Download or read book Chasing Chaos written by Jessica Alexander and published by Crown. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jessica Alexander arrived in Rwanda in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide as an idealistic intern, eager to contribute to the work of the international humanitarian aid community. But the world that she encountered in the field was dramatically different than anything she could have imagined. It was messy, chaotic, and difficult—but she was hooked. In this honest and irreverent memoir, she introduces readers to the realities of life as an aid worker. We watch as she manages a 24,000-person camp in Darfur, collects evidence for the Charles Taylor trial in Sierra Leone, and contributes to the massive aid effort to clean up a shattered Haiti. But we also see the alcohol-fueled parties and fleeting romances, the burnouts and self-doubt, and the struggle to do good in places that have long endured suffering. Tracing her personal journey from wide-eyed and naïve newcomer to hardened cynic and, ultimately, to hopeful but critical realist, Alexander transports readers to some of the most troubled locations around the world and shows us not only the seemingly impossible challenges, but also the moments of resilience and recovery.
Download or read book Chasing Alexander written by Christopher Martin and published by . This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A haunting, fast-paced war memoir, Chasing Alexander is Christopher Martin's account of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A failing college student obsessed with Alexander the Great, Martin enlists in the US Marines to become a different sort of man, a man like Alexander. From his difficulty at boot camp to his disappointing deployment to Iraq, Martin fears he may never follow in Alexander's footsteps. Then, after a strategy change, Martin and his unit arrive in Marjah, "the bleeding ulcer" of Afghanistan. There he faces heat, fleas, and a hidden enemy. As the casualties mount, Martin struggles to control his emotions and his newfound sense of power. Chasing Alexander looks unflinchingly at the seductive side of war, and its awful consequences.
Download or read book The Telephone Gambit Chasing Alexander Graham Bell s Secret written by Seth Shulman and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2009-01-07 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Telephone.
Download or read book Chasing The Monsoon written by Alexander Frater and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-03-25 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 20th May the Indian summer monsoon will begin to envelop the country in two great wet arms, one coming from the east, the other from the west. They are united over central India around 10th July, a date that can be calculated within seven or eight days. Alexander Frater aims to follow the monsoon, staying sometimes behind it, sometimes in front of it, and everywhere watching the impact of this extraordinary phenomenon. During the anxious period of waiting, the weather forecaster is king, consulted by pie-crested cockatoos, and a joyful period ensues: there is a period of promiscuity, and scandals proliferate. Frater's journey takes him to Bangkok and the cowboy town on the Thai-Malaysian border to Rangoon and Akyab in Burma (where the front funnels up between the mountains and the sea). His fascinating narrative reveals the exotic, often startling, discoveries of an ambitious and irresistibly romantic adventurer.
Download or read book Chasing the Silver Lining written by L. E. Hewitt and published by . This book was released on 2014-11-30 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ABOUT THE BOOK AND AUTHOR: In this third publication from L.E. Hewitt, we once again explore the inexplicable world we live in. The stories tackle such riveting questions as "Why does bologna cost more than steak?" and "What's a guy to do when invited to a professional cheerleader tryout?" This collection of non-fiction stories ranges from nostalgic, to laugh-out-loud funny, to tearful. A truly heartwarming collection of life at its best. You will find yourself reflecting upon your own life and feeling better about where you are and where you have been. In this collection, the reader will find some old favorite characters and will also be introduced to some wonderful new ones. FuzzButt begins to take what he feels is his rightful place as the main center of attention and Sally says goodbye. The stories cover a period of great change in L.E.'s life. But, through it all, he just keeps CHASING THE SILVER LINING. The author (pictured above) currently resides in Indiana with all the animals the children left behind when they left for college. He devotes much of his time these days to his writing and music. The author says, "I have just always had the need for a creative outlet. The older I become, the more I am driven to write about my life and the lives of those around me. I hope that in reading my books, you will find occasion to both laugh and cry. Both of these emotions are essential for a life well lived." FROM THE BOOK ... We own four dogs and three cats. Well, I take that back ... one dog is disguised in the body of a Seal Pointe Siamese cat. He acts more like a dog than some dogs do. He comes when you say his name. He follows you around. He has even learned tricks. He sits up or "sits pretty," as some people say, and Will and Elizabeth have taught him to turn off light switches. I do, however, have to give him credit for being part cat too. He will sneak in the kitchen and steal food off the table or the stove top after dinner is over if we are not careful. He was once even seen dragging a whole pork chop down the stairs. It was one of those butterflied chops and was nearly as big as he is. He was walking all spread eagle just to support the weight of the thing! I know what his plan was going to be. He was going to sneak downstairs, have a big pig-out feast, then get sick from eating too much and find one of my shoes into which to deposit the excess.
