Download or read book The Songs of St Petersburg written by Amor Towles and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-02-09 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of Rules of Civility. 'A comic masterpiece.' The Times 'Winning . . . gorgeous . . . satisfying . . . Towles is a craftsman.' New York Times Book Review 'A work of great charm, intelligence and insight.' Sunday Times 'Everything a novel should be: charming, witty, poetic and generous. An absolute delight.' Mail on Sunday 'If we do a better book than this one on the book club this year we will be very very lucky.' Matt Williams, Radio 2 Book Club 'Abundant in humour, history and humanity' Sunday Telegraph 'Wistful, whimsical and wry.' Sunday Express On 21 June 1922 Count Alexander Rostov - recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt - is escorted out of the Kremlin, across Red Square and through the elegant revolving doors of the Hotel Metropol. But instead of being taken to his usual suite, he is led to an attic room with a window the size of a chessboard. Deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the Count has been sentenced to house arrest indefinitely. While Russia undergoes decades of tumultuous upheaval, the Count, stripped of the trappings that defined his life, is forced to question what makes us who we are. And with the assistance of a glamorous actress, a cantankerous chef and a very serious child, Rostov unexpectedly discovers a new understanding of both pleasure and purpose.

Download or read book Jewish Luck written by Leslie Levine Adler and published by . This book was released on 2013-10 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish Luck recounts the intertwined stories of two women who-in their struggles against the anti-Semitism and patriarchy of the Soviet regime and the rebranded "New" Russia-succeed by creating their own luck. Their sisterhood is kindled when Vera and Alisa grudgingly line up to register for classes at the Institute that produced experts in Marxist-Leninist economics, a field on its way to extinction. For the next three decades, Vera and Alisa fight for their dreams of self-expression and status. To do so they must deprogram their minds of Soviet theory and learn the new language of a free market economy. After Vera dares to approach author Leslie Adler on a Leningrad corner in 1976, a forbidden friendship is formed. Leslie becomes Vera's confidante and link to the West. With help from her Minneapolis connections, Vera builds a successful business in Russia despite her disdain for her country and the disruption of Russian mafia attacks. In contrast, Alisa secretly escapes the Soviet Union and constructs a life in Sweden from scratch. Jewish Luck invites readers to inhabit the lives of two extraordinary and headstrong women as they fight to establish themselves in a time and place where women, Jews, and capitalism were disparaged.

Download or read book Rules of Civility written by Amor Towles and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-06-26 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway and A Gentleman in Moscow, a “sharply stylish” (Boston Globe) book about a young woman in post-Depression era New York who suddenly finds herself thrust into high society—now with over one million readers worldwide On the last night of 1937, twenty-five-year-old Katey Kontent is in a second-rate Greenwich Village jazz bar when Tinker Grey, a handsome banker, happens to sit down at the neighboring table. This chance encounter and its startling consequences propel Katey on a year-long journey into the upper echelons of New York society—where she will have little to rely upon other than a bracing wit and her own brand of cool nerve. With its sparkling depiction of New York’s social strata, its intricate imagery and themes, and its immensely appealing characters, Rules of Civility won the hearts of readers and critics alike.

Download or read book Long Way Round written by Ewan McGregor and published by Sphere. This book was released on 2013-04-11 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A highly readable and spiritually uplifting book about a dream come true' Wanderlust 'Touching and memorable ... one for armchair travellers and bike freaks' Daily Mail From London to New York, Ewan and Charley chased their shadows through Europe, the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Russia, across the Pacific to Alaska, then down through Canada and America. But as the miles slipped beneath the tyres of their big BMWs, their troubles started. Exhaustion, injury and accidents tested their strength. Treacherous roads, unpredictable weather and turbulent politics challenged their stamina. They were chased by paparazzi in Kazakhstan, courted by men with very large guns in the Ukraine, hassled by the police, and given bulls' testicles for supper by Mongolian nomads. And yet despite all these obstacles they managed to ride more than twenty thousand miles in four months, changing their lives forever in the process. As they travelled they documented their trip, taking photographs, and writing diaries by the campfire. Long Way Round is the result of their adventures - a fascinating, frank and highly entertaining travel book about two friends riding round the world together and, against all the odds, realising their dream.

Download or read book My Ideal Bookshelf written by Thessaly La Force and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The books that we choose to keep -- let alone read -- can say a lot about who we are and how we see ourselves. In My Ideal Bookshelf, dozens of leading cultural figures share the books that matter to them most; books that define their dreams and ambitions and in many cases helped them find their way in the world. Contributors include Malcolm Gladwell, Thomas Keller, Michael Chabon, Alice Waters, James Patterson, Maira Kalman, Judd Apatow, Chuck Klosterman, Miranda July, Alex Ross, Nancy Pearl, David Chang, Patti Smith, Jennifer Egan, and Dave Eggers, among many others. With colorful and endearingly hand-rendered images of book spines by Jane Mount, and first-person commentary from all the contributors, this is a perfect gift for avid readers, writers, and all who have known the influence of a great book.

