Download or read book Swimming To Ithaca written by Simon Mawer and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2011-11-24 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On her deathbed, Dee Denham, at one time the toast of colonial Cyprus, tells her son Thomas that her illness is a punishment. Compelled by grief and a confused childhood memory of betrayal, Thomas finds himself searching for the meaning of her last words. He searches through faded photographs and love letters, seeks out survivors and examines his own imperfect recollections. A vanished world comes to life: the restless, seductive island of Cyprus at the end of Empire, a place of oleander and carob trees, cocktails at the Harbour Club and adultery in shuttered bedrooms, peopled by ghostly admirers and conspirators, lovers and spies. Dee's story, an intimate history of violence and tenderness for which Thomas finds himself quite unprepared, gathers momentum, against, in the background, the ominous roar of approaching disaster. A vivid evocation of the past and a deft examination of the dangerous power of memory, SWIMMING TO ITHACA sets fragile human relationships against the unstoppable force of history and sheds new light on both.

Download or read book Leap In written by Alexandra Heminsley and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-01-12 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Remarkable' Observer 'A joy to read' Daily Telegraph 'Soaringly beautiful' Sunday Times Magazine 'Genuine and persuasive' Guardian Alexandra Heminsley thought she could swim. She really did. It may have been because she could run. It may have been because she wanted to swim; or perhaps because she only ever did ten minutes of breaststroke at a time. But, as she learned one day while flailing around in the sea, she really couldn’t. Believing that a life lived fully isn’t one with the most money earned, the most stuff bought or the most races won, but one with the most experiences, experienced the most fully, she decided to conquer her fear of the water. From the ignominy of getting into a wetsuit to the triumph of swimming from Kefalonia to Ithaca, in becoming a swimmer, Alexandra learns to appreciate her body and still her mind. As it turns out, the water is never as frightening once you're in, and really, everything is better when you remember to exhale. What Hemmo's readers are saying: ‘This book is funny, engaging, entertaining, informative, suspenseful, motivating, and inspiring... I've never read anything quite like it’ – Nina on Goodreads, 5 stars ‘Just like Running Like a Girl, this was an absolute joy to read. A beautifully written story of swimming, family and being a woman’ – Violet on Amazon, 5 stars ‘Fantastic book... Entertaining – often laugh-out-loud funny – and full of really useful advice’ – J. Edwards on Amazon, 5 stars ‘A fabulous book that’s beautifully written’ – Nik on Goodreads, 5 stars ‘I can't recommend this book enough! I absolutely love Alexandra Heminsley's writing, her attitude towards exercise and her passion for swimming’ – Sarah on Goodreads, 5 stars ‘an inspirational and encouraging read’ – Stephanie on Goodreads, 5 stars ‘the author’s enthusiasm is contagious... one cannot help but yearn to join in. ... A thoroughly inspiring book with a likeable narrator unafraid to share her personal life’ – Eleanor on Goodreads, 5 stars ‘This is a delightful book, a pleasure to read... Unbelievably well written, it flows like the water she loves’ – Bobby on Amazon, 5 stars

Download or read book Mendel s Dwarf written by Simon Mawer and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2012-12-11 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like his great-great-great-uncle, geneticist Gregor Mendel, Dr. Benedict Lambert struggles to unlock the secrets of heredity and genetic determinism. However, Benedict's mission is particularly urgent and particularly personal, for he was born with achondroplasia--he's a dwarf. He's also a man desperate for love and acceptance, and when he finds both in Jean, a shy librarian, he stumbles upon an opportunity to correct the injustice of his own, at least to him, unlucky genes. Entertaining and tender, this witty and surprisingly erotic novel reveals the beauty and drama of scientific inquiry as it informs us of the simple passions against which even the most brilliant mind is rendered powerless.

Download or read book Tightrope written by Simon Mawer and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the best-selling and Booker Prize–shortlisted The Glass Room and Trapeze An historical thriller that brings back Marian Sutro, ex-Special Operations agent, and traces her romantic and political exploits in post-World War II London, where the Cold War is about to reshape old loyalties As Allied forces close in on Berlin in spring 1945, a solitary figure emerges from the wreckage that is Germany. It is Marian Sutro, whose existence was last known to her British controllers in autumn 1943 in Paris. One of a handful of surviving agents of the Special Operations Executive, she has withstood arrest, interrogation, incarceration, and the horrors of Ravensbrück concentration camp, but at what cost? Returned to an England she barely knows and a postwar world she doesn’t understand, Marian searches for something on which to ground the rest of her life. Family and friends surround her, but she is haunted by her experiences and by the guilt of knowing that her contribution to the war effort helped lead to the monstrosities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the mysterious Major Fawley, the man who hijacked her wartime mission to Paris, emerges from the shadows to draw her into the ambiguities and uncertainties of the Cold War, she sees a way to make amends for the past and at the same time to find the identity that has never been hers. A novel of divided loyalties and mixed motives, Tightrope is the complex and enigmatic story of a woman whose search for personal identity and fulfillment leads her to shocking choices.

