Download or read book The War Of The Flowers written by Tad Williams and published by Astra Publishing House. This book was released on 2006-09-05 with total page 881 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This standalone portal fantasy transports unsuccessful rockstar Theo Vilmos from modern California to a land of magic and mystery Returning to the fantasy genre that made him a coast-to-coast best-selling phenomenon, Tad Williams writes this stand-alone contemporary fantasy novel, set in Northern California—and also in the strange parallel world that coexists in the farthest reaches of the imagination.Theo Vilmos is a thirty-year-old lead singer in a not terribly successful rock band. Once, he had enormous, almost magical charisma, both onstage and off—but now, life has taken its toll on Theo. Hitting an all-time low, he seeks refuge in a isolated cabin in the woods. While there, he reads an odd memoir written by a dead relative who believed he had visited the magical world of Faerie. And before Theo can disregard the account as the writings of a madman, he, too, is drawn to a place beyond his wildest dreams...a place that will be, and has always been, his destiny.
Download or read book Flowers in the Gutter written by K. R. Gaddy and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of the Edelweiss Pirates, working-class teenagers who fought the Nazis by whatever means they could. Fritz, Gertrud, and Jean were classic outsiders: their clothes were different, their music was rebellious, and they weren’t afraid to fight. But they were also Germans living under Hitler, and any nonconformity could get them arrested or worse. As children in 1933, they saw their world change. Their earliest memories were of the Nazi rise to power and of their parents fighting Brownshirts in the streets, being sent to prison, or just disappearing. As Hitler’s grip tightened, these three found themselves trapped in a nation whose government contradicted everything they believed in. And by the time they were teenagers, the Nazis expected them to be part of the war machine. Fritz, Gertrud, and Jean and hundreds like them said no. They grew bolder, painting anti-Nazi graffiti, distributing anti-war leaflets, and helping those persecuted by the Nazis. Their actions were always dangerous. The Gestapo pursued and arrested hundreds of Edelweiss Pirates. In World War II’s desperate final year, some Pirates joined in sabotage and armed resistance, risking the Third Reich’s ultimate punishment. This is their story.
Download or read book Flowers of War written by Llŷr Gwyn Lewis and published by . This book was released on 2021-03 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the author is given a small package, containing letters and papers relating to his grandfathers brother, who was killed in Syria during the Second World War, it leads him on an extended personal journey. An exploration of history, imagination and the process of memory, shiftingimperceptibly from autobiography to travelogue, from letters and diaries to official records.
Download or read book Flowers for Sarajevo written by John McCutcheon and published by Holiday House. This book was released on 2024-01-16 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Young Drasko is happy working with his father in the Sarajevo market. Then war encroaches. Drasko must run the family flower stand alone. One morning, the bakery is bombed and twenty-two people are killed. The next day, a cellist walks to the bombsite and plays the most heartbreaking music Drasko can imagine. The cellist returns for twenty-two days, one day for each victim of the bombing. Inspired by the musician's response, Drasko finds a way to help make Sarajevo beautiful again. Inspired by real events of the Bosnian War, award-winning songwriter and storyteller John McCutcheon tells the uplifting story of the power of beauty in the face of violence and suffering. The story comes to life with the included CD in which cellist Vedran Smailović accompanies McCutcheon and performs the melody that he played in 1992 to honor those who died in the Sarajevo mortar blast.
Download or read book The Flowers of the Field written by Sarah Harrison and published by Orion. This book was released on 2013-05-23 with total page 702 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The million copy internationally bestselling novel of one family and the devastating effects of the First World War. 'Loved the book...a very moving and powerful read which had me in tears more than once. An easy 5 stars.' Goodreads reviewer, 5 stars 'Sarah Harrison shows herself to be more than equal to the complexities of her plot, handling its developments with impeccable timing' The Times Thea Tennant, eldest daughter of a wealthy industrialist father and beautiful aristocratic mother, yearns to do more than follow the traditional path laid out for her. When her beautiful but flighty sister Dulcie brings trouble to the family, both Thea and Dulcie are sent to relatives in Austria. But with the onset of War, their lives change beyond recognition. It isn't just the Tennants whose lives have changed: for their parlourmaid, Primmy, the War brings opportunities she is determined to take. From the Kent countryside to the suffragette movement in London and the horrors of the Western Front, THE FLOWERS OF THE FIELD is an epic novel of the dreams and aspirations of a generation who found a voice above history's most horrifying conflict. Readers love this dramatic and emotional wartime epic: 'for curling up on the sofa and getting totally and utterly lost in.' Amazon reviewer 'absorbing and gripping' Amazon reviewer 'Unbelievably good book' Amazon reviewer 'A work of extraordinary fictional daring...assured...always convinces' Weekend Telegraph
Download or read book The Scent of Secrets written by Jane Thynne and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in Europe, in 1938, during the tense run-up to war, and perfect for fans of Jacqueline Winspear, Charles Todd, Robert Harris, and Susan Elia MacNeal, this gripping historical novel features the half-British, half-German actress (and wholly covert spy) Clara Vine, who finds herself enmeshed in a dangerous game of subterfuge. The colorful, lively streets of Paris come as a welcome relief to Clara Vine after the dour countenance of Berlin, where bunkers and bomb shelters are being dug, soldiers march the streets in their high boots, and Jewish residents rush to make it home before curfew. Though Clara is in Paris to make a film, her true work is never far from her mind. Approached by a British intelligence officer, Clara is initially confounded by his request: Get close to Eva Braun and glean as much as she can about the Führer’s plans and intentions. Clara has already established friendships with several high-ranking Nazi wives, but Eva Braun is another matter altogether. Hitler keeps his “secret” girlfriend obsessively hidden, fiercely guarding their relationship as well as Eva’s delicate psychological state. From the gilded halls of the decadent City of Light to the cobbled, quaint streets of Munich, and even to the chilling, rarefied air of the Berghof, Hitler’s private mountaintop retreat, Clara flirts with discovery at every turn—and a dangerous, devious plot unfolds. Previously published in the U.K. as A War of Flowers “A brilliant tale of spies and secrets, of intense psychological drama, of edgy climax and one extraordinary heroine.”—Beatriz Williams, New York Times bestselling author of A Hundred Summers “A compelling story of love and betrayal in Hitler’s Berlin . . . Peppered with real-life characters, this series offers a fascinating glimpse of the extraordinary world of the Nazi wives.”—Daisy Goodwin, author of The American Heiress “An alluring blend of thrills, suspense, historic detail, and seduction.”—Susan Elia MacNeal, author of the Maggie Hope series “An extraordinary, absorbing read with an array of characters so real you’re there with them as war looms, and a pace that sweeps you from page to page. This is indeed a winner!”—Charles Todd, author of Inspector Ian Rutledge Mysteries Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more.
Download or read book The Flowers of the Forest written by Trevor Royle and published by Birlinn. This book was released on 2011-08-12 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the brink of the First World War, Scotland was regarded throughout the British Isles as 'the workshop of the Empire'. Not only were Clyde-built ships known the world over, Scotland produced half of Britain's total production of railway equipment, and the cotton and jute industries flourished in Paisley and Dundee. In addition, Scots were a hugely important source of manpower for the colonies. Yet after the war, Scotland became an industrial and financial backwater. Emigration increased as morale slumped in the face of economic stagnation and decline. The country had paid a disproportionately high price in casualties, a result of huge numbers of volunteers and the use of Scottish battalions as shock troops in the fighting on the Western Front and Gallipoli - young men whom the novelist Ian Hay called 'the vanished generation'. In this book, Trevor Royle provides the first full account of how the war changed Scotland irrevocably by exploring a wide range of themes - the overwhelming response to the call for volunteers; the performance of Scottish military formations in 1915 and 1916; the militarization of the Scottish homeland; the resistance to war in Glasgow and the west of Scotland; and the boom in the heavy industries and the strengthening of women's role in society following on from wartime employment.