Download or read book Dear Fahrenheit 451 written by Annie Spence and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A librarian's laugh-out-loud funny, deeply moving collection of love letters and breakup notes to the books in her life. If you love to read, and presumably you do since you’ve picked up this book (!), you know that some books affect you so profoundly they forever change the way you think about the world. Some books, on the other hand, disappoint you so much you want to throw them against the wall. Either way, it’s clear that a book can be your new soul mate or the bad relationship you need to end. In Dear Fahrenheit 451, librarian Annie Spence has crafted love letters and breakup notes to the iconic and eclectic books she has encountered over the years. From breaking up with The Giving Tree (a dysfunctional relationship book if ever there was one), to her love letter to The Time Traveler’s Wife (a novel less about time travel and more about the life of a marriage, with all of its ups and downs), Spence will make you think of old favorites in a new way. Filled with suggested reading lists, Spence’s take on classic and contemporary books is very much like the best of literature—sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes surprisingly poignant, and filled with universal truths. A celebration of reading, Dear Fahrenheit 451 is for anyone who loves nothing more than curling up with a good book...and another, and another, and another!

Download or read book Dark Tales written by Shirley Jackson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time in one volume, a collection of Shirley Jackson’s scariest stories, with a foreword by PEN/Hemingway Award winner Ottessa Moshfegh After the publication of her short story “The Lottery” in the New Yorker in 1948 received an unprecedented amount of attention, Shirley Jackson was quickly established as a master horror storyteller. This collection of classic and newly reprinted stories provides readers with more of her unsettling, dark tales, including the “The Possibility of Evil” and “The Summer People.” In these deliciously dark stories, the daily commute turns into a nightmarish game of hide and seek, the loving wife hides homicidal thoughts and the concerned citizen might just be an infamous serial killer. In the haunting world of Shirley Jackson, nothing is as it seems and nowhere is safe, from the city streets to the crumbling country pile, and from the small-town apartment to the dark, dark woods. There’s something sinister in suburbia. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Download or read book When We Lost Our Heads written by Heather O'Neill and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Every decent friendship comes with a drop of hatred. But that hatred is like honey in the tea. It makes it addictive.” Charismatic Marie Antoine is the daughter of the richest man in 19th century Montreal. She has everything she wants, except for a best friend—until clever, scheming Sadie Arnett moves to the neighborhood. Immediately united by their passion and intensity, Marie and Sadie attract and repel each other in ways that thrill them both. Their games soon become tinged with risk, even violence. Forced to separate by the adults around them, they spend years engaged in acts of alternating innocence and depravity. And when a singular event brings them back together, the dizzying effects will upend the city. Traveling from a repressive finishing school to a vibrant brothel, taking readers firsthand into the brutality of factory life and the opulent lives of Montreal’s wealthy, When We Lost Our Heads dazzlingly explores gender, sex, desire, class, and the terrifying power of the human heart when it can’t let someone go.

Download or read book Warlight written by Michael Ondaatje and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of The English Patient: a mesmerizing new novel that tells a dramatic story set in the decade after World War II through the lives of a small group of unexpected characters and two teenagers whose lives are indelibly shaped by their unwitting involvement. In a narrative as beguiling and mysterious as memory itself—shadowed and luminous at once—we read the story of fourteen-year-old Nathaniel, and his older sister, Rachel. In 1945, just after World War II, they stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and they grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women joined by a shared history of unspecified service during the war, all of whom seem, in some way, determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? And what does it mean when the siblings' mother returns after months of silence without their father, explaining nothing, excusing nothing? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all that he didn't know and understand in that time, and it is this journey—through facts, recollection, and imagination—that he narrates in this masterwork from one of the great writers of our time.

Download or read book The Future of Crime and Punishment written by William R. Kelly and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-07-14 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, we know that crime is often not just a matter of making bad decisions. Rather, there are a variety of factors that are implicated in much criminal offending, some fairly obvious like poverty, mental illness, and drug abuse and others less so, such as neurocognitive problems. Today, we have the tools for effective criminal behavioral change, but this cannot be an excuse for criminal offending. In The Future of Crime and Punishment, William R. Kelly identifies the need to educate the public on how these tools can be used to most effectively and cost efficiently reduce crime, recidivism, victimization and cost. The justice system of the future needs to be much more collaborative, utilizing the expertise of a variety of disciplines such as psychology, psychiatry, addiction, and neuroscience. Judges and prosecutors are lawyers, not clinicians, and as we transition the justice system to a focus on behavioral change, the decision making will need to reflect the input of clinical experts. The path forward is one characterized largely by change from traditional criminal prosecution and punishment to venues that balance accountability, compliance, and risk management with behavioral change interventions that address the primary underlying causes for recidivism. There are many moving parts to this effort and it is a complex proposition. It requires substantial changes to law, procedure, decision making, roles and responsibilities, expertise, and funding. Moreover, it requires a radical shift in how we think about crime and punishment. Our thinking needs to reflect a perspective that crime is harmful, but that much criminal behavior is changeable.

