Life Hacks: Handy Tips to Make Life Easier


Dan Marshall - 2014
    This fully illustrated manual covers everything from nifty electric cable management to ingenious cooking methods and much, much, more. Remember: if life throws you a curveball – HACK IT!

Rock Jocks, Wall Rats, and Hang Dogs: Rock Climbing on the Edge of Reality


John Long - 1994
    John Long, who wrote the premise of the hit movie Cliffhanger, tells the breathtaking story of this immensely popular daredevil sport.

Getting In: A Step-By-Step Plan for Gaining Admission to Graduate School in Psychology


American Psychological Association - 1993
    This title shows what criteria admissions committees use to evaluate applicants, their qualifications, and how to showcase their talents in personal essays, letters of recommendations, and preselection interviews.

Saucer Wisdom


Rudy Rucker - 1999
    That's an odd way to begin a work of popular science . . . . but amusing.Please heed the warning from the Introduction by Bruce Sterling: "If you are examining Saucer Wisdom imagining that Rudy (or some fictional 'Frank Shook') has been actually logging a lot of on board saucer time, well, you can knock that off right now. Rudy Rucker made up the flying saucer part. There is no actual flying saucer. The saucer is not an interplanetary faster-than-light device. Its what we professional authors like to call a narrative device."I'm going to spill the beans as directly as I can here: Saucer Wisdom is a work of popular science speculation. Its a nonfiction book in which Prof. Rucker takes a few quirky grains of modern scientific fact, drops them into the colorful tide pool of his own imagination, and harvests a major swarm of abalones, jellyfish, and giant anemones."Pop-science writers didn't used to treat 'science' in this boisterous way, but there might well be a trend here, there may be a real future in this. Saucer Wisdom is a book by a well-qualified mathematician and computer scientist, a veteran pop science writer, in which 'science' is treated, not as some distant and rarefied quest for absolute knowledge, but as naturally great source material for a really long, cool rant."Rucker, in character, describes, and illustrates with delightful cartoon sketches (the way he would use chalk and a blackboard while talking science), the world of the progressively more distant future as it is transformed by computer technology, biotechnology, and human evolution. He also describes a hell of a party in Berkeley. Popular science writing will never be the same.

Solar Kill


Charles Ingrid - 1987
    It is the story of his desperate struggle to survive and his determination to claim justice for the lives and worlds wrongfully destroyed.

Followership: How Followers Are Creating Change and Changing Leaders


Barbara Kellerman - 2008
    Barbara Kellerman argues that, over time, followers have played increasingly vital roles. For two key reasons, this trend is now accelerating. Followers are becoming more important, and leaders less. Through gripping stories about a range of people and places—from multinational corporations such as Merck, to Nazi Germany, to the American military after 9/11—Kellerman makes key distinctions among five different types of followers: Isolates, Bystanders, Participants, Activists, and Diehards. And she explains how they relate not only to their leaders but also to each other. Thanks to Followership, we can finally appreciate the ways in which those with relatively fewer sources of power, authority, and influence are consequential. Moreover, they are getting bolder and more strategic. As Kellerman makes crystal clear, to fixate on leaders at the expense of followers is to do so at our peril. The latter are every bit as important as the former, which makes this book required reading for superiors and subordinates alike.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Freemasonry


S. Brent Morris - 2006
    Reveals the truths and dispels the myths that have surrounded the Freemasons.

The Big Lebowski


J.M. Tyree - 2007
    Its fans tend to be fanatical, congregating at 'Lebowski Conventions' in bowling alleys across American and Britain, and even dressing up as characters from the film. Among the funniest films of the last twenty-five years, and one of the high-water marks of 1990s genre recycling and pastiche, The Big Lebowski is also littered with playful and subversive references to film history, especially to Raymond Chandler's world of hardboiled detective classics and the world of film noir. The Big Lebowski is the rarest kind of film, a comedy whose jokes become funnier with repetition. The same goes for its multitudinous jukebox-like references to other films, many of which open up vistas for intertextual interpretation. Underneath the film's breakneck pacing and foul-mouthed characters, a farcical collection of flakes, losers, and phonies, is a surprisingly humane account of what fools we mortals be. It is one of the oddest buddy films ever made, with extraordinary performances by Jeff Bridges and John Goodman. In this study, The Big Lebowski is set into the context of 1990s Hollywood cinema, anatomised for its witty relationship with the classics which it satirises, and discussed in terms of its key theme: the hopeless flailing of ridiculously unmanly men in the world of discombobulated, mixed-up, or put-on identities that is Los Angeles.

The Tally


E.G. Wolverson - 2011
    Welcome to a world of crude cartoon and misplaced melodrama; a world free of all but the most trifling of consequences, where exaggerated sensitivity is rife and a semester’s success or suicide hangs on the whim of a woman. Young Tommo wiles away his evenings in a purple drunken stupor, lost to the tender mercies of what he desperately wishes was a hopeless love affair, but in reality isn’t even that. Gristle, meanwhile, is enraged when his weak-bladdered housemate Spadge moves out, only to be replaced by a neurotic freak named Jamal, who dares not only to bring books into his house, but to read them too.And for poor Will, matters are even worse. Women are staying in of a night! How’s he supposed to rack up his ‘tally’ of conquests if women daren’t leave their digs? They’re all terrified that they’ll be the next to fall prey to the invisible menace that has started stealing students away from the streets of Hull. Will has nothing to fear though – after all, he has his recently arrived destitute father to watch his back. And the fearsome Gristle. And the zealously neurotic Jamal. And the dangerously depressed Tom…The Student Bubble is about to burst, and when it does, the degenerate residents of 146 Worthington Street will find themselves drowning in a reality that they’re not equipped to comprehend, let alone survive in.

