Download or read book The Reluctant Godfather written by Allison Tebo and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-01-31 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Burndee is a young and cantankerous fairy godfather, who would rather bake cakes than help humans. A disgrace to the fairy order, Burndee has only two wards entrusted to his care...a cinder girl and a charming prince. A royal ball presents Burndee with the brilliant solution of how to make his wards happy with the least amount of effort. He'll arrange a meeting and hope the two fall in love. A humorous and magical re-telling of Cinderella from a unique perspective.

Download or read book The Godfather written by Mario Puzo and published by Penguin Longman. This book was released on 1998 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Don Corleone is the Godfather, head of one of the richest families in New York and a gangster. His favourite son Michael is a lawyer who wants to lead a quiet life, but when Don Corleone is nearly killed by a rival Mafia family, Michael is soon drawn into the family business.

Download or read book In Praise of Nepotism written by Adam Bellow and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2004-07-13 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging, surprising, and eloquently argued book that offers a pragmatic and erudite look at the innate human inclination toward nepotism—from ancient Chinese clans to families like the Gores, Kennedys, and Bushes. • “Fascinating and well-researched.” —Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Code Breaker and Steve Jobs Nepotism is one of those social habits we all claim to deplore in America; it offends our sense of fair play and our pride in living in a meritocracy. But somehow nepotism prevails; we all want to help our own and a quick glance around reveals any number of successful families whose sons and daughters have gone on to accomplish objectively great things, even if they got a little help from their parents. Bellow explores how nepotism has produced both positive and negative effects throughout history. As he argues, nepotism practiced badly or haphazardly is an embarrassment to all (including the incompetent beneficiary), but nepotism practiced well can satisfy a deep biological urge to provide for our children and even benefit society as a whole. In Praise of Nepotism is a judicious look at a controversial but timeless subject that has never been explored with such depth or candor, and a fascinating natural history of how families work.

Download or read book The Reluctant King written by L. Sprague de Camp and published by Baen Books. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The King had a good head on his shoulders—for the moment, anyway. Everyone agreed that King Jorian of Xylar had been a good and just ruler. In fact, many also agreed that, in this case, it was a pity that the laws of Xylar decreed that each randomly chosen King must reign for only five years and then, after due pomp and ceremony, have his head cut off! Understandably, Jorian himself was wholeheartedly in agreement with the second sentiment, so with the help of a spell provided by the wizard Karadur, he escaped from the beheading ceremony with his head still on his shoulders. Unfortunately, his beloved wife, Queen Estrildis, was left behind, and getting her out of Xylar would be anything but simple—particularly with the Royal Guard of Xylar hot on the trail of their fugitive monarch. With Karadur's magic, Jorian might be able to pull off the rescue. But first, he would have to locate a trove of ancient spells, deal with an enemy wizard, steal an item from a 500-year-old (but still beautiful) princess who turns into a giant serpent at inopportune moments, repair the giant tower clocks of Iraz to fulfill a prophecy, break a pirate siege, and finally fly back to Xylar in an enchanted bathtub and whisk away his beloved Estrildis before the Royal Guard notices that their King (not to mention his head) has returned. Then things began to get complicated... At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

Download or read book The Jaynes Legacy written by Lawrence Wile and published by Andrews UK Limited. This book was released on 2018-01-03 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Julian Jaynes' 1976 book, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, continues to arouse an unsettling ambivalence. Richard Dawkins called it "either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between". The present book suggests that the bicameral mind is a phantasm; the dating of the origin of consciousness contradicts archeological and literary evidence; and the theory contributes nothing toward explaining why some physical states are conscious while others are not because the nonconscious bicameral brain is neurophysiologically equivalent to the conscious brain. However, the author pays tribute to Jaynes's work as a work of "consummate genius" because it compels us to re-evaluate the significance of humankind's earliest traditions and texts that might shine light on the "very suspicious totem of evolutionary mythology" that consciousness has evolved continuously and gradually from worms to man. The present book suggests that the evolution of the relationship between consciousnesses, mass, energy, and spacetime radically changed nearly 6,000 years ago during the epigenetic, evolutionary degeneration of a little-known, threadlike structure originating from the center of the central nervous system called Reissner's fiber. The earliest Egyptian, Hebrew, Indian and Chinese traditions, buried beneath the dust of fallen Babel and thousands of years of distortions and disguisings, describe this process during the origin of religion and mystical traditions.

Download or read book Secrets of Great Rainmakers written by Jeffrey J. Fox and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2006-03-01 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Secrets of Great Rainmakers, you'll learn how to outsmart the competition and set yourself apart from the pack. In over 50 interviews with industry leaders from a wide variety of fields, bestselling author Jeffrey J. Fox will share the proven techniques and hard-won wisdom that have helped great rainmakers get ahead, along with his trademark brand of counterintuitive insight and commentary that have made his books so popular.