Download or read book Winter Flowers written by Angélique Villeneuve and published by Peirene Press. This book was released on 2021-10-07 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's October 1918 and the war is drawing to a close. Toussaint Caillet returns home to his wife, Jeanne, and the young daughter he hasn't seen growing up. He is not coming back from the front line but from the department for facial injuries at Val-de-Grâce military hospital, where he has spent the last two years. For Jeanne, who has struggled to endure his absence and the hardships of wartime, her husband's return marks the beginning of a new battle. With the promise of peace now in sight, the family must try to stitch together a new life from the tatters of what they had before.
Download or read book All the Flowers in Paris written by Sarah Jio and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Sarah Jio weaves past and present in this eminently readable novel about love, gratitude, and forgiveness. I tore through the pages!”—New York Times bestselling author Christina Baker Kline Two women are connected across time by the city of Paris, a mysterious stack of love letters, and shocking secrets sweeping from World War II to the present—for readers of Sarah’s Key and The Nightingale. When Caroline wakes up in a Paris hospital with no memory of her past, she’s confused to learn that for years she’s lived a sad, reclusive life in a sprawling apartment on the rue Cler. Slowly regaining vague memories of a man and a young child, she vows to piece her life back together—though she can’t help but feel she may be in danger. A budding friendship with the chef of a charming nearby restaurant takes her mind off her foggy past, as does a startling mystery from decades prior. In Nazi-occupied Paris, a young widow named Céline is trying to build a new life for her daughter while working in her father’s flower shop and hoping to find love again. Then a ruthless German officer discovers her Jewish ancestry and Céline is forced to play a dangerous game to secure the safety of her loved ones. When her worst fears come true, she must fight back in order to save the person she loves most: her daughter. When Caroline discovers Céline’s letters tucked away in a closet, she realizes that her apartment harbors dark secrets—and that she may have more in common with Céline than she could have ever imagined. All the Flowers in Paris is an emotionally captivating novel rooted in the resiliency and strength of the human spirit, the steadfastness of a mother’s love, and the many complex layers of the heart—especially its capacity to forgive. “Heart-stopping . . . Fans of emotional, romantic stories set during World War II will enjoy this heartbreaking tale of love and loss.”—Booklist
Download or read book Vacuum Flowers written by Michael Swanwick and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cyberpunk thriller from Nebula Award winner Michael Swanwick that explores bioengineering, wetware, and the riddle of personality Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark is a recorded personality owned by corporate giant Deutsche Nakasone. When Rebel’s personality is uploaded to persona tester Eucrasia Walsh and burned into her brain, Rebel escapes the corporation and takes off across an exotically transformed solar system, hijacking Eucrasia’s body and becoming the most wanted fugitive in existence. A fast-paced technological thriller, Vacuum Flowers allows the reader to consider the implications of bioengineering while providing an entertaining and dynamic story. Reminiscent of the innovative work of Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling, this high-tech work of science fiction carves out a niche all its own with themes as relevant today as when it was first published.
Download or read book Flowers That Kill written by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-12 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Flowers are beautiful. People often communicate their love, sorrow, and other feelings to each other by offering flowers, like roses. Flowers can also be symbols of collective identity, as cherry blossoms are for the Japanese. But, are they also deceptive? Do people become aware when their meaning changes, perhaps as flowers are deployed by the state and dictators? Did people recognize that the roses they offered to Stalin and Hitler became a propaganda tool? Or were they like the Japanese, who, including the soldiers, did not realize when the state told them to fall like cherry blossoms, it meant their deaths? Flowers That Kill proposes an entirely new theoretical understanding of the role of quotidian symbols and their political significance to understand how they lead people, if indirectly, to wars, violence, and even self-exclusion and self-destruction precisely because symbolic communication is full of ambiguity and opacity. Using a broad comparative approach, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney illustrates how the aesthetic and multiple meanings of symbols, and at times symbols without images become possible sources for creating opacity which prevents people from recognizing the shifting meaning of the symbols.