Download or read book It s Trevor Noah Born a Crime written by Trevor Noah and published by Delacorte Press. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The host of The Daily Show, Trevor Noah, shares his personal story and the injustices he faced while growing up half black, half white in South Africa under and after apartheid in this New York Times bestselling young readers' adaptation of his adult memoir. “A piercing reminder that every mad life--even yours--could end up a masterpiece." --JASON REYNOLDS, New York Times bestselling author We do horrible things to one another because we don’t see the person it affects. . . . We don’t see them as people. Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, shares his remarkable story of growing up in South Africa with a black South African mother and a white European father at a time when it was against the law for a mixed-race child to exist. But he did exist--and from the beginning, the often-misbehaved Trevor used his keen smarts and humor to navigate a harsh life under a racist government. In a country where racism barred blacks from social, educational, and economic opportunity, Trevor surmounted staggering obstacles and created a promising future for himself thanks to his mom’s unwavering love and indomitable will. This honest and poignant memoir adapted from the #1 New York Times bestseller Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood will astound and inspire readers as well as offer a fascinating perspective on South Africa’s tumultuous racial history. BORN A CRIME IS SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING OSCAR WINNER LUPITA NYONG'O!

Download or read book Tuva Or Bust written by Ralph Leighton and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2000 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A close friend of physicist Richard Feynman chronicles his relationship with the scientist and describes their ten-year quest to reach the remote country of Tannu Tuva.

Download or read book Godspeed written by Nickolas Butler and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the Reading the West Book Award For the right price, you’d risk your life. Wouldn’t you? Cole, Bart, and Teddy, the three principals of True Triangle Construction, are hired to finish a project for a mysteriously wealthy homeowner. The grand house is unlike anything they’ve worked on before, and they’re sure it’ll put their name on the map. But the owner is intent on having it built in a few months, an impossible task made irresistible by an exorbitant bonus. Up against the critical deadline and the threat of a harsh Wyoming winter, the trio will do anything to get the money, even if it means risking their lives…or each other’s. With heart-pounding danger and high-stakes action, Godspeed is a gripping thriller about greed and violence that asks: How much is never enough?

Download or read book The Golem and the Jinni written by Helene Wecker and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An intoxicating fusion of fantasy and historical fiction. . . . Wecker’s storytelling skills dazzle." —Entertainment Weekly A marvelous and absorbing debut novel about a chance meeting between two supernatural creatures in turn-of-the-century immigrant New York. Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay by a disgraced rabbi knowledgeable in the ways of dark Kabbalistic magic. She serves as the wife to a Polish merchant who dies at sea on the voyage to America. As the ship arrives in New York in 1899, Chava is unmoored and adrift until a rabbi on the Lower East Side recognizes her for the creature she is and takes her in. Ahmad is a jinni, a being of fire born in the ancient Syrian desert and trapped centuries ago in an old copper flask by a Bedouin wizard. Released by a Syrian tinsmith in a Manhattan shop, Ahmad appears in human form but is still not free. An iron band around his wrist binds him to the wizard and to the physical world. Chava and Ahmad meet accidentally and become friends and soul mates despite their opposing natures. But when the golem’s violent nature overtakes her one evening, their bond is challenged. An even more powerful threat will emerge, however, and bring Chava and Ahmad together again, challenging their very existence and forcing them to make a fateful choice. Compulsively readable, The Golem and the Jinni weaves strands of Yiddish and Middle Eastern literature, historical fiction and magical fable, in a wondrously inventive tale that is mesmerizing and unforgettable.

Download or read book In The Garden of Beasts written by Erik Larson and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-08-31 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A compelling tale... a narrative that makes such a brave effort to see history as it evolves and not as it becomes.' SPECTATOR Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the times, and with brilliant portraits of Hitler, Goebbels, Goering and Himmler amongst others, Erik Larson's new book sheds unique light on events as they unfold, resulting in an unforgettable, addictively readable work of narrative history. Berlin,1933. William E. Dodd, a mild-mannered academic from Chicago, has to his own and everyone else's surprise, become America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany, in a year that proves to be a turning point in history. Dodd and his family, notably his vivacious daughter, Martha, observe at first-hand the many changes - some subtle, some disturbing, and some horrifically violent - that signal Hitler's consolidation of power. Dodd has little choice but to associate with key figures in the Nazi party, his increasingly concerned cables make little impact on an indifferent U.S. State Department, while Martha is drawn to the Nazis and their vision of a 'New Germany' and has a succession of affairs with senior party players, including first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as the year darkens, Dodd and his daughter find their lives transformed and any last illusion they might have about Hitler are shattered by the violence of the 'Night of the Long Knives' in the summer of 1934 that established him as supreme dictator . . .