have to see how it mirrors my life." Richardson, who lived near the artist in Provence for ten years and became a trusted friend, was able to observe and record this phenomenon at first hand. Later, Picasso's widow continued to give Richardson access to the artist's studios and storerooms. This close personal friendship and the privilege of working in hitherto inaccessible archives make Richardson uniquely qualified to write the artist's life, rescuing his renown from sensationalist legend and specialist pleading and analyzing anew the traumas and obsessions that triggered his explosive genius.Richardson is the first biographer to make sense of the myriad contradictions that leave so many statements about Picasso's nature equally true in reverse. The artist's ambivalence is one of the author's central themes. At last we are able to see how his courage and terror misogyny and tenderness, generosity and thrift, superstition and skepticism, cynicism and sentiment, are reflected in the conflicts and paradoxes in his work.Richardson's eye is finely attuned to the complexities of Picasso's art, and his extensive knowledge of cultural history enables him to show how Picasso plundered the art of the past, the imaginations of his poet friends, the beliefs of mystics and magi, to create a revolutionary new synthesis. The author's evocation of Picasso's ferocious ego, demonic loves and hates and black fears is the more absorbing for its terse and lively prose and freedom from jargon.This first volume of Richardson's prodigiously detailed and documented four-volume study takes Picasso to the age of twenty-five. It reveals how the adolescent Picasso struggled, through determination and study, to escape the shadow of his father's artistic failures. It describes his precocious success in Barcelona and Paris and the period of rejection and despair that followed. We watch Picasso transform the prostitutes of the Saint-Lazare prison into Blue period madonnas and, later, the performers of the Montmartre circuses into Rose period harlequins. Volume I culminates in Picasso's dawning perception of himself as the messiah of the modern movement.Some nine hundred illustrations, many of them unfamiliar, enable the reader to follow Picasso's mesmerizing development in images as well as words.

Period Pain


Kopano Matlwa - 2016
    With almost 25 000 sales this award-winning title cemented her position as one of South Africa's bestselling authors. With her follow-up novel, Spilt Milk, Kopano continued to amaze us with her ability to intimately address complex political issues through relatable characters. This year she brings us her best novel yet, Period Pain; a compelling story about how the broken continue to survive. In Period Pain she has poignantly captured the heartache and confusion of so many South Africans who feel defeated by the litany of headline horrors: xenophobia, corrective rape, corruption and crime and for many the death sentence that is the public health nightmare. Through this story we are able to reflect, to question and to rediscover our humanity. Kopano is a brand in her own right, and to celebrate her latest release all three of her titles will be re-branded and jacketed. Look out for the epitome of #BlackGirlMagic.

Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America


Sylviane A. Diouf - 2007
    They were the last recorded group of Africans deported to the United States as slaves. Timothy Meaher, an established Mobile businessman, sent the slave ship, the Clotilda, to Africa, on a bet that he could "bring a shipful of niggers right into Mobile Bay under the officers' noses." He won the bet.This book reconstructs the lives of the people in West Africa, recounts their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describes their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved men and women. After emancipation, the group reunited from various plantations, bought land, and founded their own settlement, known as African Town. They ruled it according to customary African laws, spoke their own regional language and, when giving interviews, insisted that writers use their African names so that their families would know that they were still alive.The last survivor of the Clotilda died in 1935, but African Town is still home to a community of Clotilda descendants. The publication of Dreams of Africa in Alabama marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.Winner of the Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association (2007)

A Bit of Difference


Sefi Atta - 2012
    Deola works as a financial reviewer for an international charity. When her job takes her back to Nigeria in time for her father’s five-year memorial service, she finds herself turning her scrutiny inward. In Nigeria, Deola encounters changes in her family and in the urban landscape of her home, and new acquaintances who offer unexpected possibilities. Deola’s journey is as much about evading others’ expectations to get to the heart of her frustration as it is about exposing the differences between foreign images of Africa and the realities of contemporary Nigerian life.

