QUICK DELIVERY
Swift dispatch
The Untouchable by John Banville
Brief Summary
One of the most dazzling and adventurous writers now working in English takes on the enigma of the Cambridge spies in a novel of exquisite menace, biting social comedy, and vertiginous moral complexity.
The narrator is the elderly Victor Maskell, formerly of British intelligence, for many years art expert to the Queen. Now he has been unmasked as a Russian agent and subjected to a disgrace that is almost a kind of death. But at whose instigation?
As Maskell retraces his tortuous path from his recruitment at Cambridge to the airless upper regions of the establishment, we discover a figure of manifold doubleness: Irishman and Englishman; husband, father, and lover of men; betrayer and dupe. Beautifully written, filled with convincing fictional portraits of Maskell's co-conspirators, and vibrant with the mysteries of loyalty and identity, The Untouchable places John Banville in the select company of both Conrad and le Carre.
ISBN:9780679767473
Author:John Banville
The Perfect Business Plan By Ron Johnson
Brief Summary
A carefully prepared plan is essential to the success of any business. Planning ahead means you make better decisions today, and helps you take into account as many of the relevant factors as possible. The business plan is vital to the people who finance the business - but above all it's vital to the people who carry out its day-to-day management.
Perfect Business Plan provides a planning framework and shows you how to complete it for you own business in one hundred short, easy-to-follow steps. The book is comprehensive and yet concise and to the point. It is written in simple, clear language and is designed to be of immediate, practical benefit to readers.
Chapters include:
-Planning to plan
-Essential expertise
-Key business factors
-Basic estimates
-Essential calculations
-Planning to manage
-Collating the plan
-Implementation
-Your own plan
The Perfect series is a range of practical guides that give clear and straightforward advice on everything from finding your first job to choosing your baby's name. Written by experienced authors offering tried-and-tested tips, each book contains all you need to get it right first time.
ISBN:9780712655248
Author:Ron Johnson
Living Through the Meantime by Iyanla...
Brief Summary
Living Through the Meantime: Learning to Break the Patterns of the Past and Begin the Healing Process
From the host of the OWN TV show, Iyanla: Fix My Life, the companion workbook to Iyanla Vanzant’s #1 New York Times bestseller In the Meantime provides an easy, step-by-step program to help you begin the healing process after facing adversity.
Are you in the Meantime?
Are you confused, angry, disappointed, frustrated, anxious, apprehensive, sorry for yourself, or generally wiped out? If so, my friend, you are in the meantime.
Are you ready to put the pieces of your life together? Are you ready to begin the process of healing? Are you ready to give and receive love in all of your experiences?
In Living Through the Meantime, bestselling author Iyanla Vanzant will lead you, step-by-step, to a greater understanding of your own past, your motivations, and your desires. Once you have completed this program of meditation, self-care, and self-examination, you will be able to move beyond your meantime experience and into the love that is your true essence.
ISBN:9780743227100
Author:Iyanla Vanzant
Spies in the Congo by Susan Williams
Brief Summary
Spies in the Congo: America's Atomic Mission in World War II
A thrilling account of the extraordinary efforts of Allied intelligence in gaining control of Belgian Congo's uranium mines and keeping them from Hitler and Stalin.
This book is the true story of American spies in Africa in the Second World War, which until now has never been researched or told. It is set against the background of one of the most tightly guarded secrets of the war -- America's struggle to secure enough high quality uranium to build atomic bombs. These efforts were focused on the Shinkolobwe Mine in the Belgian Congo, which was described within the Manhattan Project as the 'most important deposit of uranium yet discovered in the world'.
Uranium from this mine was used to build the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. Given the very real possibility that Germany was also working on an atomic bomb, it was an urgent priority for the US to prevent uranium from the Congo being diverted to the enemy. This task was given to the newly-created Office of Strategic Services in Washington, which sent some of their best Secret Intelligence agents under cover to the Belgian Congo to track the ore and to hunt for Nazi collaborators. Their assignment was made even tougher by the complex colonial reality and by tensions with British officials.
Spies in the Congo tells the story of the men -- and one woman -- who were sent on this dangerous wartime mission
ISBN:9781849046381
Author:Susan Williams
Speeches that Changed the World by Si...
Brief Summary
This gripping DVD pack provides genuine historical footage of 20 of the most significant speeches of the 20th century and is accompanied by a deluxe illustrated book containing the transcripts of these and over 30 other momentous orations from throughout history.
Complete with biographies of each speaker and the stories of why the world changed as a result, this is a fascinating history of humanity told through the speeches that shaped it.
