Download or read book Poking Seaweed with a Stick and Running Away from the Smell written by Alison Whitelock and published by Polygon. This book was released on 2009-03-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alison Whitelock dreamed of shooting her father with a sawn-off shotgun. Her brother planned to use the longest knife in the cutlery drawer, and her mother tried to poison him with out-of-date tranquilizers. And he deserved it. This wee book is a bittersweet account of growing up in Scotland in the strange and brutal kingdom we call home. But Poking Seaweed with a Stick is anything but a tale of childhood suffering. With a whimsical disregard for all that's proper, Alison Whitelock tells her story not as an adult remembering her past, but as the child who experienced "all that shite" first hand. Like the day her ponies Rusty and Silver got carted off to the glue factory; the day her school pal Fiona caught a brain tumor and died; and, not to mention the terrible shame of the blue-tit collage and the porridge bowl at Brownie camp. Poking Seaweed with a Stick & Running Away from the Smell is Alison's first book. Her Da hopes it will be her last.
Download or read book Meeting Mr Kim Or how I Went to Korea and Learned to Love Kimchi written by Jennifer Barclay and published by Wakefield Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'It is high time that a new book be written about Korea, and Jennifer Barclay's fresh, amusing and light-hearted take on the country seems to be precisely the right approach.' - Simon Winchester. Feeling professionally burned out after turning 30, Jennifer Barclay had a hankering to experience something different. But after quitting her job and moving to South Korea with her boyfriend, she soon found life in Seoul lonely and bewildering. Desperate to connect with Korean life and people, she wandered the country alone, where the people's kindness and pride in their culture slowly began to work its magic.
Download or read book Cheat Sheets written by Edward O'Dwyer and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2018-06-18 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 108 stories of infidelity ""Disturbingly knowing and knowingly disturbing, Edward O'Dwyer comes at his delicate subject matter with a playful and razor eye. These are shards that insist on being read, and then read again."" Alan McMonagle, author of 'Psychotic Episodes' and 'Ithaca' ""Cheat Sheets (is) an astonishing collection of vignettes about life, love, lust and relationships, which are jaw-droppingly hilarious, tender, strange, potent and weirdly charming--all at the same time. I laughed out loud in public too many times, the laughs often interrupted with sharp intakes of breath, as stories took outrageously i-didn't-see-that-coming turns. If I have any advice for readers when they sit down with this collection, it is this: pace yourself. Like a packet of Nestl 's Rolos or a family size packet of salt & vinegar crisps, you won't want these stories to end."" Ali Whitelock, author of 'and my heart crumples like a coke can' and 'Poking seaweed with a stick and running away from the smell'
Download or read book Amore and Amaretti written by Victoria Cosford and published by Wakefield Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagine visiting Florence to study Italian and being swept off your feet by a charming chef who takes you speeding through the moonlit hills in his Fiat to visit the village of his childhood, and into the kitchens of his Tuscan restaurants where he teaches you to cook.
Download or read book Maybe I Ll Be Cleverer Tomorrow written by Pamela Bradley and published by Balboa Press. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The train rolls slowly into the platform, and there he is the man who for over four decades I have thought of as tough and critical, a man who could impale me with a few carefully chosen words. As I alight and walk towards him, I wonder what the hell the next few days will bring. When Pamela Bradley stepped off the train in Murwillumbah to visit her father, who at seventy-eight had chosen to live a solitary life Up North far from his family, she had no idea she was at the beginning of an intensely emotional journey. Faced with his slow decline, she set out to delve into his past to find those influences that might have shaped his character and helped to define her own, discovering much along the way that came as a complete surprise. In Maybe Ill Be Cleverer Tomorrow, Bradley shares an honest and personal memoir told with insight, humour and tenderness as she seamlessly moves between past and present. Throughout the story, she weaves some of the vital issues about loss, ageing and death that affect everyone, while the vignettes of a childhood and adolescence in the 1940s, 50s and 60s offer glimpses into an Australia that has long since disappeared.
Download or read book And My Heart Crumples Like a Coke Can written by Ali Whitelock and published by Polygon. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This humourous, accessible collection explores a diverse range of themes: death, infidelity, politics, homesickness, racism, humanity as well as every day life. The topics, found within the lines of this book, are portrayed with such humour and warmth they will delight, shock and amuse readers in equal measure. Reading this collection has been described as, 'feeling like I was at a book festival, stand-up comedy night and therapy session all at once. Every poem is an event.' Kevin MacNeil, author of The Brilliant & Forever, A Method Actor's Guide to Jekyll and Hyde and The Stornoway Way. Raw, beautiful and completely devoid of pretension, Ali Whitelock's poems will speak to anyone who's ever messed up, been confused or wished they'd done things differently.
Download or read book It s Like This Cat written by Emily Neville and published by Courier Dover Publications. This book was released on 2017-02-22 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dave has the usual adolescent problems, mitigated by the consoling company of his cat. Recounted with humor and a realistic teenage voice, this Newbery Award winner unfolds amid the excitement of 1960s New York City. "Superb." — The New York Times.
Download or read book Blindsight written by Peter Watts and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2006-10-03 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book The Percy Jackson and the Olympians Book Three Titan s Curse written by Rick Riordan and published by Disney-Hyperion. This book was released on 2007-05 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this third book of the acclaimed series, Percy and his friends are escorting two new half-bloods safely to camp when they are intercepted by a manticore and learn that the goddess Artemis has been kidnapped.
Download or read book Unbroken written by Laura Hillenbrand and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more. In boyhood, Louis Zamperini was an incorrigible delinquent. As a teenager, he channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics. But when World War II began, the athlete became an airman, embarking on a journey that led to a doomed flight on a May afternoon in 1943. When his Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean, against all odds, Zamperini survived, adrift on a foundering life raft. Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater. Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor; brutality with rebellion. His fate, whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will. Appearing in paperback for the first time—with twenty arresting new photos and an extensive Q&A with the author—Unbroken is an unforgettable testament to the resilience of the human mind, body, and spirit, brought vividly to life by Seabiscuit author Laura Hillenbrand. Hailed as the top nonfiction book of the year by Time magazine • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography and the Indies Choice Adult Nonfiction Book of the Year award “Extraordinarily moving . . . a powerfully drawn survival epic.”—The Wall Street Journal “[A] one-in-a-billion story . . . designed to wrench from self-respecting critics all the blurby adjectives we normally try to avoid: It is amazing, unforgettable, gripping, harrowing, chilling, and inspiring.”—New York “Staggering . . . mesmerizing . . . Hillenbrand’s writing is so ferociously cinematic, the events she describes so incredible, you don’t dare take your eyes off the page.”—People “A meticulous, soaring and beautifully written account of an extraordinary life.”—The Washington Post “Ambitious and powerful . . . a startling narrative and an inspirational book.”—The New York Times Book Review “Magnificent . . . incredible . . . [Hillenbrand] has crafted another masterful blend of sports, history and overcoming terrific odds; this is biography taken to the nth degree, a chronicle of a remarkable life lived through extraordinary times.”—The Dallas Morning News “An astonishing testament to the superhuman power of tenacity.”—Entertainment Weekly “A tale of triumph and redemption . . . astonishingly detailed.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “[A] masterfully told true story . . . nothing less than a marvel.”—Washingtonian “[Hillenbrand tells this] story with cool elegance but at a thrilling sprinter’s pace.”—Time “Hillenbrand [is] one of our best writers of narrative history. You don’t have to be a sports fan or a war-history buff to devour this book—you just have to love great storytelling.”—Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Download or read book Farewell to Manzanar written by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2002 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A true story of Japanese American experience during and after the World War internment.
Download or read book The Power of the Dog The fig tree written by Kathleen Killikelly and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Kaufman Field Guide to Nature of New England written by Kenn Kaufman and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2012 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an illustrated field guide to the plants, wildlife, night sky, and natural environments of New England.
Download or read book Al Capone Does My Shirts written by Gennifer Choldenko and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-04-20 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Newbery Honor Book and New York Times Bestseller that is historical fiction with a hint of mystery about living at Alcatraz not as a prisoner, but as a kid meeting some of the most famous criminals in our history. Al Capone Does My Shirts has become an instant classic for all kids to read! Today I moved to Alcatraz, a twelve-acre rock covered with cement, topped with bird turd and surrounded by water. I'm not the only kid who lives here. There are twenty-three other kids who live on the island because their dads work as guards or cooks or doctors or electricians for the prison, like my dad does. And then there are a ton of murderers, rapists, hit men, con men, stickup men, embezzlers, connivers, burglars, kidnappers and maybe even an innocent man or two, though I doubt it. The convicts we have are the kind other prisons don't want. I never knew prisons could be picky, but I guess they can. You get to Alcatraz by being the worst of the worst. Unless you're me. I came here because my mother said I had to. A Newbery Honor Book A New York Times Bestseller A People magazine "Best kid's Book" An ALA Book for Young Adults An ALA Notable Book A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year A Krikus Reviews Editor's Choice A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year A Parents' Choice Silver Honor Book A New York Public Library "100 Titles for Reading and Sharing" Selection A New York Public Library Best Book for the Teen Age *"Choldenko's pacing is exquisite. . . . [A] great read."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review *"Exceptionally atmospheric, fast-paced and memorable!"—Publishers Weekly, starred review *"The story, told with humor and skill, will fascinate readers."—School Library Journal, starred review "Al is the perfect novel for a young guy or moll who digs books by Gordon Korman, or Louis Sachar."—Time Out New York for Kids "Funny situations and plot twists abound!"—People magazine "Heartstopping in some places, heartrending in others, and most of all, it is heartwarming."—San Francisco Chronicle
Download or read book The Secret of Our Success written by Joseph Henrich and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How our collective intelligence has helped us to evolve and prosper Humans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? This book shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains—on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations. Drawing insights from lost European explorers, clever chimpanzees, mobile hunter-gatherers, neuroscientific findings, ancient bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich demonstrates how our collective brains have propelled our species' genetic evolution and shaped our biology. Our early capacities for learning from others produced many cultural innovations, such as fire, cooking, water containers, plant knowledge, and projectile weapons, which in turn drove the expansion of our brains and altered our physiology, anatomy, and psychology in crucial ways. Later on, some collective brains generated and recombined powerful concepts, such as the lever, wheel, screw, and writing, while also creating the institutions that continue to alter our motivations and perceptions. Henrich shows how our genetics and biology are inextricably interwoven with cultural evolution, and how culture-gene interactions launched our species on an extraordinary evolutionary trajectory. Tracking clues from our ancient past to the present, The Secret of Our Success explores how the evolution of both our cultural and social natures produce a collective intelligence that explains both our species' immense success and the origins of human uniqueness.
Download or read book Touching Spirit Bear written by Ben Mikaelsen and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-04-20 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his Nautilus Award-winning classic Touching Spirit Bear, author Ben Mikaelson delivers a powerful coming-of-age story of a boy who must overcome the effects that violence has had on his life. After severely injuring Peter Driscal in an empty parking lot, mischief-maker Cole Matthews is in major trouble. But instead of jail time, Cole is given another option: attend Circle Justice, an alternative program that sends juvenile offenders to a remote Alaskan Island to focus on changing their ways. Desperate to avoid prison, Cole fakes humility and agrees to go. While there, Cole is mauled by a mysterious white bear and left for dead. Thoughts of his abusive parents, helpless Peter, and his own anger cause him to examine his actions and seek redemption—from the spirit bear that attacked him, from his victims, and, most importantly, from himself. Ben Mikaelsen paints a vivid picture of a juvenile offender, examining the roots of his anger without absolving him of responsibility for his actions, and questioning a society in which angry people make victims of their peers and communities. Touching Spirit Bear is a poignant testimonial to the power of a pain that can destroy, or lead to healing. A strong choice for independent reading, sharing in the classroom, homeschooling, and book groups.
Download or read book A Little History of the World written by E. H. Gombrich and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: E. H. Gombrich's Little History of the World, though written in 1935, has become one of the treasures of historical writing since its first publication in English in 2005. The Yale edition alone has now sold over half a million copies, and the book is available worldwide in almost thirty languages. Gombrich was of course the best-known art historian of his time, and his text suggests illustrations on every page. This illustrated edition of the Little History brings together the pellucid humanity of his narrative with the images that may well have been in his mind's eye as he wrote the book. The two hundred illustrations—most of them in full color—are not simple embellishments, though they are beautiful. They emerge from the text, enrich the author's intention, and deepen the pleasure of reading this remarkable work. For this edition the text is reset in a spacious format, flowing around illustrations that range from paintings to line drawings, emblems, motifs, and symbols. The book incorporates freshly drawn maps, a revised preface, and a new index. Blending high-grade design, fine paper, and classic binding, this is both a sumptuous gift book and an enhanced edition of a timeless account of human history.