Download or read book Waste written by Catherine Coleman Flowers and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The MacArthur grant–winning environmental justice activist’s riveting memoir of a life fighting for a cleaner future for America’s most vulnerable A Smithsonian Magazine Top Ten Best Science Book of 2020 Catherine Coleman Flowers, a 2020 MacArthur “genius,” grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that’s been called “Bloody Lowndes” because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today it’s Ground Zero for a new movement that is also Flowers’s life’s work—a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets and, as a consequence, live amid filth. Flowers calls this America’s dirty secret. In this “powerful and moving book” (Booklist), she tells the story of systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that foster Third World conditions not just in Alabama, but across America, in Appalachia, Central California, coastal Florida, Alaska, the urban Midwest, and on Native American reservations in the West. In this inspiring story of the evolution of an activist, from country girl to student civil rights organizer to environmental justice champion at Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, Flowers shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards—not only those of poor minorities.
Download or read book The Scent of Burnt Flowers written by Blitz Bazawule and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2023-09-05 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fleeing persecution in 1960s America, a Black couple seeks asylum in Ghana, but fresh dangers and old secrets threaten their newfound freedom in this hypnotic debut novel. “I am truly blown away by this novel.”—Jacqueline Woodson, New York Times bestselling author of Red at the Bone ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: CrimeReads When the windshield of his Chevy Impala shatters in a dark diner parking lot in Alabama, Melvin moves without thinking. A split-second reaction marrows in his bones from the days of war, but this time it is the safety of his fiancé, Bernadette, at stake. Impulse keeps them alive, and yet they flee with blood on their hands. What is life like now that they are fugitives? Pack passports. Empty bank accounts. Set their old life on fire. The couple disguise themselves as a pastor and a reluctant pastor’s wife who’s hiding a secret from her fiancé. With a persistent FBI agent on their trail, they travel to Ghana to seek the help of Melvin’s old college friend who happens to be the country’s embattled president, Kwame Nkrumah. The couple’s chance encounter with Ghana’s most beloved highlife musician, Kwesi Kwayson, who’s on his way to perform for the president, sparks a journey full of suspense, lust, magic, and danger as Nkrumah’s regime crumbles around them. What was meant to be a fresh start quickly spirals into chaos, threatening both their relationship and their lives. Kwesi and Bernadette’s undeniable attraction and otherworldly bond cascades during their three-day trek, and so does Melvin’s intense jealousy. All three must confront one another and their secrets, setting off a series of cataclysmic events. Steeped in the history and mythology of postcolonial West Africa at the intersection of the civil rights movement in America, this gripping and ambitious debut merges political intrigue, magical encounters, and forbidden romance in an epic collision of morality and power.
Download or read book Where Have All the Flowers Gone written by Ellen Emerson White and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1968 Massachusetts, after her brother Patrick goes to fight in Vietnam, fifteen-year-old Molly records in her diary how she misses her brother, volunteers at a Veterans' Administration Hospital, and tries to make sense of the war in Vietnam and the tumultuous events in the United States. Includes historical notes.
Download or read book Rat Six written by Jack Flowers and published by Page Publishing Inc. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on a true story, Rat Six tells the story of Clifford Price who, like hundreds of thousands of other young men in the 1960s, was drafted into the United States Army and served in Vietnam. Price was from Indiana, where he was a college student who had recently returned from a year studying abroad in Denmark. He came from a long line of soldiers; his two grandfathers served in the First World War and his father in the Second. Vietnam proved to be his turn to fight. Little did he know that his war would not only be a conflict on the battlefield, but a conflict in his mind. Torn between his anti-war sentiments, which had been reinforced by his year abroad and the proud heritage of his forefathers, Price had to choose between right and wrong, survival and death, love and war. Having been a commissioned officer in the Army Corps of Engineers shortly after being drafted and selected for Officer's Candidate School, Price ended up in Vietnam in 1968. After three months of commanding a platoon of bridge builders, mine sweepers, and truck drivers, Price was offered the job of Rat Six, one of the most dangerous assignments in the war. Rat Six was the code name for the leader of the First Infantry Division Tunnel Rats. The Tunnel Rats were some of the most courageous soldiers to fight in Vietnam. All were volunteers, slightly built, cunning, rebellious, trained in demolitions, and dedicated to ferreting out the enemy below. In the beginning of the war, entering a tunnel with only a flashlight and a pistol was almost suicidal. Over time, the Army learned to successfully navigate the underground labyrinths, retrieve vital intelligence, and destroy the tunnels. The most organized of the Tunnel Rat teams in Vietnam was that of the First Infantry Division's First Engineer Battalion. The team was led almost from the beginning by Sergeant Robert Bateman, a crusty, hard-nosed non-commissioned officer from New Jersey. He was dubbed "Batman" by his men and his reputation spread far and wide. He became even more famous among the enemy, of whom he had killed many, than among other warriors in the Army. "Batman" was on the Viet Cong's "10 Most Wanted List," which included the most prominent generals and not one other non-commissioned officer. Lieutenant Price was put in charge of the team and the conflict with Batman was immediate. Although there was no rank underground, Rat Six and Batman slowly built a mutual trust and the team's exploits and reputation grew even more. Harrowing missions and close calls engulfed the two men and their team. The tunnels were the setting and the enemy inside was just as fearsome as the men who pursued them. After four months of working together, Batman was sent home after his fourth reenlistment for Vietnam was denied. Suddenly Price was alone and vulnerable. The fear became insurmountable, climaxing on his last mission. Rat Six tells one of the most important yet little known stories of Lieutenant Clifford Price and his men. They were known as the Tunnel Rats, and their courageous exploits during the war in Vietnam are breathtaking and extraordinary.
Download or read book Pumpkinflowers written by Matti Friedman and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A book about young men transformed by war, written by a veteran whose dazzling literary gifts gripped my attention from the first page to the last.” —The Wall Street Journal “Friedman’s sober and striking new memoir . . . [is] on a par with Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried -- its Israeli analog.” —The New York Times Book Review It was just one small hilltop in a small, unnamed war in the late 1990s, but it would send out ripples that are still felt worldwide today. The hill, in Lebanon, was called the Pumpkin; flowers was the military code word for “casualties.” Award-winning writer Matti Friedman re-creates the harrowing experience of a band of young Israeli soldiers charged with holding this remote outpost, a task that would change them forever, wound the country in ways large and small, and foreshadow the unwinnable conflicts the United States would soon confront in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Pumpkinflowers is a reckoning by one of those young soldiers now grown into a remarkable writer. Part memoir, part reportage, part history, Friedman’s powerful narrative captures the birth of today’s chaotic Middle East and the rise of a twenty-first-century type of war in which there is never a clear victor and media images can be as important as the battle itself. Raw and beautifully rendered, Pumpkinflowers will take its place among classic war narratives by George Orwell, Philip Caputo, and Tim O’Brien. It is an unflinching look at the way we conduct war today.
Download or read book Into the Pulpit written by Elizabeth H. Flowers and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012-04-09 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The debate over women's roles in the Southern Baptist Convention's conservative ascendance is often seen as secondary to theological and biblical concerns. Elizabeth Flowers argues, however, that for both moderate and conservative Baptist women--all of whom had much at stake--disagreements that touched on their familial roles and ecclesial authority have always been primary. And, in the turbulent postwar era, debate over their roles caused fierce internal controversy. While the legacy of race and civil rights lingered well into the 1990s, views on women's submission to male authority provided the most salient test by which moderates were identified and expelled in a process that led to significant splits in the Church. In Flowers's expansive history of Southern Baptist women, the "woman question" is integral to almost every area of Southern Baptist concern: hermeneutics, ecclesial polity, missionary work, church-state relations, and denominational history. Flowers's analysis, part of the expanding survey of America's religious and cultural landscape after World War II, points to the South's changing identity and connects religious and regional issues to the complicated relationship between race and gender during and after the civil rights movement. She also shows how feminism and shifting women's roles, behaviors, and practices played a significant part in debates that simmer among Baptists and evangelicals throughout the nation today.
