Bayles now turns that same attention to his native West.When European Americans “discovered” the American West, they fell in love with the resplendent landscape. The love affair and its congenital flaws persists to this day.Bayles writes: “. . . the question is why my people bungled our occupation of the West so badly when no one really wanted to, when there was every chance to get it right, when voices of caution were constantly raised, when what needed to be done was frequently obvious, and when, occasionally, we did get it right (think: National Parks).”Notes on a Shared Landscape engages the issues that make the West the West—widely ranging over the autobiographical and the cultural, the ecological and the epistemological, the cow and the potato. This is an intensely personal book, and though the Western library is huge, there is not another book like it. Much of the text unfolds in Yellowstone, where Bayles writes:In the Lamar valley of the Yellowstone, beaver gnaw the trunks of cottonwoods, elk browse their leaves. The shadows are long, even in summer. Even so, it is just another place. In it, just as elsewhere, we see the marks of our own hands faintly because we don’t have to know very much about the land we live in, because we are equally a part of and apart from nature, and because there is hardly any moment when humans are more delusional than when self recognition is required.

    Ellie has a dream . . . to become a world-class gymnast. When she’s offered a place at the prestigious London Gymnastics Academy, it looks like she has a chance to make that dream come true. But there are many obstacles to overcome, new friends to make, and rivalries to face! Will she make it, against all the odds?Making the Grade is the first book in the Somersaults and Dreams series, a rollercoaster ride full of friendship, rivalries, setbacks and triumphs, with echoes of classic stories like Ballet Shoes.

    Names of Kings and major political/military persons have been updated and major typographical errors found with the previous Kindle edition have been corrected. Combined with copious illustrations, maps and images, the newly revised Dark Ages is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand a critical period in Western history that saw the transition from Roman Imperial rule to conquest-driven tribal rule and, ultimately, a flowering into the High Middle Ages. Oman provides one of the best historical examinations and explanations about the period widely known as the Dark Ages, when the end of total and complex Roman Imperial rule over Europe and the Mediterranean collapsed, taking the institutions that provided so much cultural sophistication and stability with it. The Dark Ages has been split into three books, mainly for ease of reading; the original book published in 1893 was a massive tome that covered the period from 476 CE to 918 CE. This second book in the new edition covers the period from 561 CE to 743 CE:THE SUCCESSORS OF JUSTINIAN 565-610DECLINE AND DECAY OF THE MEROVINGIANS 561-656THE LOMBARDS IN ITALY, AND THE RISE OF THE PAPACY 568-653HERACLIUS AND MOHAMMED 610-641THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE VISIGOTHS A.D. 603-711THE CONTEST OF THE EASTERN EMPIRE AND THE CALIPHATE 641-717THE HISTORY OF THE GREAT MAYORS OF THE PALACE 656-720THE LOMBARDS AND THE PAPACY 653-743CHARLES MARTEL AND HIS WARS 720-741

     Charles lives in the testosterone-driven, high-powered, brutal world of investment banking. It is a world dominated by deals, bonuses, bravado and savagery. Charles is a master of this world. Each day he shrugs on a metaphorical suit of armour and goes out into a dog-eat-dog world to accumulate power and make money. He's a man who is familiar with casual brutality - his childhood saw to that.But there is a price to pay. Now, at the peak of his career, his armour is rusted and bloodstained and no longer protecting him the way it once did. He finds himself empty. Always cold. No friends. A family that is falling apart.Over the course of two days, everything in Charles' life comes into question. His carefully constructed world is starting to splinter - and he's splintering too.Shocking and at times immensely moving, Man in Armour is a compelling story of a man at the end of his tether, written with a sharp-eyed, incisive focus that also carries real emotional - and moral - resonance. Written by an ultimate business insider - a woman who knows intimately and at first hand this world of power, money and deal-making - this novel carries an undeniable authenticity and force.'The detailed setting of the finance world - the highs and lows, cutthroat practices and relentless pace -is vividly rendered ... Man in Armour is very readable' Bookseller+Publisher'There's no doubt McKenna can write a page-turner' Sydney Morning Herald