The Good for Nothing Seventh Young Lady Book #1


North Night
    Not only that, she had to bend her will according to her relatives’ mood. Idiot? Trash? Very well, sooner or later, she will show these group of silly earthlings what it means to be too late for regrets!Battle-qi? Magic? Her talent on both magic and martial arts will mortify every genius in existence. The position of the clan chief? The mythological Vermilion Bird? Want them? So sorry~ She already took them!But who will tell her, that the cute boy who gets carsick easily was really the mythological Vermilion Bird? Then, what about the elder that’s residing in her body, just which deity does that mysterious soul belong to? Furthermore……Why was it that other people’s companion were those kind of domineering, and incomparably mighty type. Why was it the one around her were either an evil merchant or a sly fox, a useless nerd or a playboy, the worst is this sick pretty boy! What happened to ruling the world, and standing above all else? Please don’t f*ck with me!

The Maestro Myth: Great Conductors in Pursuit of Power


Norman Lebrecht - 1991
    And in portraying the politics and inflated economics surrounding the podiums of today's international classical music scene, the author investigates the awesome power of superagents, the obstacles faced by blacks, women, and gays, and the mounting crisis in a profession where genuine talent grows ever scarcer.

The Real McCaw: The Autobiography


Richie McCaw - 2012
    During the 2011 World Cup he reached 100 caps and has played over 60 Tests as Captain. When the All Blacks beat France in Final, he crowned a ten year career that started with a man-of-the-match performance against Ireland in 2001. Unquestionably the greatest player of his generation, he is arguably the most talented rugby player of all time. In his autobiography, McCaw recounts for the first time, with brutal honesty, the roots of his family life that defined his character – learning to play the game on the family farm in South New Zealand and being inspired to fly gliders by his war-hero grandfather – and how it gave him the strength to emerge from the lowest moment in his career to become the most successful Captain world rugby has ever seen. Unafraid of playing the game right at the edge and putting his body on the line for his team mates, McCaw has set the standard of what a professional rugby player should be. Hugely popular and respected, his sheer presence means that he is a natural leader of men both on and off the pitch and his story is not just a brutal account of life on the front line, but an exhilarating portrait of modern rugby.

Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia


Emily Toth - 1997
    Mentor advises academic women about issues they daren't discuss openly, such as: How does one really clamber onto the tenure track when the job market is so nasty, brutish, and small? Is there such a thing as the perfectly marketable dissertation topic? How does a meek young woman become a tiger of an authority figure in the classroom-and get stupendous teaching evaluations? How does one cope with sexual harassment, grandiosity, and bizarre behavior from entrenched colleagues?Ms. Mentor's readers will find answers to the secret queries they were afraid to ask anyone else. They'll discover what it really takes to get tenure; what to wear to academic occasions; when to snicker, when to hide, what to eat, and when to sue. They'll find out how to get firmly planted in the rich red earth of tenure. They'll learn why lunch is the most important meal of the day.

Bound


Sarah Bryant - 2012
    Strikingly pretty, a top student, with unique musical talent, the London schoolgirl has always stood out from the crowd. But it’s the Revenants that truly set her apart: creatures not quite living, not quite dead, and visible only to Sophie. Hard as she tries to ignore them, her haunting has cost her friends, opportunities, even her parents’ trust.In a last-ditch effort to free herself of it, she foregoes a university place in favour of a waitressing job in the tiny village of Ardnasheen, on Scotland’s wild northwest coast. Though at first Ardnasheen seems to offer exactly the refuge Sophie has been looking for, she quickly realizes that it harbors dark secrets of its own. Barely a week into her new life, she finds herself caught up in a bitter rivalry between Sam and Lucas, two young landowners. One is charming, the other brooding, and both irresistibly compelling. But the roots of their hostility run deep into a mysterious past that seems to involve Sophie. As they vie for her attention, she is forced to choose which one to trust.Sophie is about to discover the love of her life – and a secret to die for.

A Jarful Of Angels


Babs Horton - 2003
    It was there that Iffy, Bessie, Fatty and Billy experienced a plague of frogs one summer, stumbled upon a garden full of dancing statues, found a skull with its front teeth missing - and discovered just what it was that mad Carty Annie was collecting so secretly in those jars of hers.But at the end of that long, hot summer of 1961, one of the four children disappeared.Over thirty years later, returned detective Will Sloane, never able to forget the unsolved case, returns to Wales to resume his search for the truth. His investigation will draw him into a number of interlocking mysteries, each one more puzzling than the last.Written in a rich, sensuous and lyrical prose style full of the sights and sounds of childhood, 'A Jar Full of Angels' is a mesmerising, evocative - and wholly unforgettable - novel of psychological suspense.