Download or read book Siberia Bound written by Alexander Blakely and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recounts the adventures of an American entrepreneur in Siberia, where he and Russian partner built a multi-million dollar company, and offers insightsnto the life in Novosibirsk.
Download or read book Chasing Shakespeares written by Sarah Smith and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-05-11 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From an author the San Francisco Chronicle hails as "daring and splendid" comes an exhilarating novel of passion and ideas that cuts to the heart of one of literature's most fascinating and enduring mysteries: the enigma of Shakespeare. Meet Joe Roper, tough-minded young graduate student, who has been lucky enough to land a job cataloging the famed Kellogg Collection of Elizabethan texts and curiosities. Joe's been passionate about Shakespeare since he read a duct-taped paperback at age nine and found the witches, warriors, murders, and ghosts as much fun as Stephen King, but his working-class roots make him a fish out of water in the academic world. He is seemingly as far from adventure as it's possible to be -- until the delicious Posy Gould enters, stage right. A glamorous rising star at Harvard, she insists that a letter Joe has found, signed by one W. Shakespeare of Stratford, is a career-making discovery for them both -- because the letter says Shakespeare didn't write the plays. To Joe's mind, the letter is a forgery. When Posy insists they test it, the two literary sleuths head for England to prove their clashing theories. But they find themselves in a world where the London Eye looks out over Shakespeare's city, Hollywood producers rub elbows with Elizabethan spies, and mystery shadows the heart of Westminster Abbey and the lanes of rural England. And Joe and Posy find that, when you start chasing Shakespeares, what you find is not only who he was, but who you are, and how far you're willing to go.... A first-rate mystery from one of the masters of the genre, Chasing Shakespeares is also a literary shell game, a love story, and a profound meditation on identity and ownership. Sarah Smith has created a novel that rivals A. S. Byatt's Possession in its rich and fast-moving blend of literary history and page-turning suspense.
Download or read book Chasing Venus written by Andrea Wulf and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “thrilling adventure story" (San Francisco Chronicle) that brings to life the astronomers who in the 1700s embarked upon a quest to calculate the size of the solar system, and paints a vivid portrait of the collaborations, rivalries, and volatile international politics that hindered them at every turn. • From the author of Magnificent Rebels and New York Times bestseller The Invention of Nature. On June 6, 1761, the world paused to observe a momentous occasion: the first transit of Venus between the Earth and the Sun in more than a century. Through that observation, astronomers could calculate the size of the solar system—but only if they could compile data from many different points of the globe, all recorded during the short period of the transit. Overcoming incredible odds and political strife, astronomers from Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Sweden, and the American colonies set up observatories in the remotest corners of the world, only to be thwarted by unpredictable weather and warring armies. Fortunately, transits of Venus occur in pairs; eight years later, they would have another opportunity to succeed. Thanks to these scientists, neither our conception of the universe nor the nature of scientific research would ever be the same.
Download or read book Chasing Homer written by László Krasznahorkai and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic escape nightmare, Chasing Homer is sped on not only by Krasznahorkai’s signature velocity, but also by a unique musical score and intense illustrations In this thrilling chase narrative, a hunted being escapes certain death at breakneck speed—careening through Europe, heading blindly South. Faster and faster, escaping the assassins, our protagonist flies forward, blending into crowds, adjusting to terrains, hopping on and off ferries, always desperately trying to stay a step ahead of certain death: the past did not exist, only what was current existed—a prisoner of the instant, rushing into this instant, an instant that had no continuation … Krasznahorkai—celebrated for the exhilarating energy of his prose—outdoes himself in Chasing Homer. And this unique collaboration boasts beautiful full-color paintings by Max Neumann and—reaching out of the book proper—the wildly percussive music of Szilveszter Miklós scored for each chapter (to be accessed by the reader via QR codes).
Download or read book The Calder Game written by Blue Balliett and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new mystery from bestselling author Blue Balliett is now available in After Words paperback!When Calder Pillay travels with his father to a remote village in England, he finds a mix of mazes and mystery . . . including an unexpected Alexander Calder sculpture in the town square. Calder is strangely drawn to the sculpture, while other people have less-than-friendly feelings towards it. Both the boy and the sculpture seem to be out of place . . . and then, on the same night, they disappear! Calder's friends Petra and Tommy must fly out to help his father find him. But this mystery has more twists and turns than a Calder mobile . . . with more at stake than first meets the eye.
