The Sigilist


Andrew Karevik - 2020
    The few patrons who pass through his tavern are often travelers looking for a cold beer and warm bed, but they move on quickly after that. The pretty noblewoman who visits from time to time, owner of the land Lance works, barely notices him, despite his efforts. But what is a peasant to do?One night, a traveler, poor and weary, arrives with nary a coin in his pocket. Lance, ever a man of hospitality, allows him to stay. The weary traveler sleeps in one of the tavern rooms and dies overnight, leaving behind nothing except a book of spells. This spellbook, which talks, explains to Lance that this wizard had no next of kin and sought instead to grant his immense power to whoever took him in first. The spellbook now belongs to Lance, changing everything in an instant.Within the pages of the book are sigils—carefully scribed arcane markings that transfer power. By learning to replicate a sigil in the air, Lance is able to cast spells. Magic is relatively secretive in this world; there are no wizard schools, nor books to explain how it works. All wizards are sworn to secrecy. By gaining the power of the Sigilist, Lance’s opportunities become endless.Will Lance be able to use these spells wisely, helping the world he lives in? Can he use his power to win the heart of the fair noblewoman who has not once paid him any mind? Or will the strange powers that exist in the world lure him to serve the causes of a Sorcerer King who is slowly building his dominion to reign over the land?

Crazy Horse and Custer


Stephen E. Ambrose - 1975
    Ambrose, a dual biography of two great nineteenth century warriors, General Custer and Crazy Horse, culminating in the Battle of Little Bighorn.

Take This Man: A Memoir


Brando Skyhorse - 2014
    His mother, Maria, dreaming of a more exciting life, saw no reason for her son to live his life as a Mexican just because he started out as one. The life of “Brando Skyhorse,” the American Indian son of an incarcerated political activist, was about to begin.Through a series of letters to Paul Skyhorse Johnson, a stranger in prison for armed robbery, Maria reinvents herself and her young son as American Indians in the colorful Mexican-American neighborhood of Echo Park, California. There Brando and his mother live with his acerbic grandmother and a rotating cast of surrogate fathers. It will be over thirty years before Brando begins to untangle the truth of his own past, when a surprise discovery online leads him to his biological father at last.From an acclaimed, prize-winning novelist celebrated for his “indelible storytelling” (O, The Oprah Magazine), this extraordinary literary memoir captures a son’s single-minded search for a father wherever he can find one, and is destined to become a classic.

The Living


Annie Dillard - 1992
    Here, the Lummi and Nooksack Indian people fish and farm, hermits pay their debts in sockeye salmon, and miners track gold-bearing streams.Here, too, is the intimate, murderous tale of three men. Clare Fishburn believes that greatness lies in store for him. John Ireland Sharp, an educated orphan, abandons hope when he sees socialists expel the Chinese workers from the region. Beal Obenchain, who lives in a cedar stump, threatens Clare Fishburn's life.A killer lashes a Chinese worker to a wharf piling at low tide. Settlers pour in to catch the boom the railroads bring. People give birth, drown, burn, inherit rich legacies, and commit expensive larcenies. All this takes place a hundred years ago, when these vital, ruddy men and women were ''the living.''

Kitnay Aadmi Thay : Completely Useless Bollywood Trivia


Diptakirti Chaudhuri - 2012
    Packed with 50 lists and 500+ entries, it is a multiplex of pointless Bollywood gyaan. Separated in eight logicless sections and with out a contents page (or index), it is a book for dipping into and zipping through. Remember your favourite Bollywood film fast, actionpacked, mad, packed with colourful characters and a little bit of everything? Well, they made this book out of it. About the AuthorDiptakirti Chaudhuri has been a salesman for more than twelve years now having sold soaps, soft drinks, oils and newspapers all over India. His obsessive love for movies is a hereditary disease, which was nurtured during his engineering and MBA college days. When not watching or reading about mov ies, he writes about them on his blog, Calcutta Chro mosome (http://diptakirti.blogspot.com) or discusses them on Twitter (@diptakirti).He has published a book for children on the 2011 cricket World Cup. This is his second book.He lives in Gurgaon with his wife, a son and a daughter. None of them shares his obsessive love for the movies. Yet.