Download or read book My Longest Night written by Geneviève Duboscq and published by Arcade Publishing. This book was released on 1994 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Making of the Godfather written by Mario Puzo and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2015-01-13 with total page 57 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this entertaining and insightful essay, Mario Puzo chronicles his rise from struggling writer to overnight success after the publication of The Godfather. With equal parts cynicism and humor, Puzo recounts the book deal and his experiences in Hollywood while writing the screenplay for the movie. Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Evans, Peter Bart, Marlon Brando, and Al Pacino all make appearances-as does Frank Sinatra, in his famous and disastrous encounter with Puzo. First published in 1972, the essay is now available as an ebook for the first time. A must-have for every Godfather fan! Featuring a foreword by Ed Falco, author of The Family Corleone.

Download or read book The Reluctant Jihadist written by Umar A. Hassan and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2006-10-31 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book consists of 2 sections. Section 1 is an interview with, what else, a reluctant jihadist. The second section is a collection of 99 posted blogs with a few interesting twists.

Download or read book Nineteenth Century Fiction and the Production of Bloomsbury written by Matthew Ingleby and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-11-05 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores the role of fiction in the social production of the West Central district of London in the nineteenth century. It tells a new history of the novel from a local geographical perspective, tracing developments in the form as it engaged with Bloomsbury in the period it emerged as the city’s dominant literary zone. A neighbourhood that was subject simultaneously to socio-economic decline and cultural ascent, fiction set in Bloomsbury is shown to have reconceived the area’s marginality as potential autonomy. Drawing on sociological theory, this book critically historicizes Bloomsbury’s trajectory to show that its association with the intellectual “fraction” known as the ‘Bloomsbury Group’ at the beginning of the twentieth century was symptomatic rather than exceptional. From the 1820s onwards, writers positioned themselves socially within the metropolitan geography they projected through their fiction. As Bloomsbury became increasingly identified with the cultural capital of writers rather than the economic capital of established wealth, writers subtly affiliated themselves with the area, and the figure of the writer and Bloomsbury became symbolically conflated.

Download or read book Everything is an Afterthought written by Kevin Avery and published by Fantagraphics Books. This book was released on 2011-11-21 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happened to Paul Nelson? In the '60s, he pioneered rock & roll criticism with a first-person style of writing that would later be popularized by the likes of Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer as “New Journalism.” As co-founding editor of The Little Sandy Review and managing editor of Sing Out!, he’d already established himself, to use his friend Bob Dylan’s words, as “a folk-music scholar”; but when Dylan went electric in 1965, Nelson went with him. During a five-year detour at Mercury Records in the early 1970s, Nelson signed the New York Dolls to their first recording contract, then settled back down to writing criticism at Rolling Stone as the last in a great tradition of record-review editors that included Jon Landau, Dave Marsh, and Greil Marcus. Famously championing the early careers of artists like Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Rod Stewart, Neil Young, and Warren Zevon, Nelson not only wrote about them but often befriended them. Never one to be pigeonholed, he was also one of punk rock’s first stateside mainstream proponents, embracing the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. But in 1982, he walked away from it all — Rolling Stone, his friends, and rock & roll. By the time he died in his New York City apartment in 2006 at the age of seventy — a week passing before anybody discovered his body — almost everything he’d written had been relegated to back issues of old music magazines. How could a man whose writing had been so highly regarded have fallen so quickly from our collective memory? With Paul Nelson’s posthumous blessing, Kevin Avery spent four years researching and writing Everything Is an Afterthought: The Life and Writing of Paul Nelson. This unique anthology-biography compiles Nelson’s best works (some of it previously unpublished) while also providing a vivid account of his private and public lives. Avery interviewed almost 100 of Paul Nelson’s friends, family, and colleagues, including several of the artists about whom he’d written.

Download or read book A Royal Masquerade written by Allison Tebo and published by . This book was released on 2018-12-03 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A madcap and magical retelling of The Goose Girl from a unique perspective. Burndee can barely tolerate the mischievous Prince Colin, but the two of them are invariably thrown together in a way that keeps them at one another's throats. While attending a noblewoman's wedding, Burndee and Colin's private feud comes to a climax when Burndee loses his temper and does the unthinkable. With Prince Colin unable to attend to his royal duties and Burndee bound by an inconvenient spell, can the two of them work together long enough to unsnarl the mysterious goings-on around them? The next installment in "The Tales of Ambia" series from Allison Tebo. A Royal Masquerade is a new addition to the charming fairy tale tradition of Cameron Dokey and K.M. Shea.

Download or read book The Family Corleone written by and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2012-05-08 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exhilarating and profound novel of tradition and violence and of loyalty and betrayal, The Family Corleone will appeal to the legions of fans who can never get enough of The Godfather. New York, 1933: The city and the nation are in the depths of the Great Depression. The crime families of New York have prospered in this time, but with the coming end of Prohibition, a battle is looming that will determine which organizations will rise and which will face a violent end. For Vito Corleone, nothing is more important that his family's future. While his youngest children, Michael, Fredo, and Connie, are in school, unaware of their father's true occupation, and his adopted son Tom Hagen is a college student, he worries most about Sonny, his eldest child. Vito pushes Sonny to be a businessman, but Sonny-17 years-old, impatient and reckless-wants something else: To follow in his father's footsteps and become a part of the real family business.