    But incorporating historical events and figures into a shapely narrative is no simple task. The acclaimed novelist Christopher Bram examines how writers as disparate as Gabriel García Márquez, David McCullough, Toni Morrison, Leo Tolstoy, and many others have employed history in their work.Unique among the "Art Of" series, The Art of History engages with both fiction and narrative nonfiction to reveal varied strategies of incorporating and dramatizing historical detail. Bram challenges popular notions about historical narratives as he examines both successful and flawed passages to illustrate how authors from different genres treat subjects that loom large in American history, such as slavery and the Civil War. And he delves deep into the reasons why War and Peace endures as a classic of historical fiction. Bram's keen insight and close reading of a wide array of authors make The Art of History an essential volume for any lover of historical narrative.

    The truth? In Saudi Arabia, the existence of Christian churches is prohibited, along with the Bible itself; no Christian or Jew can enter Mecca or Medina lest their mere footsteps desecrate Islam’s holiest sites. In Pakistan and Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world, conversion from Islam to Christianity is punishable by death. In Iraq, Syria, Nigeria and even the President’s beloved Indonesia, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and other “infidels” often face acts of religious genocide by fundamentalists who invoke core Islamic texts and teachings to justify their actions.In short, as Robert Spencer shows in this work, the creed of Muhammad, far from being a religion of peace, has revealed itself in the post-9/11 world to be a religion of bigotry.

     Promotes simple shifts in thinking that can be easily implemented into real-life situations. Offers a way out of suffering and demonstrates how to keep a peaceful mind, so that even the bad times are good! Explains the cause of all human problems and how to overcome them. Explains how to strip away the layers of unhelpful beliefs that we’ve accumulated over the years, so that we can experience mental freedom and self-expression. Gives straight-forward techniques on how to enhance communication skills and achieve goals, whilst keeping a peaceful mind. Enables the reader to create harmonious relationships – which is something that everyone wants. In BOOK ONE - LIFE IS WHAT YOU MAKE IT - You'll learn: How your mind creates your experience of the world. How to overcome your problems by gaining mastery of your mind. How to focus on only thoughts that serve you. How to harness your own inner dialogue instead of being a slave to it. People who practice the teachings in the series often report: An understanding that their mind is the cause of all their suffering, and how to keep it peaceful. An insight into the workings of the mind, which empowers the individual to control their life experiences, rather than being at the mercy of what life throws at them. A permanent increase in satisfaction, peace of mind, and confidence. An improvement in the quality of relationships and communication skills. An understanding of where their concept of self comes from, and how to cultivate the helpful personality traits, whilst abandoning the unhelpful ones.

    Marriage is simultaneously the biggest blessing and the greatest challenge two people can ever take on. It is the joy of knowing there is someone to share in your joys and sorrows, and the challenge of living with someone who thinks it's a good idea to hang a giant antelope head on your living room wall. In The Antelope in the Living Room, New York Times best-selling author and blogger Melanie Shankle does for marriage what Sparkly Green Earrings did for motherhood--makes us laugh out loud and smile through tears as she shares the holy and the hilarity of that magical and mysterious union called marriage.

    A filmmaker escapes New York, accompanied by a woman who may be his therapist, as a violent storm bears down. A lawyer in the throes of divorce seeks refuge at her seaside cottage only to find a vagrant girl living in it. A dilettantish banker sees his ambitions laid bare when he comes under the influence of two strange sisters. A group of friends gathers in the California desert for one last bacchanal, and a journalist finds his visit to the French country home of a former tennis star taking a deeply unnerving turn.Strivers, misfits, and children of privilege, the restless, sympathetic characters in Jackson's astonishing debut hew to passion and perversity through life's tempests. Theirs is a quest for meaning and authenticity in lives spoiled by self­-knowledge and haunted by spiritual longing. Lyrical and unflinching, cerebral and surreal, Prodigals maps the degradations of contemporary life with insight and grace, from the comedy of our foibles, to the granular dignity of experience, to the pathos of our yearning for home.

