Download or read book The Afghan Vampires Book Club written by Gary Barker and published by . This book was released on 2015-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Afghan Vampires Book Club is an edgy, political and thrillingly contemporary novel about America's war in Afghanistan. The novel is a dark and satirical examination of the way the US treats its veterans, and of the ultimate foolishness of armed conflict and violence.
Download or read book The Southern Book Club s Guide to Slaying Vampires written by Grady Hendrix and published by Quirk Books. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This funny and fresh take on a classic tale manages to comment on gender roles, racial disparities, and white privilege all while creeping me all the way out. So good.”—Zakiya Dalila Harris, author of The Other Black Girl Steel Magnolias meets Dracula in this New York Times best-selling horror novel about a women's book club that must do battle with a mysterious newcomer to their small Southern town. Bonus features: • Reading group guide for book clubs • Hand-drawn map of Mt. Pleasant • Annotated true-crime reading list by Grady Hendrix • And more! Patricia Campbell’s life has never felt smaller. Her husband is a workaholic, her teenage kids have their own lives, her senile mother-in-law needs constant care, and she’s always a step behind on her endless to-do list. The only thing keeping her sane is her book club, a close-knit group of Charleston women united by their love of true crime. At these meetings they’re as likely to talk about the Manson family as they are about their own families. One evening after book club, Patricia is viciously attacked by an elderly neighbor, bringing the neighbor's handsome nephew, James Harris, into her life. James is well traveled and well read, and he makes Patricia feel things she hasn’t felt in years. But when children on the other side of town go missing, their deaths written off by local police, Patricia has reason to believe James Harris is more of a Bundy than a Brad Pitt. The real problem? James is a monster of a different kind—and Patricia has already invited him in. Little by little, James will insinuate himself into Patricia’s life and try to take everything she took for granted—including the book club—but she won’t surrender without a fight in this blood-soaked tale of neighborly kindness gone wrong.
Download or read book The Time Has Come written by Michael Kaufman and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “For too long the struggle for the rights of women and girls was seen as women’s business. Of course, it’s equally men’s business and stops being such a struggle when it’s seen that way. This reframing gives us a chance to understand violence against women as deeply toxic for us all.” —Phumzile Mlambo–Ngcuka, UN Under–Secretary–General and Executive Director of UN Women The Time Has Come explores how a patriarchal culture that has given power to men comes at a huge cost to women, children, and, surprisingly, to men as well. It details how very achievable changes in our workplaces, in the ways we raise boys to be men, and in the movement to end men’s violence will bring significant rewards to communities all around the world. Michael Kaufman is the cofounder of the White Ribbon Campaign—the largest international network of men working to end violence against women—and for decades has been an advisor on gender equality to the United Nations, governments, NGOs, schools, and workplaces around the world. With honest storytelling, compassion, and hard–hitting analysis, The Time Has Come is a compelling look at why men must take a stand in the fight for general equality.
Download or read book The Last Exit written by Michael Kaufman and published by Crooked Lane Books. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perfect for fans of Ben Winters and Cory Doctorow. In this thrilling near-future novel, the secret to eternal life is closely guarded by people who will do anything to protect it--even if it means destroying everything in their path. Set in Washington D.C. in the near future, climate change has hit hard, fires are burning, unemployment is high, and controversial longevity treatments are only available to the very rich. Enter resourceful young police detective, Jen B. Lu, and her 'partner', Chandler, a SIM implant in her brain and her instant link to the Internet and police records, and constant voice inside her head. He's an inquisitive tough guy, with a helluva sense of humor and his own ideas about solving crimes. As a detective in the Elder Abuse unit, Jen is supposed to be investigating kids pushing their aging parents to "exit" so they are eligible to get the longevity drug. But what really has her attention are the persistent rumors about Eden, an illegal version of the longevity drug, and the bizarre outbreak of people aging almost overnight, then suddenly dying--is this all connected? Is Big Pharma involved? When Jen's investigations of Eden take her too close to the truth, she is suspended, Chandler is deactivated, and her boyfriend is freaked out by "the thing inside her brain." This leaves Jen to pursue a very dangerous investigation all by herself.