Divan of Shah


Shah Asad Rizvi - 2019
    Divan of Shah represents an unconscious longing for union within. It is beautifully illustrated and a wonderful amalgamation of some of Shah’s brilliant work filled with the raw emotion of love as if he himself has spilled his heart onto a canvas and has painted love itself. Shah has tapped into the collective unexplored and perhaps his own realm of dreams.The book meticulously presents so many aspects of love in specific detail which harkens one’s appreciation for love even more than before and some examples of love we may have taken for granted. It shows the limitless power and ways love presents itself and how it can change one’s life for the better or worse.This one is a thoughtful collection of poetic lines that invites the reader into the dimension of love, which happens to be the idea of a reflective mirror having no color yet for all colors of the embodiment are reflected back.never make a lady crypearls are not meant to flowlet them reside within celestial eyesfor even paradise unveils its reflectionthrough the radiance of their glow

The Last Days of the Incas


Kim MacQuarrie - 2007
    Drawing on both native and Spanish chronicles, he vividly describes the dramatic story of the conquest, with all its savagery and suspense. This authoritative, exciting history is among the most powerful and important accounts of the culture of the South American Indians and the Spanish Conquest.

Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West


Judith Nies - 2014
    It began when a 4,000-square-mile area of Arizona desert called Black Mesa was divided between the Hopi and Navajo tribes. To the outside world, it was a land struggle between two fractious Indian tribes; to political insiders and energy corporations, it was a divide-and-conquer play for the 21 billion tons of coal beneath Black Mesa. Today, that coal powers cheap electricity for Los Angeles, a new water aqueduct into Phoenix, and the neon dazzle of Las Vegas.Journalist and historian Judith Nies has been tracking this story for nearly four decades. She follows the money and tells us the true story of wealth and water, mendacity, and corruption at the highest levels of business and government. Amid the backdrop of the breathtaking desert landscape, Unreal City shows five cultures colliding—Hopi, Navajo, global energy corporations, Mormons, and US government agencies—resulting in a battle over resources and the future of the West.Las Vegas may attract 39 million visitors a year, but the tourists mesmerized by the dancing water fountains at the Bellagio don’t ask where the water comes from. They don’t see a city with the nation’s highest rates of foreclosure, unemployment, and suicide. They don’t see the astonishing drop in the water level of Lake Mead—where Sin City gets 90 percent of its water supply.Nies shows how the struggle over Black Mesa lands is an example of a global phenomenon in which giant transnational corporations have the power to separate indigenous people from their energy-rich lands with the help of host governments. Unreal City explores how and why resources have been taken from native lands, what it means in an era of climate change, and why, in this city divorced from nature, the only thing more powerful than money is water.

Homeland: Carrie's Run [Prequel Book] Part 1 of 3


Andrew Kaplan - 2013
    The hunt is on in this edge-of-your-seat original prequel thriller based on Showtime’s hit series, HOMELAND.Beirut, 2006. CIA operations officer Carrie Mathison barely escapes an ambush while attempting a clandestine meeting with a new contact code-named Nightingale. Suspicious that security has been compromised, she challenges the station chief in a heated confrontation that gets her booted back to Langley.Expert in recognizing and anticipating behavioral patterns—a skill enhanced by the bipolar disorder she keeps secret to protect her career—Carrie is increasingly certain that a terrorist plot has been set in motion. Carrie risks a shocking act of insubordination that helps her uncover secret evidence connecting Nightingale with Abu Nazir, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Determined to stop the terrorist mastermind, she embarks on an obsessive quest that will nearly destroy her.Filled with the suspense and plot twists that have made Homeland a must-watch series, this riveting tale reveals the compelling untold backstories of the series’ main characters and takes fans deeper into the life and mind of one brilliant woman spy.

The Together Teacher: Plan Ahead, Get Organized, and Save Time!


Norman Atkins - 2012
    This practical resource shows teachers how to be effective and have a life! Author and educator Maia Heyck-Merlin explores the key habits of Together Teachers?how they plan ahead, organize work and their classrooms, and how they spend their limited free time. The end goal is always strong outcomes for their students. So what does Together, or Together Enough, look like? To some teachers it might mean neat filing systems. To others it might mean using time efficiently to get more done in fewer minutes. Regardless, Together Teachers all rely on the same skills. In six parts, the book clearly lays out these essential skills. Heyck-Merlin walks the reader through how to establish simple yet successful organizational systems. There are concrete steps that every teacher can implement to achieve greater stability and success in their classrooms and in their lives. Contains templates and tutorials to create and customize a personal organizational system and includes a companion website: www.thetogetherteacher.com Recommends various electronic or online tools to make a teacher's school day (and life!) more efficient and productive Includes a Reader's Guide, a great professional development resource; teachers will answer reflection questions, make notes about habits, and select tools that best match individual needs and preferences

The Nation's Favourite Love Poems


Daisy Goodwin - 1997
    In this selection of 100 popular poems, poets of every age consider that most universal of themes: love. As well as traditional lovers' favourites such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'How do I love thee?' and Shakespeare's 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?' there are contemporary voices such as Adrian Mitchell, Wendy Cope and John Fuller, whose erudite yet salacious 'Valentine' would melt the most fridgid heart. There are even poems for those more melancholic moments, Hardy's haunting 'After a Journey', for example, and Larkin's poignant 'Love Songs in Age'. So, wherever you are in the tunnel of love, dip into this book of poetry and you will be reassured to discover that at one time or another a poet has been there before you.