Download or read book The Floating Pool Lady written by Ann L. Buttenwieser and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-15 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why on earth would anyone want to float a pool up the Atlantic coastline to bring it to rest at a pier on the New York City waterfront? In The Floating Pool Lady, Ann L. Buttenwieser recounts her triumphant adventure that started in the bayous of Louisiana and ended with a self-sustaining, floating swimming pool moored in New York Harbor. When Buttenwieser decided something needed to be done to help revitalize the New York City waterfront, she reached into the city's nineteenth-century past for inspiration. Buttenwieser wanted New Yorkers to reestablish their connection to their riverine surroundings and she was energized by the prospect of city youth returning to the Hudson and East Rivers. What she didn't suspect was that outfitting and donating a swimming facility for free enjoyment by the public would turn into an almost-Sisyphean task. As she describes in The Floating Pool Lady, Buttenwieser battled for years with politicians and struggled with bureaucrats as she brought her "crazy" scheme to fruition. From dusty archives in the historic Battery Maritime Building to high-stakes community board meetings to tense negotiations in the Louisiana shipyard, Buttenwieser retells the improbable process that led to a pool named The Floating Pool Lady tying up to a pier at Barretto Point Park in the Bronx, ready for summer swimmers. Throughout The Floating Pool Lady, Buttenwieser raises consciousness about persistent environmental issues and the challenges of developing a constituency for projects to make cities livable in the twenty-first century. Her story and that of her floating pool function as both warning and inspiration to those who dare to dream of realizing innovative public projects in the modern urban landscape.

Download or read book Prague Spring written by Simon Mawer and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Room Simon Mawer returns to Czechoslovakia, this time during the turbulent 1960s, with a suspenseful story that mixes sex, politics, and betrayal. In the summer of 1968--a year of love and hate, of Prague Spring and Cold War winter--Oxford students James Borthwick and Eleanor Pike set out to hitchhike across Europe, complicating a budding friendship that could be something more. Having reached southern Germany, they decide on a whim to visit Czechoslovakia, where Alexander Dubček's "socialism with a human face" is smiling on the world. Meanwhile, Sam Wareham, First Secretary at the British embassy in Prague, is observing developments in the country with both a diplomat's cynicism and a young man's passion. In the company of Czech student Lenka Konečková, he finds a way into the world of Czechoslovak youth, its hopes and its ideas. For the first time, nothing seems off limits behind the Iron Curtain. Yet the wheels of politics are grinding in the background. The Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev is making demands of Dubček, and the Red Army is amassed on the borders. How will the looming disaster affect those fragile lives caught up in the invasion? With this shrewd, engrossing, and sensual novel, Simon Mawer cements his status as one of the most talented writers of historical spy fiction today.

Download or read book Contested Waters written by Jeff Wiltse and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-11-30 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From nineteenth-century public baths to today's private backyard havens, swimming pools have long been a provocative symbol of American life. In this social and cultural history of swimming pools in the United States, Jeff Wiltse relates how, over the years, pools have served as asylums for the urban poor, leisure resorts for the masses, and private clubs for middle-class suburbanites. As sites of race riots, shrinking swimsuits, and conspicuous leisure, swimming pools reflect many of the tensions and transformations that have given rise to modern America.

Download or read book King of Ithaka written by Tracy Barrett and published by Henry Holt and Company (BYR). This book was released on 2010-09-14 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Telemachos has a comfortable life on his small island of Ithaka, where his mother Penelopeia keeps the peace even though the land has been without its king, his father Odysseus, since the Trojan War began many years ago. But now the people are demanding a new king, unless Telemachos can find Odysseus and bring him home. With only a mysterious prophecy to guide him, Telemachos sets off over sea and desert in search of the father he has never known.

Download or read book The Gospel Of Judas written by Simon Mawer and published by Abacus. This book was released on 2011-11-24 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amongst the ancient papyri of the Dead Sea, a remarkable scroll is discovered. Written in the first century AD, it purports to be the true account of the life of Jesus, as told by Youdas the sicarios - Judas Iscariot: the missing Gospel of Judas. If authentic, it will be one of the most incendiary documents in the history of humankind. The task of proving - or disproving - its validity falls to Father Leo Newman, one of the world's leading experts in Koine, the demotic Greek of the Roman Empire, and a man the newspapers like to call a 'renegade priest'. But as Leo absorbs himself in Judas' testimony, the stories of his own life haunt him. The story of his forbidden yet irresistible love for a married woman. The story of his mother's passionate and tragic affair amidst the war-time ruins of Rome. They are stories of love and betrayal that may threaten his faith just as deeply as the Gospel of Judas... With a dramatic narrative that spans from the Europe of the Second World War to Jerusalem two thousand years after Jesus' birth, THE GOSPEL OF JUDAS is a compelling and erudite thriller.

Download or read book This Is Water written by David Foster Wallace and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2009-04-14 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this rare peak into the personal life of the author of numerous bestselling novels, gain an understanding of David Foster Wallace and how he became the man that he was. Only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views on life, during a commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon College. The speech is reprinted for the first time in book form in This is Water. How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? The speech captures Wallace's electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the London Times, commented on endlessly in blogs, and emailed from friend to friend. Writing with his one-of-a-kind blend of causal humor, exacting intellect, and practical philosophy, David Foster Wallace probes the challenges of daily living and offers advice that renews us with every reading.