Download or read book The Last Resort written by Michael Kaufman and published by Crooked Lane Books. This book was released on 2023-01-10 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Margaret Atwood meets Raymond Chandler meets Greta Thunberg: Jen Lu is back on the case when the death of a lawyer sparks an even more intriguing mystery in Michael Kaufman’s second book in the thrilling series. It’s March 2034, six months after D.C. police detective Jen Lu and Chandler, her sentient bio-computer and wannabe tough guy implanted in her brain, cracked the mystery of Eden. The climate crisis is hitting harder than ever: a mega-hurricane has devastated the eco-system and waves of refugees pour into Washington, D.C. Environmental lawyer and media darling Patty Garcia dies in a bizarre accident on a golf course. Of the seven billion people on the planet, only Jen thinks she was murdered. After all, Garcia just won a court case for massive climate change reparations to be paid out by oil, gas, and coal companies. Jen is warned off, but she and Chandler start digging. Signs point to Garcia’s abusive ex, a former oil giant, but soon Jen turns up more suspects who have an even greater motive for committing murder Soon Jen is in the crosshairs of those who will ensure the truth never comes to light, no matter the cost. She has to move quickly before she becomes next on the killer’s list.
Download or read book The Anthropocene Unconscious written by Mark Bould and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Ducks, Newburyport to zombie movies and the Fast and Furious franchise, how climate anxiety permeates our culture The art and literature of our time is pregnant with catastrophe, with weather and water, wildness and weirdness. The Anthropocene - the term given to this geological epoch in which humans, anthropos, are wreaking havoc on the earth - is to be found bubbling away everywhere in contemporary cultural production. Typically, discussions of how culture registers, figures and mediates climate change focus on 'climate fiction' or 'cli-fi', but The Anthropocene Unconscious is more interested in how the Anthropocene and especially anthropogenic climate destabilisation manifests in texts that are not overtly about climate change - that is, unconsciously. The Anthropocene, Mark Bould argues, constitutes the unconscious of 'the art and literature of our time'. Tracing the outlines of the Anthropocene unconscious in a range of film, television and literature - across a range of genres and with utter disregard for high-low culture distinctions - this playful and riveting book draws out some of the things that are repressed and obscured by the term 'the Anthropocene', including capital, class, imperialism, inequality, alienation, violence, commodification, patriarchy and racial formations. The Anthropocene Unconscious is about a kind of rewriting. It asks: what happens when we stop assuming that the text is not about the anthropogenic biosphere crises engulfing us? What if all the stories we tell are stories about the Anthropocene? About climate change?
Download or read book Dead to the World written by Charlaine Harris and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-05-03 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychic Sookie Stackhouse has her hands full with an amnesiac vampire in the fourth seductive novel in the #1 New York Times bestselling series—the inspiration for the HBO® original series True Blood. When cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse sees a naked man on the side of the road, she doesn’t just drive on by. Turns out the poor thing hasn’t a clue who he is, but Sookie does. It’s the vampire Eric Northman—but now he’s a kinder, gentler Eric. And a scared Eric, because whoever took his memory now wants his life. Sookie’s investigation into why leads straight into a dangerous battle among witches, vampires, and werewolves. But a greater danger could be to Sookie’s heart—because the kinder, gentler Eric is very difficult to resist...
Download or read book Dying to be Men written by Gary Thomas Barker and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on field research and interviews this text discusses the challenges faced by young men in poor urban settings and examines education, employment, sexual behaviour, HIV/AIDS and violence.
Download or read book The Museum of Lost Love written by Gary Barker and published by World Editions. This book was released on 2019-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tyler is in therapy. Katia and Goran are in love. On a summer trip to Zagreb, the couple discover an unusual museum that displays mementos of broken relationships. Inside, Goran stumbles upon an exhibit that seems to be addressed to him, from a girl he met in a Sarajevo refugee camp at age fourteen. What follows is a whirlwind summer of reconnecting with lost pasts: Goran confronts the youth he lost during the Yugoslav Wars, Katia heads to Brazil to find her roots, and Afghanistan veteran Tyler pours out his soul. Set against alternating backdrops of violent circumstances, this novel is a soulful testament to the resilience of the human heart. 'Told with grace and passion, Mary of Kivu is an intriguing story that shows humanity's gift to forgive is greater than its genius to destroy.' SHEREEN EL FEKI, author of Sex and the Citadel (for Mary of Kivu) 'I was incredibly impressed with Mary of Kivu. Hemmingway without the false macho energy.' RICHARD REYES-GAVILAN, Executive Director, Washington DC Public Libraries (for Mary of Kivu)
Download or read book Urban Girls written by Gary Barker and published by Intermediate Technology Publications. This book was released on 2000 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The text focuses on the way in which low-cost programmes can help at-risk girls and young women in four difficult circumstances - street living, domestic servitude, sex work and teenage motherhood - improve their lives. It uses the work of the Consortium for Street Children UK as a case study.
