Download or read book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier Clay with bonus content written by Michael Chabon and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic, beloved novel of two boy geniuses dreaming up superheroes in New York’s Golden Age of comics, now with special bonus material by the author “It's absolutely gosh-wow, super-colossal—smart, funny, and a continual pleasure to read.”—The Washington Post Book World One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of Entertainment Weekly’s 10 Best Books of the Decade • Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize A “towering, swash-buckling thrill of a book” (Newsweek), hailed as Chabon’s “magnum opus” (The New York Review of Books), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a triumph of originality, imagination, and storytelling, an exuberant, irresistible novel that begins in New York City in 1939. A young escape artist and budding magician named Joe Kavalier arrives on the doorstep of his cousin, Sammy Clay. While the long shadow of Hitler falls across Europe, America is happily in thrall to the Golden Age of comic books, and in a distant corner of Brooklyn, Sammy is looking for a way to cash in on the craze. He finds the ideal partner in the aloof, artistically gifted Joe, and together they embark on an adventure that takes them deep into the heart of Manhattan, and the heart of old-fashioned American ambition. From the shared fears, dreams, and desires of two teenage boys, they spin comic book tales of the heroic, fascist-fighting Escapist and the beautiful, mysterious Luna Moth, otherworldly mistress of the night. Climbing from the streets of Brooklyn to the top of the Empire State Building, Joe and Sammy carve out lives, and careers, as vivid as cyan and magenta ink. Spanning continents and eras, this superb book by one of America’s finest writers remains one of the defining novels of our modern American age. Winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award and the New York Society Library Book Award

Download or read book It s Not About Me written by Max Lucado and published by Thomas Nelson Inc. This book was released on with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini written by Joe Posnanski and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joe Posnanski enters the colorful world of Harry Houdini and his legions of devoted fans to explore the illusionist’s impact on global culture—and why his legacy endures to this day. Nearly a century after Harry Houdini died on Halloween in 1926, he feels as modern and alive as ever. The name Houdini still leaps to mind whenever we witness a daring escape. The baby who frees herself from her crib? Houdini. The dog who vanishes and reappears in the neighbor’s garden? Houdini. Every generation produces new disciples of the magician, from household names in magic like David Copperfield and David Blaine to countless other followers whose lives have been transformed by the power of Houdini. In rural Pennsylvania, a thirteen-year-old girl finds the courage to leave a violent home after learning that Houdini ran away to join the circus; she eventually becomes the first female magician to saw a man in half on television. In Australia, an eight-year-old boy with a learning impediment feels worthless until he sees an old poster of Houdini advertising “Nothing on earth can hold Houdini prisoner,” and begins his path to becoming that nation’s most popular magician. In California, an actor and Vietnam War veteran finds purpose in his life by uncovering the secrets of his hero. But the unique phenomenon of Houdini was always more than his death-defying stunts or his ability to escape handcuffs and straitjackets. It is also about the power of imagination and self-invention. His incredible transformation from Ehrich Weiss, humble Hungarian immigrant and rabbi’s son, into the self-named Harry Houdini has won him a slice of immortality. No one has withstood the test of time quite like Houdini. Fueled by Posnanski’s personal obsession with the magician—and magic itself—The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini is a poignant odyssey of discovery, blending biography, memoir, and first-person reporting to trace Houdini’s metamorphosis into an iconic figure who has inspired millions.

Download or read book It s Not About Me Personal Guidebook written by Max Lucado and published by HarperChristian Resources. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “It’s all about me.” Believing that has created chaos—noisy homes, stress-filled businesses, cutthroat relationships. We’ve chased so many skinny rabbits, says Max Lucado, that we’ve missed the fat one: the God-centered life. Life makes sense when we know our place! Our pleasures, our problems, our gifts and talents . . . when they’re all for the One who created us, we gain what we’ve been seeking—a clear path to purpose. The It’s Not About Me Personal Guidebook is designed to provide just such a path. It will help you . . . Understand your place in the world Change your life through love Discover your hidden strengths Battle against selfishness Conquer stress and uncertainties Rethink your way to happiness Let Max Lucado show you how to make the shift of a lifetime. How to bump your life off self-center. How to experience the meaning-charged life you were meant to live. This is your lifeline to a life of purpose. Grab hold and let the rescue begin!