Download or read book The Glass Room written by Simon Mawer and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2009-10-27 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honeymooners Viktor and Liesel Landauer are filled with the optimism and cultural vibrancy of central Europe of the 1920s when they meet modernist architect Rainer von Abt. He builds for them a home to embody their exuberant faith in the future, and the Landauer House becomes an instant masterpiece. Viktor and Liesel, a rich Jewish mogul married to a thoughtful, modern gentile, pour all of their hopes for their marriage and budding family into their stunning new home, filling it with children, friends, and a generation of artists and thinkers eager to abandon old-world European style in favor of the new and the avant-garde. But as life intervenes, their new home also brings out their most passionate desires and darkest secrets. As Viktor searches for a warmer, less challenging comfort in the arms of another woman, and Liesel turns to her wild, mischievous friend Hana for excitement, the marriage begins to show signs of strain. The radiant honesty and idealism of 1930 quickly evaporate beneath the storm clouds of World War II. As Nazi troops enter the country, the family must leave their old life behind and attempt to escape to America before Viktor's Jewish roots draw Nazi attention, and before the family itself dissolves. As the Landauers struggle for survival abroad, their home slips from hand to hand, from Czech to Nazi to Soviet possession and finally back to the Czechoslovak state, with new inhabitants always falling under the fervent and unrelenting influence of the Glass Room. Its crystalline perfection exerts a gravitational pull on those who know it, inspiring them, freeing them, calling them back, until the Landauers themselves are finally drawn home to where their story began. Brimming with barely contained passion and cruelty, the precision of science, the wild variance of lust, the catharsis of confession, and the fear of failure - the Glass Room contains it all.

Download or read book Swimming World and Junior Swimmer written by and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Gregor Mendel Planting the Seeds of Genetics written by Simon Mawer and published by . This book was released on 2006-09 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gregor Mendel's discoveries were so far in advance of their day that it wasn't until 50 years had passed that their importance was recognised by the scientific community. Providing an account of scientific history, this work presents the narrative through the work of the life-scientists who built their own research on Mendel's discoveries.

Download or read book Z for Zachariah written by Robert C. O'Brien and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this post-apocalyptic novel from Newbery Medal–winning author Robert C. O’Brien, a teen girl struggling to survive in the wake of unimaginable disaster comes across another survivor. Ann Burden is sixteen years old and completely alone. The world as she once knew it is gone, ravaged by a nuclear war that has taken everyone from her. For the past year, she has lived in a remote valley with no evidence of any other survivors. But the smoke from a distant campfire shatters Ann’s solitude. Someone else is still alive and making his way toward the valley. Who is this man? What does he want? Can he be trusted? Both excited and terrified, Ann soon realizes there may be worse things than being the last person on Earth.

Download or read book Child of the Universe written by Ray Jayawardhana and published by Make Me a World. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perfect for fans of The Wonderful Things You Will Be and That's Me Loving You, this picture book by a renowned astrophysicist is a lyrical meditation on the preciousness of one child and the vastness of the universe. Just like the sun gives shine to the moon, you light up the world beyond this room . . . You are grand and marvelous, strong and mysterious. The history of the world is in your fingertips. A lyrical meditation on the preciousness of one child and the vastness of the universe, this gorgeously illustrated picture book shares the immensity of a parent's love along with the message that we are all connected to the broader cosmos in important and intimate ways. A perfect bedtime read-aloud, Child of the Universe is a book to cherish forever. The author is an astrophysicist who has been fascinated by the universe since he was a child. As a parent, he has developed a new appreciation for the deep connections between billions of years of cosmic evolution and this one tiny human.

Download or read book Swimming for Sunlight written by Allison Larkin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When recently divorced Katie Ellis and her rescue dog Bark move back in with Katie’s grandmother in Florida, she becomes swept up in a reunion of her grandmother’s troupe of underwater performers—finding hope and renewal in unexpected places, in this sweet novel perfect for fans of Kristan Higgins and Claire Cook. Aspiring costume designer Katie gave up everything in her divorce to gain custody of her fearful, faithful rescue dog, Barkimedes. While she figures out what to do next, she heads back to Florida to live with her grandmother, Nan. But Katie quickly learns there’s a lot she doesn’t know about Nan—like the fact that in her youth Nan was a mermaid performer in a roadside attraction show, swimming and dancing underwater with a close-knit cast of talented women. Although most of the mermaids have since lost touch, Katie helps Nan search for her old friends on Facebook, sparking hopes for a reunion show. Katie is up for making some fabulous costumes, but first, she has to contend with her crippling fear of water. As Katie’s college love Luca, a documentary filmmaker, enters the fray, Katie struggles to balance her hopes with her anxiety, and begins to realize just how much Bark’s fears are connected to her own, in this thoughtful, charming novel about hope after loss and friendships that span generations.

Download or read book Freshman Register written by and published by UM Libraries. This book was released on 1977 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: