Stealing the Mystic Lamb: The True Story of the World's Most Coveted Masterpiece

Price: $10.15 (as of 2013-12-01 - Details)

Kirkus, July 15, 2010 “Charney unsnarls the tangled history of Jan van Eyck’s 15th-century The Ghent Altarpiece (aka The Mystic Lamb), 'the most desired and victimized object of all time.' With a novelist’s sense of structure and tension, the author adds an easy familiarity with the techniques of oil painting and with the intertwining vines of art and political and religious history…. A brisk tale of true-life heroism, villainy, artistry and passion.”

 

Christian Science Monitor, August 30, 2010 "[A]ction-packed…. In scrupulous detail, Charney divulges the secrets of the revered painting’s past, and in doing so, gives readers a history lesson on art crime, a still-prospering black market.

Stealing the Mystic Lamb: The True Story of the World's Most Coveted Masterpiece Feature

The Male Brain

Price: $12.83 (as of 2013-11-30 - Details)

Starred Review. In this utterly fascinating follow-up to her bestselling The Female Brain, Harvard neuropsychiatrist Brizendine leads readers through the lifespan of a man's brain, using lively prose and personable anecdotes to turn complex scientific research into a highly accessible romp. Among other salient info, readers will learn why it is what young boys seem unable to stay still (they are learning through "embodied cognition"); why behaviors may change so suddenly during puberty (among other changes, testosterone increases 20-fold); the nature of irritability in teens ("boys' hormones prime them for aggressive and territorial behaviors"); and the ways in which chemicals, physical touch, and play bond fathers with their children. With clearly detailed scientific explanations for how characteristics like anger expression, analysis of facial expression, and spatial manipulation differ between the sexes, Brizendine's review of brain and behavioral research should net a broad audience, from parents of boys to psychology students to fans of her first volume. Brizendine also includes an appendix regarding the brain and sexual orientation, as well as lengthy endnotes and an exhaustive reference list.

The Male Brain Feature

[Audible Audio Edition]

Price: $17.95 (as of 2013-11-30 - Details)

An in-depth report that takes readers on a shocking tour through a macabre global underworld where organs, bones, and live people are bought and sold on the red market.

Investigative journalist Scott Carney has spent five years on the ground tracing the lucrative and deeply secretive trade in human bodies and body parts - a vast hidden economy known as the "red market". From the horrifying to the ridiculous, he discovers its varied forms: an Indian village nicknamed "Kidneyvakkam" because most of its residents have sold their kidneys for cash; unscrupulous grave robbers who steal human bones from cemeteries, morgues, and funeral pyres for anatomical skeletons used in Western medical schools and labs; an ancient temple that makes money selling the hair of its devotees to wig makers in America -to the tune of $6 million annually.

The Red Market reveals the rise, fall, and resurgence of this multibillion-dollar underground trade through history: from early medical study and modern universities to poverty-ravaged Eurasian villages and high-tech Western labs; from body snatchers and surrogate mothers to skeleton dealers and the poor who sell body parts to survive. While local and international law enforcement have cracked down on the market, advances in science have increased the demand for human tissue - ligaments, kidneys, even rented space in women's wombs - leaving little room to consider the ethical dilemmas inherent in the flesh-and-blood trade.

By turns tragic, voyeuristic, and thought-provoking, The Red Market is an eye-opening, surreal look at a little-known global industry and its implications for all our lives.

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[Audible Audio Edition]

Price: $27.95 (as of 2013-11-29 - Details)

After managing to get her degree despite the machinations of the disagreeable directrice of the school, Julia started teaching cooking classes herself, then teamed up with two fellow gourmettes, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, to help them with a book they were trying to write on French cooking for Americans. Throwing herself heart and soul into making it a unique and thorough teaching book, only to suffer several rounds of painful rejection, is part of the behind-the-scenes drama that Julia reveals with her inimitable gusto and disarming honesty.