Download or read book Houdini written by Adam Begley and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, an exuberant biography of the world’s greatest escape artist In 1916, the war in Europe having prevented a tour abroad, Harry Houdini wrote a film treatment for a rollicking motion picture. Though the movie was never made, its title, “The Marvelous Adventures of Houdini: The Justly Celebrated Elusive American,” provides a succinct summary of the Master Mystifier’s life. Born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874, Houdini grew up an impoverished Jewish immigrant in the Midwest and became world-famous thanks to talent, industry, and ferocious determination. He concealed as a matter of temperament and professional ethics the secrets of his sensational success. Nobody knows how Houdini performed some of his dazzling, death-defying tricks, and nobody knows, finally, why he felt compelled to punish and imprison himself over and over again. Must a self-liberator also be a self-torturer? Tracking the restless Houdini’s wide-ranging exploits, acclaimed biographer Adam Begley asks the essential question: What kind of man was this?

Download or read book The Secrets of Houdini written by J. C. Cannell and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2013-04-26 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published 1930's. A well illustrated compendium of the famous Harry Houdini's magic tricks and illusions. All explained in detail.Many of the earliest magic books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing many of these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Download or read book Water From the Rock written by Greg Hinnant and published by Gatekeeper Press. This book was released on 2024-05-05 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirsty? Parched for fresh, flowing biblical insights that will revive your trial-weary heart and slake your thirst for more of Jesus? Water From the Rock, the final book in Greg Hinnant’s devotional trilogy, offers you spiritual water aplenty. Its 122 biblical devotional studies are intentionally crafted to provide more material than that offered by most devotionals in hopes of providing more inspiration and prompting further study. Ministers will find numerous sermons and teachings here and disciples much study material. These expository messages address many timely biblical subjects yet, like the Bible, their central theme is Christ—knowing Him, pleasing Him, and learning to walk closely with Him in the hot, spiritually dry wilderness of this increasingly secular, Christ-rejecting world. For that, we will need to rehydrate our souls regularly with lots of spiritual water. So, take long, thoughtful, prayerful drinks of this devotional’s Spirit-illuminated, biblical water, again and again. With the Holy Spirit’s blessing, it will help sustain and guide you through your wilderness trials to the Promised Land of Christian maturity! Book Review: As always, this book is blessing my socks off, to use an old expression. I am thoroughly enjoying working on it." -- Deborah Moss, Associate Editor, Charisma Media

Download or read book Endings written by Leon Prochnik and published by Random House Value Publishing. This book was released on 1980 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Kreskin Confidential written by The Amazing Kreskin and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2009-03-31 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After years of international fame, the remarkable entertainer known as The Amazing Kreskin has never spoken on the record about the dozens who owe their careers to him, the wonderful people he's met, the terrific times he's had, and the tricks pulled on you by television jokers. Until now. Here, you'll meet superstars as well as con men, and true artists of magic as well as gamblers - from Harry Houdini and Criss Angel to Johnny Carson and Tom Hanks. You'll even discover how to surprise friends and family with fun and fascinating magic of your own. It's all here, and much more, when the World's Greatest Mentalist finally speaks out in Kreskin Confidential.

Download or read book The New York Times Book Review written by and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 934 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book American Vaudeville as Ritual written by Albert F. McLeanJr. and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study affords an entirely new view of the nature of modern popular entertainment. American vaudeville is here regarded as the carefully elaborated ritual serving the different and paradoxical myth of the new urban folk. It demonstrates that the compulsive myth-making faculty in man is not limited to primitive ethnic groups or to serious art, that vaudeville cannot be dismissed as meaningless and irrelevant simply because it fits neither the criteria of formal criticsm or the familiar patterns of anthropological study. Using the methods for criticism developed by Susanne K. Langer and others, the author evaluates American vaudeville as a symbolic manifestation of basic values shared by the American people during the period 1885-1930. By examining vaudeville as folk ritual, the book reveals the unconscious symbolism basic to vaudeville-in its humor, magic, animal acts, music, and playlets, and also in the performers and the managers—which gave form to the dominant American myth of success. This striking view of the new mass man as a folk and of his mythology rooted in the very empirical science devoted to dispelling myth has implications for the serious study of all forms of mass entertainment in America. The book is illustrated with a number of striking photographs.

Download or read book The Jewish Phenomenon written by Steve Silbiger and published by Taylor Trade Publications. This book was released on 2000-05-25 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With truly startling statistics and a wealth of anecdotes, Silbiger reveals the cultural principles that form the bedrock of Jewish success in America.