Download or read book Volunteers written by Jerad W. Alexander and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Riveting and morally complex, Volunteers is not only an insider’s account of war. It takes you inside the increasingly closed culture that creates our warriors.” —Elliot Ackerman, author of the National Book Award finalist Dark at the Crossing As a child, Jerad Alexander lay in bed listening to the fighter jets take off outside his window and was desperate to be airborne. As a teenager at an American base in Japan, he immersed himself in war games, war movies, and pulpy novels about Vietnam. Obsessed with all things military, he grew up playing with guns, joined the Civil Air Patrol for the uniform, and reveled in the closed and safe life “inside the castle,” within the embrace of the armed forces, the only world he knew or could imagine. Most of all, he dreamed of enlisting—like his mother, father, stepfather, and grandfather before him—and playing his part in the Great American War Story. He joined the US Marines straight out of high school, eager for action. Once in Iraq, however, he came to realize he was fighting a lost cause, enmeshed in the ongoing War on Terror that was really just a fruitless display of American might. The myths of war, the stories of violence and masculinity and heroism, the legacy of his family—everything Alexander had planned his life around—was a mirage. Alternating scenes from childhood with skirmishes in the Iraqi desert, this original, searing, and propulsive memoir introduces a powerful new voice in the literature of war. Jerad W. Alexander—not some elite warrior, but a simple volunteer—delivers a passionate and timely reckoning with the troubled and cyclical truths of the American war machine.
Download or read book Chasing the Hawk written by Andrew Sheehan and published by Delta. This book was released on 2002-10-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I have always chased my father, chased after his love, chased him through his many changes. I chased him even when I thought I was running in the other direction. Today, even though he is gone, I chase him still. I know he is the key to my freedom.” To runners around the world, Dr. George Sheehan, author of the landmark New York Times bestseller Running and Being, was nothing short of a guru — the country’s “greatest philosopher of sport.” But to his son Andrew, who had spent his entire boyhood longing for the attention and approval of an emotionally distant father, he was an incomprehensible paradox: a lifelong loner, who was now sunning himself in the spotlight of the nation’s press; a hero to millions, who seemed to have no time for his own son. The events that transformed George Sheehan from doctor to family man to bestselling author and media magnet began at the depths of what we would now call a midlife crisis, when he rediscovered an old love — running. Twenty-five years after his days on a high school cross-country team, he remembered how running made him feel free, and began beating a solitary path down his suburban streets. With running as his new religion, the formerly quiet, withdrawn man became an unlikely evangelist, converting a sedentary nation to the theology of fitness, and in the process becoming an internationally known figure. But the freedom he found in running was not enough, and one day he left his family, having decided that life was “an experiment of one,” and it was time for him to start living it. Angry and disillusioned after years of enduring his father’s self-absorption, and hurt by his apparent indifference, Andrew had long since begun the search for his own version of freedom, looking first to drugs and later to alcohol. By his twenties he was a confirmed alcoholic. By his thirties his marriage had fallen apart and he was drinking more heavily than ever. It was at that moment that his father threw him a lifeline. Although he was struggling with the cancer that would eventually end his life, Dr. Sheehan was the first to notice his son’s pain, and to reach out to him. In this stunningly candid book, Andrew Sheehan describes the process through which these two men carefully and lovingly rebuilt their relationship. And in the effort to understand and forgive the dark side of his father’s psyche, Andrew shows how he came to understand, and to transcend, his own. A gracefully written paean to the healing power of forgiveness, a memoir that will resonate with any “fallible” parent or child, Chasing the Hawk traces the arduous steps that carry father and son down the hard road to resolution, healing, and love.