From the moment the ship docked in Le Havre in the fall of 1948 and Julia watched the well-muscled stevedores unloading the cargo to the first perfectly soigne meal that she and her husband, Paul, savored in Rouen en route to Paris, where he was to work for the USIS, Julia had an awakening that changed her life. Soon this tall, outspoken gal from Pasadena, California, who didn't speak a word of French and knew nothing about the country, was steeped in the language, chatting with purveyors in the local markets, and enrolled in the Cordon Bleu.

In her own words, here is the captivating story of Julia Child's years in France, where she fell in love with French food and found "her true calling".This memoir is laced with wonderful stories about the French character, particularly in the world of food, and the way of life that Julia embraced so wholeheartedly. Above all, she reveals the kind of spirit and determination, the sheer love of cooking, and the drive to share that with her fellow Americans that made her the extraordinary success she became.

Le voici.

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The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life

Price: (as of 2013-11-29 - Details)

Florida, an academic whose field is regional economic development, explains the rise of a new social class that he labels the creative class. Members include scientists, engineers, architects, educators, writers, artists, and entertainers. He defines this class as those whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology, and new creative content. In general this group shares common characteristics, such as creativity, individuality, diversity, and merit. The author estimates that this group has 38 million members, constitutes more than 30 percent of the U.S. workforce, and profoundly influences work and lifestyle issues. The purpose of this book is to examine how and why we value creativity more highly than ever and cultivate it more intensely. He concludes that it is time for the creative class to grow up--boomers and Xers, liberals and conservatives, urbanites and suburbanites--and evolve from an amorphous group of self-directed while high-achieving individuals into a responsible, more cohesive group interested in the common good. Mary WhaleyCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life Feature

The Sugar Camp Quilt (Elm Creek Quilts Series #7)

Price: (as of 2013-11-28 - Details)

In the seventh entry in the Elm Creek Quilt series, Chiaverini returns to Creek's Crossing, Pennsylvania, in the period before the Civil War, when quilts were used as markers along the Underground Railroad. Nineteen-year-old Dorothea Granger, dutiful daughter and niece, teaches at the local school, the closest she can come to fulfilling her dreams of education and career. Her younger brother, Jonathan, is studying medicine in Boston and is seen as the likely heir to the farm where her family lives under the scrutiny of cantankerous Uncle Jacob. When her uncle asks Dorothea to make him a quilt with very specific instructions, she obeys but is intrigued and annoyed at the request, as it takes her away from the task of quilting to raise funds to build a library and wondering about the intentions of a potential suitor and a mysterious newcomer. The Granger family and their small town become increasingly torn by encroaching efforts to round up or to assist runaway slaves. Vanessa BushCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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[Audible Audio Edition]

Price: $10.95 (as of 2013-11-28 - Details)

Discover an alternate history to the human race as the authors of Forbidden Archeology challenge one of the most fundamental components of the modern scientific world view. Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson discuss the work of researchers who, over the past 2 centuries, have found bones and artifacts showing that people like ourselves existed on earth millions of years ago. They explain how the scientific establishment has ignored these remarkable facts because they contradict the dominant views of human origins and antiquity.

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My Dog Tulip (New York Review Books Classics)

Price: $9.39 (as of 2013-11-27 - Details)

In many ways this 1956 memoir is an intimate saga of human idealism and doggish realism. Or is it the other way around? In any case, this odd couple undertakes a series of adventures, which bring them into contact with a gallery of strange, mostly martial players. There's the taunting Colonel Finch, owner of Gunner, an Alsatian suitor that Tulip finds wanting--and Captain Pugh, who had served with Ackerley in World War I and who even then was a bizarre mixture of efficiency and indolence. Decades later, in "those rare moments when he was not horizontal he would stalk about the farm buildings with great vigor, making pertinent remarks in his military voice and spreading consternation among the cows." My Dog Tulip is the ultimate bitch session--in the canine sense of the phrase, of course. In 1947, J.R.