Download or read book Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon written by David McGowan and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2014-03-19 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The very strange but nevertheless true story of the dark underbelly of a 1960s hippie utopia. Laurel Canyon in the 1960s and early 1970s was a magical place where a dizzying array of musical artists congregated to create much of the music that provided the soundtrack to those turbulent times. Members of bands like the Byrds, the Doors, Buffalo Springfield, the Monkees, the Beach Boys, the Turtles, the Eagles, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Steppenwolf, CSN, Three Dog Night and Love, along with such singer/songwriters as Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, James Taylor and Carole King, lived together and jammed together in the bucolic community nestled in the Hollywood Hills. But there was a dark side to that scene as well. Many didn’t make it out alive, and many of those deaths remain shrouded in mystery to this day. Far more integrated into the scene than most would like to admit was a guy by the name of Charles Manson, along with his murderous entourage. Also floating about the periphery were various political operatives, up-and-coming politicians and intelligence personnel – the same sort of people who gave birth to many of the rock stars populating the canyon. And all the canyon’s colorful characters – rock stars, hippies, murderers and politicos – happily coexisted alongside a covert military installation.

Download or read book Carter Beats the Devil written by Glen David Gold and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2009-07-23 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Carter, dubbed Carter the Great by Houdini himself, was born into privilege but became a magician out of need: only when dazzling an audience can he defeat his fear of loneliness. But in 1920s America the stakes are growing higher, as technology and the cinema challenge the allure of magic and Carter's stunts become increasingly audacious. Until the night President Harding takes part in Carter's act only to die two hours later, and Carter finds himself pursued not only by the Secret Service but by a host of others desperate for the terrible secret they believe Harding confided in him. Seamlessly blending reality and fiction, Gold lays before us a glittering and romantic panorama of our modern world at a point of irrevocable change.

Download or read book The Encyclopedia of Popular Music Paul Emmanuel Smith Larry written by Colin Larkin and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 906 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Inner Circle written by Brad Meltzer and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2013-03-12 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are stories no one knows. Hidden stories. I love those stories. And since I work in the National Archives, I find those stories for a living. Beecher White, a young archivist, spends his days working with the most important documents of the U.S. government. He has always been the keeper of other people's stories, never a part of the story himself... Until now. When Clementine Kaye, Beecher's first childhood crush, shows up at the National Archives asking for his help tracking down her long-lost father, Beecher tries to impress her by showing her the secret vault where the President of the United States privately reviews classified documents. After they accidentally happen upon a priceless artifact - a 200 hundred-year-old dictionary that once belonged to George Washington, hidden underneath a desk chair, Beecher and Clementine find themselves suddenly entangled in a web of deception, conspiracy, and murder. Soon a man is dead, and Beecher is on the run as he races to learn the truth behind this mysterious national treasure. His search will lead him to discover a coded and ingenious puzzle that conceals a disturbing secret from the founding of our nation. It is a secret, Beecher soon discovers, that some believe is worth killing for. Gripping, fast-paced, and filled with the fascinating historical detail for which he is famous, The Inner Circle is a thrilling novel that once again proves Brad Meltzer as a brilliant author writing at the height of his craft.

Download or read book The Shadow and Its Shadow written by Paul Hammond and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2000-11 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Shadow and Its Shadow is a classic collection of writings by the Surrealists on their mad love of moviegoing. The forty-odd theoretical, polemical, and poetical re-visions of the seventh art in this anthology document Surrealism's scandalous and nonreductive take on film. Writing between 1918 and 1977, the essayists include such names as Andréeacute; Breton, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Salvador Dalíiacute;, Luis Buñntilde;uel, and man Ray, as well as many of the less famous though equally fascinating figures of the movement. Paul Hammond's introduction limns the history of Surrealist cinemania, highlighting how these revolutionary poets, artists, and philosophers sifted the silt of commercial-often Hollywood-cinema for the odd fleck of gold, the windfall movie that, somehow slipping past the censor, questioned the dominant order. Such prospecting pivoted around the notion of lyrical behavior-as depicted on the screen and as lived in the movie house. The representation of such behavior led the Surrealists to valorize the manifest content of such denigrated genres as silent and sound comedy, romantic melodrama, film noir, horror movies. As to lived experience, moviegoing Surrealists looked to the spectacle's latent meaning, reading films as the unwitting providers of redemptive sequences that could be mentally clipped out of their narrative context and inserted into daily life-there, to provoke new adventures. "Hammond's book is a reminder of the wealth and range of surrealist writings on the cinema. . . . [T]he work represented here is still challenging and genuinely eccentric, locating itself in an 'ethic' of love, reverie and revolt." --Sight & Sound "Hammond, who is the author of the invaluable anthology The Shadow and its Shadow: Surrealist Writing on the Cinema (1978), writes about cinema independently of the changing academic and cultural fashions of film theory and abhors the dogmas of contemporary border-patrol thought. His magnetically appealing free-wheeling form of erudite film-critical writing is recognisable for its iconoclastic humour, non-authoritarian verve and playful witty discursivity." --John Conomos, Senses of Cinema Paul Hammond is a writer, editor, and translator living in Barcelona. He is the author of Constellations of Miróoacute;, Breton which was published by City Lights.