    Ever since that life-changing event, McCrum has lived in the shadow of death, unavoidably aware of his own mortality. And now, 21 years on, he is noticing a change: his friends are joining him there. Death has become his contemporaries' every third thought. The question is no longer "Who am I?" but "How long have I got?" and "What happens next?" This book takes us on a journey through a year and towards death itself. As he acknowledges his own and his friends' aging, McCrum confronts an existential question: in a world where we have learnt to live well at all costs, can we make peace with what Freud calls "the necessity of dying?" Searching for answers leads him to others for advice and wisdom, and this book is populated by the voices of brain surgeons, psychologists, cancer patients, hospice workers, writers and poets. Witty, lucid and provocative, this book is an enthralling exploration of what it means to approach the "end game," and begin to recognize, perhaps reluctantly, that we are not immortal.

    Spanning the period from the 1950s to the 1970s, a time when English society was changing with disconcerting speed, the characters are first seen as students at Cambridge, before the story moves on to follow their progress and varying fortunes in the larger world of the media and academe.For Adam Morris, of the quicksilver tongue, the concentration camps of which he has only heard of and the social life of England, which he has experienced, combine to give him a scorching skepticism. Unable to accept without suspicion what life offers, he develops a sharp ambivalence that allows him both to enjoy the fruits of a successful screenwriting career and also to retain the self-critical detachment of a novelist.For the other colourful and powerfully realised characters, success, money and satisfaction come in varying degrees. Over all of them the golden Cambridge era, with its smart badinage, its exploratory sex and its uncertain friendships, throws a light - or a shadow - from which none, perhaps, can ever quite escape.The subject of a highly-acclaimed 1976 television series starring TomConti, The Glittering Prizes is a witty, incisive and moving saga of an era and a generation. This new edition will be widely welcomed.

    From blonde to ginger, the brown that changed the way battles were fought to the white that protected against the plague, Picasso's blue period to the charcoal on the cave walls at Lascaux, acid yellow to kelly green, and from scarlet women to imperial purple, these surprising stories run like a bright thread throughout history.In this book, Kassia St. Clair has turned her lifelong obsession with colors and where they come from (whether Van Gogh's chrome yellow sunflowers or punk's fluorescent pink) into a unique study of human civilization. Across fashion and politics, art and war, the secret lives of color tell the vivid story of our culture.

    Unflinchingly honest yet unfailingly hopeful, Rev. Sarah is a genre unto herself. You've never had this much fun going to church

    The Lines that Make Us is a collection of thirty stories and thirty photographs by Seattle bus driver Nathan Vass (The View from Nathan’s Bus).“Read this beautiful book about junkies and hookers and bankers and lawyers in the last place in America they can’t avoid each other.”—Paul Currington, Fresh Ground StoriesNathan “...describes the riders—often poor, often not white, often going to bad news, often just being in the world—with a prose that’s at once elegant, rhythmical, and clear.”—Charles Tonderai Mudede, writer, editor, filmmaker, cultural criticWith an introduction by Paul Constant

    Having uprooted herself from a promising career in publishing in her adopted Brooklyn, Palmer embarks on a quest to determine the fate of her lost homes—and of a community that has been erased by unchecked Southern progress. Palmer's journey takes her from the ruins of kudzu-covered, airport-owned ghost towns to carefully preserved cemeteries wedged between the runways; into awkward confrontations with airport planners, developers, and even her own parents. Along the way, Palmer becomes an amateur detective, an urban historian, and a mother. Lyrically chronicling the overlooked devastation and beauty along the airport’s fringe communities in the tradition of John Jeremiah Sullivan and Leslie Jamison, Palmer unearths the startling narratives about race, power, and place that continue to shape American cities. Part memoir, part urban history, Flight Path: A Search for My Roots beneath the World's Busiest Airport is a riveting account of one young mother's attempt at making a home where there’s little home left.