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Holler If You Hear Me (2006)

Price: $13.82 (as of 2013-11-27 - Details)

A poor, urban, high school dropout and book-devouring autodidact who'd quote Shakespeare in conversation, Shakur would also sing along to Sarah McLachlan. Dyson (I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.), a Baptist minister, reveals the complexity of Shakur and shows why even five years after his death his records, poetry and films continue to sell. "He was not hip-hop's most gifted emcee. Still, Shakur may be the most influential and compelling rapper of them all," writes Dyson. "He was more than the sum of his artistic parts.

Holler If You Hear Me (2006) Feature

The Case for God

Price: $13.21 (as of 2013-11-26 - Details)

"The time is ripe for a book like The Case for God, which wraps a rebuke to the more militant sort of atheism in an engaging survey of Western religious thought."  —Ross Douthat, The New York Times Book Review "Armstrong's argument is prescient, for it reflects the most important shifts occurring in the religious landscape." —Lisa Miller, Newsweek "A thoughtful explanation, well-sourced and impressively rooted in the writings of theologians, philosophers, scholars and religious figures through the ages. . . . If Armstrong is out to bring respect to both reason and faith in the search of that transcendent meaning, she has done well." —Repps Hudson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch "The Case for God is Armstrong's most concise and practical-minded book yet: a historical survey of hwo rather than what we believe, where we lost the "knack" of religion and what we need to do to get it back." —Michael Brunton, Ode "In over a dozen books [Armstrong] has delivered something people badly want: a way to acknowledge that faith can be taken seriously as a response to deep human yearnings without needing to subscribe to the formality of organized belief." —The Economist "The Case for God should be read slowly, and savored." —Karen R. Long, Cleveland Plain Dealer "Armstrong's thesis is provocative, and her book illuminates a side of Christianity that has recently been overshadowed." —Margaret Quamme, Columbus Dispatch "Armstrong is ambitious. The Case for God is an entire semester at college packed into a single book—a voluminous, dizzying intellectual history. . . . Reading The Case for God, I felt smarter. . . . A stimulating, hopeful work.  After I finished it, I felt inspired, I stopped, and I looked up at the stars again.  And I wondered what could be." —Susan Jane Gilman, NPR's "All Things Considered" "Karen Armstrong's book is simply superb. Wide-ranging, detailed, well researched meticulously argued and beautifully written, it is a definitive analysis of the role of religious belief and transcendence in our history and our life." —Dr. Robert Buckman, author of Can We Be Good without God? "Karen Armstrong, in writing The Case for God, provides the reader with one of the very best theological works of our time. It brings a new understanding to the complex relationship between human existence and the transcendent nature of God. This is a book that is so well researched and so deep with insight and soaring scholarship that only Karen Armstrong could have written it.

The Case for God Feature

Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls: True Stories of Castaways and Other Survivors

Price: (as of 2013-11-26 - Details)

With painstaking research, riveting detail and elegant prose, freelance writer Leslie here creates a keen psychological study as well as a paean to the courage, resourcefulness and perseverance of the human body and mind. This is a hefty chronicle of true stories, from the 1500s to the present day, about survivors of shipwrecks, maroonings and plane crashes, lost in every sort of climate and environment, struggling against animals, humans--savage and civilized--and the forces of nature. There is Peter Carder, who sailed in the 16th century with Drake, was castaway once and twice marooned, ingratiated himself with Brazilian cannibals and outwitted his Portuguese enemies. Leslie insightfully describes the real "Robinson Crusoe," Alexander Selkirk, a sailing master who quarreled with his captain and was stranded for four years on an island paradise off the coast of Chile in the early 1700s. The account of Marguerite de la Roque, a 16th century French woman who was betrayed as an adulterer by her adventurer cousin on an Atlantic voyage and then left to die, pregnant, on an island off the coast of Canada with her servant and her lover, is affecting. But for sheer thrills and inspiration, readers will be fascinated by the tale of the ill-planned and ill-fated Stefansson Polar expedition of 1913. Illustrated. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls: True Stories of Castaways and Other Survivors Feature

Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper -- Case Closed

Price: (as of 2013-11-25 - Details)