Download or read book Operation Oleander written by Valerie O. Patterson and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ninth-grader Jess Westmark had the best of intentions when she started Operation Oleander to raise money for a girls’ orphanage in Kabul. She named her charity for the oleander that grows both in her Florida hometown and in Afghanistan, where her father is deployed. But on one of her father's trips to deliver supplies to the orphans, a car bomb explodes nearby and her father is gravely injured. Worse, her best friend’s mother and some of the children are killed, and people are blaming Operation Oleander for turning the orphanage into a military target for the Taliban. Is this all Jess’s fault?
Download or read book Breaking Dawn written by Stephenie Meyer and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2008-08-02 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the explosive finale to the epic romantic saga, Bella has one final choice to make. Should she stay mortal and strengthen her connection to the werewolves, or leave it all behind to become a vampire? When you loved the one who was killing you, it left you no options. How could you run, how could you fight, when doing so would hurt that beloved one? If your life was all you had to give, how could you not give it? If it was someone you truly loved? To be irrevocably in love with a vampire is both fantasy and nightmare woven into a dangerously heightened reality for Bella Swan. Pulled in one direction by her intense passion for Edward Cullen, and in another by her profound connection to werewolf Jacob Black, a tumultuous year of temptation, loss, and strife have led her to the ultimate turning point. Her imminent choice to either join the dark but seductive world of immortals or to pursue a fully human life has become the thread from which the fates of two tribes hangs. This astonishing, breathlessly anticipated conclusion to the Twilight Saga illuminates the secrets and mysteries of this spellbinding romantic epic. It's here! #1 bestselling author Stephenie Meyer makes a triumphant return to the world of Twilight with the highly anticipated companion, Midnight Sun: the iconic love story of Bella and Edward told from the vampire's point of view. "People do not want to just read Meyer's books; they want to climb inside them and live there." -- Time "A literary phenomenon." -- The New York Times
Download or read book The Guy s Guide to Feminism written by Michael Kaufman and published by Seal Press. This book was released on 2011-10-25 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by and for men, the ultimate guide to becoming a strong male ally in the 21st century In just one generation, age-old ideas about women have been swept aside . . . but what does that have to do with men? Authors Michael Kaufman and Michael Kimmel, two of the world's leading male advocates of gender equality, believe it has everything to do with them -- and that it's crucial to educate men about feminism in order for them to fully understand just how important and positive these changes have been for them. Kaufman and Kimmel address these issues in The Guy's Guide to Feminism. Hip and accessible, it contains nearly a hundred entries -- from "Autonomy" to "Zero Tolerance" -- written in varying tones (humorous, satirical, irreverent, thoughtful, and serious) and in many forms ("top ten" lists, comics, interviews, mini-stories, and more). Each topic celebrates the ongoing gains that are improving the lives of women and girls -- and what that really means for men. Informal and fun yet substantive and intelligent, The Guy's Guide to Feminism illustrates how understanding and supporting feminism can help men live richer, fuller, and happier lives.
Download or read book Mona written by Pola Oloixarac and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Both a wicked satire of the literary élite and an exploration of art and violence . . . Terrifying, brilliant, and dangerous." —The New Yorker Mona, a Peruvian writer based in California, presents a tough and sardonic exterior. She likes drugs and cigarettes, and when she learns that she is something of an anthropological curiosity—a woman writer of color treasured at her university for the flourish of rarefied diversity she brings—she pokes fun at American academic culture and its fixation on identity. When she is nominated for “the most important literary award in Europe,” Mona sees a chance to escape her downward spiral of sunlit substance abuse and erotic distraction, so she trades the temptations of California for a small, gray village in Sweden, close to the Arctic Circle. Now she is stuck in the company of all her jet-lagged—and mostly male—competitors, arriving from Japan, France, Armenia, Iran, and Colombia. Isolated as they are, the writers do what writers do: exchange compliments, nurse envy and private resentments, stab rivals in the back, and hop in bed together. All the while, Mona keeps stumbling across the mysterious traces of a violence she cannot explain. As her adventures in Scandinavia unfold, Mona finds that she has not so much escaped her demons as locked herself up with them in the middle of nowhere. In Mona, Pola Oloixarac paints a hypnotic, scabrous, and ultimately jaw-dropping portrait of a woman facing down a hipster elite to which she does and does not belong. A survivor of both patronization and bizarre sexual encounters, Mona is a new kind of feminist. But her past won’t stay past, and strange forces are working to deliver her the test of a lifetime.
Download or read book Armor written by John Steakley and published by Astra Publishing House. This book was released on 1984-12-04 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The military sci-fi classic of courage on a dangerous alien planet The planet is called Banshee. The air is unbreathable, the water is poisonous. It is home to the most implacable enemies that humanity, in all its interstellar expansion, has ever encountered. Body armor has been devised for the commando forces that are to be dropped on Banshee—the culmination of ten thousand years of the armorers’ craft. A trooper in this armor is a one-man, atomic powered battle fortress. But he will have to fight a nearly endless horde of berserk, hard-shelled monsters—the fighting arm of a species which uses biological technology to design perfect, mindless war minions. Felix is a scout in A-team Two. Highly competent, he is the sole survivor of mission after mission. Yet he is a man consumed by fear and hatred. And he is protected, not only by his custom-fitted body armor, but by an odd being which seems to live within him, a cold killing machine he calls “The Engine.” This is Felix’s story—a story of the horror, the courage, and the aftermath of combat, and the story, too, of how strength of spirit can be the greatest armor of all.
Download or read book Words in the Dust written by Trent Reedy and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Christopher Medal and a "heart-wrenching" Al Roker's Book Club selection on the Today Show. Zulaikha hopes. She hopes for peace, now that the Taliban have been driven from Afghanistan; a good relationship with her hard stepmother; and one day even to go to school, or to have her cleft palate fixed. Zulaikha knows all will be provided for her--"Inshallah," God willing. Then she meets Meena, who offers to teach her the Afghan poetry she taught her late mother. And the Americans come to her village, promising not just new opportunities and dangers, but surgery to fix her face. These changes could mean a whole new life for Zulaikha--but can she dare to hope they'll come true?
Download or read book First Casualty written by Toby Harnden and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning journalist reveals the dramatic true story of the CIA's Team Alpha, the first Americans to be dropped behind enemy lines in Afghanistan after 9/11. America is reeling; Al-Qaeda has struck and thousands are dead. The country scrambles to respond, but the Pentagon has no plan for Afghanistan—where Osama bin Laden masterminded the attack and is protected by the Taliban. Instead, the CIA steps forward to spearhead the war. Eight CIA officers are dropped into the mountains of northern Afghanistan on October 17, 2001. They are Team Alpha, an eclectic band of linguists, tribal experts, and elite warriors: the first Americans to operate inside Taliban territory. Their covert mission is to track down Al- Qaeda and stop the terrorists from infiltrating the United States again. First Casualty places you with Team Alpha as the CIA rides into battle on horseback alongside the warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum. In Washington, DC, few trust that the CIA men, the Green Berets, and the Americans’ outnumbered Afghan allies can prevail before winter sets in. On the ground, Team Alpha is undeterred. The Taliban is routed but hatches a plot with Al-Qaeda to hit back. Hundreds of suicidal fighters, many hiding weapons, fake a surrender and are transported to Qala-i Jangi—the “Fort of War.” Team Alpha’s Mike Spann, an ex-Marine, and David Tyson, a polyglot former Central Asian studies academic, seize America’s initial opportunity to extract intelligence from men trained by bin Laden—among them a young Muslim convert from California. The prisoners revolt and one CIA officer falls—the first casualty in America’s longest war, which will last two decades. The other CIA man shoots dead the Al-Qaeda jihadists attacking his comrade. To survive, he must fight his way out against overwhelming odds. Award-winning author Toby Harnden gained unprecedented access to all living Team Alpha members and every level of the CIA. Superbly researched, First Casualty draws on extensive interviews, secret documents, and deep reporting inside Afghanistan. As gripping as any adventure novel, yet intimate and profoundly moving, it tells how America found a winning strategy only to abandon it. Harnden reveals that the lessons of early victory and the haunting foretelling it contained—unreliable allies, ethnic rivalries, suicide attacks, and errant US bombs—were ignored, tragically fueling a twenty-year conflict. "Masterful, complex, and heartfelt, from the deeply personal to the critically strategic. Captures many lessons on many levels." —Ambassador Hank Crumpton, former senior CIA officer