Download or read book Chasing Aphrodite written by Jason Felch and published by HMH. This book was released on 2011-05-24 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “thrilling, well-researched” account of years of scandal at the prestigious Getty Museum (Ulrich Boser, author of The Gardner Heist). In recent years, several of America’s leading art museums have voluntarily given up their finest pieces of classical art to the governments of Italy and Greece. Why would they be moved to such unheard-of generosity? The answer lies at the Getty, one of the world’s richest and most troubled museums, and scandalous revelations that it had been buying looted antiquities for decades. Drawing on a trove of confidential museum records and candid interviews, these two journalists give us a fly-on-the-wall account of the inner workings of a world-class museum, and tell a story of outlandish characters and bad behavior that could come straight from the pages of a thriller. “In an authoritative account, two reporters who led a Los Angeles Times investigation reveal the details of the Getty Museum’s illicit purchases, from smugglers and fences, of looted Greek and Roman antiquities. . . . The authors offer an excellent recap of the museum’s misdeeds, brimming with tasty details of the scandal that motivated several of America’s leading art museums to voluntarily return to Italy and Greece some 100 classical antiquities worth more than half a billion dollars.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “An astonishing and penetrating look into a veiled world where beauty and art are in constant competition with greed and hypocrisy. This engaging book will cast a fresh light on many of those gleaming objects you see in art museums.” —Jonathan Harr, author of The Lost Painting
Download or read book Chasing the Scream written by Johann Hari and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-01-20 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times Bestseller What if everything you think you know about addiction is wrong? Johann Hari's journey into the heart of the war on drugs led him to ask this question--and to write the book that gave rise to his viral TED talk, viewed more than 62 million times, and inspired the feature film The United States vs. Billie Holiday and the documentary series The Fix. One of Johann Hari's earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of his relatives and not being able to. As he grew older, he realized he had addiction in his family. Confused, not knowing what to do, he set out and traveled over 30,000 miles over three years to discover what really causes addiction--and what really solves it. He uncovered a range of remarkable human stories--of how the war on drugs began with Billie Holiday, the great jazz singer, being stalked and killed by a racist policeman; of the scientist who discovered the surprising key to addiction; and of the countries that ended their own war on drugs--with extraordinary results. Chasing the Scream is the story of a life-changing journey that transformed the addiction debate internationally--and showed the world that the opposite of addiction is connection.
Download or read book Please Kill Me written by Legs McNeil and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, this first oral history of the most nihilistic of all pop movements brings the sound of the punk generation chillingly to life with 50 new pages of depraved testimony. "Please Kill Me" reads like a fast-paced novel, but the tragedies it contains are all too human and all too real. photos.
Download or read book Being Alexander written by Nancy Sparling and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2002-06-25 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alex was a pushover. Alexander pushes back. Alex was a chump. Alexander is a champ. Alex moved in the gutter. Alexander hits the fast lane. Everyone likes Alex Fairfax. He’s dependable, friendly, hardworking. He is also a sucker. A sucker who sits by while his oily coworker maliciously sabotages his advertising career, then steals Alex’s girlfriend from under his very nose. But Alex is a sucker who has finally had enough of “yes sir” and “thank you.” Enough of kowtowing to the powerful. Enough of being polite. So Alex transforms himself into Alexander—avenger of the maligned. Sure, he lost his job and has to share a crummy apartment with a bunch of twentysomething hippies, but nothing will stop Alexander from exacting sweet vengeance on the long list of those who have done him wrong. With the right clothes, the right hair, and the right attitude, Alexander plots to ascend through the ranks of the elite, tear down the company that refused to stand by him, and humiliate his snake of a colleague and disloyal ex-girlfriend. But while pulling off one stealthy stunt after another, wooing away clients and ruining a few choice careers, Alex discovers that being a shark isn’t all glitz and glamour—and that his own heart still beats to a very tender drum. . . . A sharp, edgy, witty novel of delicious revenge, Being Alexander stars the best kind of character—one readers can’t quite decide whether to loathe or to love. But in the end, the fact remains: for Alex to truly find himself, he had to become someone else. The result is an irresistibly wicked comedy of ill-manners.
Download or read book Chef s Kiss written by TJ Alexander and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-06-30 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Out now - SECOND CHANCES IN NEW PORT STEPHEN, the charming new TJ Alexander rom-com! A high-strung pastry chef’s professional goals are interrupted by an unexpected career transition and the introduction of her wildly attractive nonbinary kitchen manager in this deliciously fresh and witty queer rom-com. Simone Larkspur is a perfectionist pastry expert with a dream job at The Discerning Chef, a venerable cookbook publisher in New York City. All she wants to do is create the perfect loaf of sourdough and develop recipes, but when The Discerning Chef decides to bring their brand into the 21st century by pivoting to video, Simone is thrust into the spotlight and finds herself failing at something for the first time in her life. To make matters worse, Simone has to deal with Ray Lyton, the new test kitchen manager, whose obnoxious cheer and outgoing personality are like oil to Simone’s water. When Ray accidentally becomes a viral YouTube sensation with a series of homebrewing videos, their eccentric editor in chief forces Simone to work alongside the chipper upstart or else risk her beloved job. But the more they work together, the more Simone realizes her heart may be softening like butter for Ray. Things get even more complicated when Ray comes out at work as nonbinary to mixed reactions—and Simone must choose between the career she fought so hard for and the person who just might take the cake (and her heart).