"I knew the identity of a murderer and couldn't possibly avert my gaze," declares bestselling author and Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine chairman of the board Cornwell (The Last Precinct). Claiming to have cracked the unsolved case of Jack the Ripper, the author, combining superb investigative skills and meticulous research with modern technology, presents strong, albeit largely circumstantial, evidence as to the true culprit in this uncharacteristic work of nonfiction. Cornwell's man is the handsome, educated actor-cum-artist Walter Richard Sickert, and she delves into his life, probing the psychological pain and sexual deformity which led to his "impotent fury." Screen, stage and TV actress Burton's splendid, professional narration deserves much of the credit for the book's smooth translation to abridged audio format. Transporting listeners to 19th century England, Burton easily transitions between American and English accents, bringing an authentic, resonating flavor to the era and to the desperate lives of London's "unfortunates" who became the killer's prey. Despite some tedious and over-detailed readings of medical records, laws and police reports, as well as descriptive accounts of Cornwell's experiences re-opening the case, this audiobook turns potentially dry material into an enthralling exploration.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper -- Case Closed Feature

Cape Cod

Price: $21.51 (as of 2013-11-25 - Details)

"Cape Cod is Thoreau's sunniest, happiest book. It bubbles over with jokes, puns, tall tales, and genial good humor. . . . Unquestionably the best book that has ever been written about Cape Cod, and it is the model to which all new books about the Cape are still compared."--Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

Price: $13.64 (as of 2013-11-24 - Details)

When Terrence Real was studying to be a therapist, he accepted the notion that women suffered depression at rates several times that of men. Now he believes that conventional wisdom is wrong, that there has been a great cultural cover-up of depression in men. Real is convinced of the existence of a mental illness that is passed from fathers to sons in the form of rage, workaholism, distanced relationships from loved ones, and self-destructive behaviors ranging from stupid choices at work and in love to drug and alcohol abuse. Men reading I Don't Want to Talk About It will probably recognize themselves in every chapter, while women will recognize their partners--and, of course, both sexes will see their fathers in a new light.

I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression Feature

The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

Price: $12.51 (as of 2013-11-24 - Details)

Hitchens, an avowed atheist and author of the bestseller God Is Not Great, is a formidable intellectual who finds the notion of belief in God to be utter nonsense. The author is clear in his introduction that religion has caused more than its fair share of world problems. "Religion invents a problem where none exists by describing the wicked as also made in the image of god and the sexually nonconformist as existing in a state of incurable mortal sin that can incidentally cause floods and earthquakes." The readings Hitchens chooses to bolster his atheist argument are indeed engaging and important.

The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever Feature

Christopher Hitchens

religion

atheism

Aspire: Discovering Your Purpose Through the Power of Words

Price: $16.98 (as of 2013-11-23 - Details)

“Just as I broke new ground in human development over twenty years ago by uncovering the habits that make for a meaningful and effective life, Kevin Hall is breaking new ground by uncovering and revealing the true intent and meaning of the words that make up those habits.” (Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)“Words have power . . . amazing power! I can’t wait to see the world’s response to Aspire!.” (John Assaraf, author of The Answer; Teacher in The Secret)“Kevin Hall’s ability to unlock human potential is rare and extremely valuable. In Aspire!, he unveils a completely new paradigm for personal development and growth that is dynamic and life changing.” (Norman E. Brinker, founder and chairman emeritus, Brinker International)“Once you pick this book up you will find it hard to put down. The layers of examples and principles inside a single word can prove life changing.

Aspire: Discovering Your Purpose Through the Power of Words Feature

[Audible Audio Edition]

Price: $29.95 (as of 2013-11-23 - Details)

From one of the most beloved authors of our time - more than six million copies of his books have been sold in this country alone - a fascinating excursion into the history behind the place we call home.

"Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up."

Bill Bryson has one of the liveliest, most inquisitive minds on the planet, and he is a master at turning the seemingly isolated or mundane fact into an occasion for the most diverting exposi­tion imaginable. His wit and sheer prose fluency make At Home one of the most entertaining books ever written about private life.

Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped.

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