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present


David Treuer - 2019
    Not only did one hundred fifty Sioux die at the hands of the U. S. Cavalry, the sense was, but Native civilization did as well. Growing up Ojibwe on a reservation in Minnesota, training as an anthropologist, and researching Native life past and present for his nonfiction and novels, David Treuer has uncovered a different narrative. Because they did not disappear—and not despite but rather because of their intense struggles to preserve their language, their traditions, their families, and their very existence—the story of American Indians since the end of the nineteenth century to the present is one of unprecedented resourcefulness and reinvention. In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Treuer melds history with reportage and memoir. Tracing the tribes' distinctive cultures from first contact, he explores how the depredations of each era spawned new modes of survival. The devastating seizures of land gave rise to increasingly sophisticated legal and political maneuvering that put the lie to the myth that Indians don't know or care about property. The forced assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools incubated a unifying Native identity. Conscription in the US military and the pull of urban life brought Indians into the mainstream and modern times, even as it steered the emerging shape of self-rule and spawned a new generation of resistance. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is the essential, intimate story of a resilient people in a transformative era.

Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea's Prisons


Cullen Thomas - 2007
    Possessed of a youthful, romantic view of the world, he set off for adventure in Asia and a job teaching English in Seoul, South Korea. But he got more than he ever bargained for when an ill-advised stunt led to a drugsmuggling arrest and a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence. Brother One Cell is Cullen�s memoir of that time�the harrowing and unusual story of a good kid forced to grow up in very unusual circumstances. One of only a handful of foreign inmates, Cullen shared a cell block with human-traffickers, jewel smugglers, murderers, and thieves. Fortunately for him, the strict Confucian social mores that dominated the prison made it almost a safe place, different from the brutal, lawless setting most would imagine. In the relative calm of this environment Cullen would learn invaluable life lessons and come out of the experience a wise and grounded adult. With its gritty descriptions of life behind the concrete walls, colorful depictions of his fellow inmates, and acute insights about Korean society, Brother One Cell is part gritty prison story, part cautionary tale, and part insightful travelogue into the places most people never see.

The Navajo Nightmare


David Sodergren - 2021
    Or at least, he was, once. Now he lives a quiet life with his family, until a gang of crooks take everything from him and Charles must make a diabolical pact. His soul, in exchange for vengeance!Tanner Williams has been tasked with an impossible job — to track and kill the bloodthirsty abomination that stalks the plains. Haunted by his dark past, Tanner must learn the horrifying secret of…THE NAVAJO NIGHTMARE!From the twisted minds of David Sodergren (The Forgotten Island) and Steve Stred (Ritual) comes a gripping, blood-soaked horror western that will leave you breathless.

The Vampires of Athens Box Set


Eva Pohler - 2020
    She would rather remain in the world of her books. After settling in with her poor and boisterous host family, she discovers that the vampires and Greek gods that people her favorite books actually exist! Yes. The city of Athens has secrets. Her host family calls them "tramps." In Greek, they are called vrykolakas, or "vryks," which sometimes gets translated to "freaks." They are the vampires of Athens, created centuries ago by the Maenads. They live in caves beneath the acropolis without economic resources and according to rules imposed on them by the Olympians. First and foremost, they are forbidden from turning humans into vampires. The human will not turn unless all of the blood is drained, so a vampire is allowed to drink up to one pint per month from a willing mortal. Some mortals are willing because a vampire bite will infect the body for six hours, and during that time, the mortal has the powers of the vampire: flight, invisibility, strength, speed, x-ray vision, and mind control. Such great power can become irresistible, though dangerous and addicting to mortals... As Gertie uncovers the unfathomable secrets of this ancient city, she is drawn to the beauty and deep thoughts of a boy she first met on the bus into Athens--Jeno. Her host family and another boy she later learns is a demigod warn her to stay away from him, but her curiosity gets the best of her and she unwittingly becomes a catalyst in an uprising led by Dionysus, the god of wine and lord of the vampires. "An epic take on vampires and Greek mythology"--Goodreads Reviewer