Effective Life Management


Amartyananda Swami - 2016
    How should we gain mastery over the enemies lurking within our own mind, so that we can enjoy a peaceful and prosperous life? This book published by Advaita Ashrama, a branch of Ramakrishna Math, gives practical guidelines to make life more meaningful — both on the individual and the collective level — by managing it in the right way, and thus achieve success and fulfillment.

The Africa Book: A Journey Through Every Country in the Continent


Matt Phillips - 2007
    Herds of wild animals crossing acacia-dotted plains, remote cultures that time seems to have forgotten, the monumental vestiges of crumbled empires, as well ast he dire realities of war, disease and famine - Africa is all this and much more. From Cape Town's gleaming shopping arcades to the remote tribal settlements on Lake Turkana's shores, The Africa Book draws together a definitive collection of the sights, sounds and tastes of this spellbinding continent.Here's how to start - open at any page and begin your own journey. Float down the Nile in a felucca, visit the mountain gorillas of Rwanda, catch mbalax fever on Dakar's glittering dance floors, relax under the palms on Zanzibar's powdery white beaches. Let Lonely Planet's photographers, authors and travelers lead you through five regions, 54 countries and inspire you to embark on the journey of your life.

Tea Time with Terrorists: A Motorcycle Journey into the Heart of Sri Lanka's Civil War


Mark Stephen Meadows - 2010
    Figuring that the first step to solving a problem is understanding it, he journeys north into the war zone, interviewing terrorists, generals, and heroin dealers along the way.He discovers an island of beauty and abundance ground down by three decades of war. As he travels north through Colombo, Kandy, and the damaged city of Jaffna, Meadows gives his riveting take on the war. Known for child conscription and drawn-out torture methods, he explains, the Tamil Tigers also invented suicide bombing and were the first to lace together terrorists and financiers into international networks of militant uprising.In Sri Lanka, Meadows discovers a deep view into an ancient culture. Along the way, he learns to trap an elephant, weave rope from coconut husks, and cast out devils, and he actually has tea with a few terrorists. This is the inspiring story of his journey and an enlightening meditation on the interconnectedness of globalization, the media, and modern terrorism.

Easy Motion Tourist


Leye Adenle - 2016
    It features Guy Collins, a British hack who stumbles by chance into the murky underworld of the city. A woman's mutilated body is discarded by the side of a club near one of the main hotels in Victoria Island. Collins, a bystander, is picked up by the police as a potential suspect. After experiencing the unpleasant realities of a Nigerian police cell, he is rescued by Amaka, a Pam Grier-esque Blaxploitation heroine with a saintly streak. As Collins discovers more of the darker aspects of what makes Lagos tick - including the clandestine trade in organs - he also falls slowly for Amaka. Little do they realise how the body parts business is wrapped up in the power and politics of the city. The novel features a motley cast of supporting characters, including a memorable duo of low-level Lagos gangsters, Knockout and Go-Slow. Easy Motion Tourist pulsates with the rhythms of Lagos, reeks of its open drains, and entertains from beginning to end. A modern thriller featuring a strong female protagonist, prepared to take on the Nigerian criminal world on her own.

Mississippi in Africa


Alan Huffman - 2004
    Ross�s heirs contested the will for more than a decade in the state courts and legislature, prompting a deadly revolt in which a group of slaves burned Ross' mansion to the ground, but the will was ultimately upheld. The slaves then emigrated to their new home, where they battled the local tribes and built vast plantations with Greek Revival style mansions in a region the Americo- Africans renamed Mississippi in Africa. The seeds of resentment sown over a century of cultural conflict between the colonists and tribal peoples exploded in the late twentieth century, begetting a civil war that rages in Liberia to this day. Tracking down Prospect Hill's living descendants, deciphering a history ruled by rumor, and delivering the complete chronicle in riveting prose, journalist Alan Huffman has rescued a lost chapter of American history whose aftermath is far from over.