Download or read book City Limits written by Stephanie Schwerter and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-01-13 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Belfast, Beirut and Berlin are notorious for their internal boundaries and borders. As symbols for political disunion, the three cities have inspired scriptwriters and directors from diverse cultural backgrounds. Despite their different histories, they share a wide range of features central to divided cities. In each city, particular territories take on specific symbolic and psychological meanings. Following a comparative approach, this book concentrates on the cinematographic representations of Belfast, Beirut and Berlin. Filmmakers are in constant search of new ways in order to engage with urban division. Making use of a variety of genres reaching from thriller to comedy, they explore the three cities' internal and external borders, as well as the psychological boundaries existing between citizens belonging to different communities. Among the characters featuring in films set in Belfast, Berlin and Beirut, we may count dangerous gunmen, prisoners' wives, soldiers and snipers, but also comic Stasi-members, punk aficionados and fake nuns. The various characters contribute to the creation of a multifaceted image of city limits in troubled times.

Download or read book Trumpet Blues written by Peter J. Levinson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999-11-18 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Swing is back in style, and with it a renewed interest in the Big Band Era. And few players dominated that era more than Harry James, whose soaring trumpet solos and romantic hit tunes influenced popular music for a generation. Now, Peter J. Levinson, who knew Harry James personally, has written a revealing biography of this jazz icon, based on nearly 200 interviews with musicians and friends. Harry James led a truly colorful life, and in Trumpet Blues Levinson captures it all. Beginning with James's childhood in a traveling circus, we follow the young trumpeter's meteoric rise in the 1930s and witness his electrifying performances with the Benny Goodman Orchestra. We see how James formed his own band in 1939, an incubator for many pop music stars of the 1940s and '50s, including Frank Sinatra, Connie Haines, Dick Haymes, Helen Forrest, and Kitty Kallen. Combined with James's superb musicianship, peerless trumpet technique and talented sidemen, this stellar group dominated the war years and the immediate post-war period. And James himself, especially after his marriage to film goddess Betty Grable, became one of America's most famous personalities and lived like true Hollywood royalty. Levinson describes their twenty-two-year marriage with insight and sympathy. But he shows how James's marriage--and his triumphant late-1950s comeback in Nevada's casinos--were slowly undermined by his penchant for compulsive gambling, womanizing, and alcoholism. He gives us the inside story of James's sybaritic life style, and probes the profound psychological reasons for James's destructive behavior. The first biography ever written on Harry James, Trumpet Blues is a scintillating portrait of Swing's brightest star--his life, his loves, and the music that defined an era.

Download or read book The Reluctant Wrangler written by Roxann Delaney and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nikki Johannson's new job at Oklahoma's Bent Tree Boys Ranch is a wish come true. As housemother and riding instructor to a passel of troubled kids, Nikki can do the work she loves. And finally meet someone she's been chasing down for years—ranch owner Tanner O'Brien. Someday, somehow, she'll tell him she's the sister he didn't know he had. William "Mac" MacGregor, Bent Tree's head wrangler, is looking for peace from his troubled past…so playing nursemaid to a bunch of juvenile delinquents and falling for Nikki Johannson are life complications he doesn't need. When Mac discovers Nikki has been lying to everyone at the ranch, including him, he takes matters into his own hands—because if there's one thing he can't stand, it's being deceived….

Download or read book The Infamous Sophie Dawes written by Adrian Searle and published by Pen and Sword History. This book was released on 2020-03-20 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of the British woman who left behind life in a brothel to become a baroness in a French chateau, and perhaps a killer. She was the daughter of an alcoholic Isle of Wight smuggler. Much of her childhood was spent in the island’s workhouse. Yet Sophie Dawes threw off the shackles of her downbeat formative years to become one of the most talked-about personalities in post-revolutionary France. It was the ultimate rags to riches story that would see her become the mistress of the fabulously wealthy French aristocrat Louis Henri de Bourbon, destined to be the last Prince of Condé. Her total subjugation of the aging prince, her obsessive desire for a position among the highest echelon of French royalist society following the Bourbon restoration, and her designs upon a hefty chunk of Louis Henri’s vast fortune would lead to scandal, sensation, and then infamy. The Infamous Sophie Dawes examines her island background before tracing her extraordinary rise from obscurity to becoming a baroness who ruled the prince’s château at Chantilly as its unofficial queen and intrigued with the King of the French to get what she wanted. But how far did she go? The book examines the mysterious death of Louis Henri in 1830 and uses newly discovered evidence in a bid to determine the part Sophie may have played in his demise. “Mouthwatering scandal, dangerous affairs, this story has the lot!” —Books Monthly