Footage includes: Chamberlain: 'Peace for our time'; Hitler: Speech to the Hitler youth; Goebbels: Book burning; Molotov: The invasion of Russia; Churchill: 'Blood, tears, toil', 'Finest hour', 'The few'; Gandhi: 'I have faith in the righteousness of our cause'; FDR: 'A day that will live in infamy'; De Gaulle: Speech to World War 1 veterans; Hirohito: Surrender of Japan; MacArthur: Terms of Japanese surrender, 'Old soldiers never die, they just fade away'; JFK: 'Ask not what your country can do for you', 'Ich Bin ein Berliner'; Martin Luther King: 'I have a dream'; Nixon: Watergate first speech, 'No whitewash at the White House'; Reagan: 'Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall'; Rudd: 'To the stolen generations...I am sorry'; Obama: 'Yes we can'.
ISBN:9780857382474
Author:Simon Sebag Montefiore
Sophocles The Complete Plays
Brief Summary
Collects the full texts of Sophocles's seven extant ancient Greek plays, including updated translations of Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Ajax, Electra, Philoctetes, and The Women of Trachis, accompanied by stage directions, prefaces to each play, and other helpful notes. Original.
ISBN:9780451531537
Author:Sophocles
The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk
Brief Summary
If this were 1923, this book would have been called "Why Radio Is Going to Change the Game" . . .
If it were 1995, it would be "Why Amazon Is Going to Take over the Retailing World" . . .
The Thank You Economy is about something big, something greater than any single revolutionary platform. It isn't some abstract concept or wacky business strategy—it's real, and every one of us is doing business in it every day, whether we choose to recognize it or not. It's the way we communicate, the way we buy and sell, the way businesses and consumers interact online and offline. The Internet, where The Thank You Economy was born, has given consumers back their voice, and the tremendous power of their opinions via social media means that companies and brands have to compete on a whole different level than they used to.
Gone are the days when a blizzard of marketing dollars could be used to overwhelm the airwaves, shut out the competition, and grab customer awareness. Now customers' demands for authenticity, originality, creativity, honesty, and good intent have made it necessary for companies and brands to revert to a level of customer service rarely seen since our great-grandparents' day, when business owners often knew their customers personally, and gave them individual attention.
Here renowned entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk reveals how companies big and small can scale that kind of personal, one-on-one attention to their entire customer base, no matter how large, using the same social media platforms that carry consumer word of mouth.
The Thank You Economy offers compelling, data-driven evidence that we have entered into an entirely new business era, one in which the companies that see the biggest returns won't be the ones that can throw the most money at an advertising campaign, but will be those that can prove they care about their customers more than anyone else. The businesses and brands that harness the word-of-mouth power from social media, those that can shift their culture to be more customer-aware and fan-friendly, will pull away from the pack and profit in today's markets.
Filled with Vaynerchuk's irrepressible candor and wit, as well as real-world examples of companies that are profiting by putting Thank You Economy principles into practice, The Thank You Economy reveals how businesses can harness all the changes and challenges inherent in social media and turn them into tremendous opportunities for profit and growth.
ISBN:9780061914188
Author:Gary Vaynerchuk
Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro
Brief Summary
In these ten stories, Alice Munro once again renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.
Ten superb new stories by one of our most beloved and admired writers—the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize.
In the first story a young wife and mother receives release from the unbearable pain of losing her three children from a most surprising source. In another, a young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual and humiliating seduction, reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion. Other stories uncover the "deep-holes” in a marriage, the unsuspected cruelty of children, and how a boy’s disfigured face provides both the good things in his life and the bad.
And in the long title story, we accompany Sophia Kovalevsky—a late-nineteenth-century Russian émigré and mathematician—on a winter journey that takes her from the Riviera, where she visits her lover, to Paris, Germany, and, Denmark, where she has a fateful meeting with a local doctor, and finally to Sweden, where she teaches at the only university in Europe willing to employ a female mathematician.
With clarity and ease, Alice Munro once again renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.
ISBN:9780307269768
Author:Alice Munro
The Tidal Zone by Sarah Mos
Brief Summary
Adam is a stay-at-home dad who is also working on a history of the bombing and rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral. He is a good man and he is happy. But one day, he receives a call from his daughter's school to inform him that, for no apparent reason, fifteen-year-old Miriam has collapsed and stopped breathing. In that moment, he is plunged into a world of waiting, agonizing, not knowing.
The story of his life and the lives of his family are rewritten and re-told around this shocking central event, around a body that has inexplicably failed. In this exceptionally courageous and unflinching novel of contemporary life Sarah Moss goes where most of us wouldn't dare to look, and the result is riveting - unbearably sad, but also miraculously funny and ultimately hopeful.
The Tidal Zone explores parental love, overwhelming fear, illness and recovery. It is about clever teenagers and the challenges of marriage. It is about the NHS, academia, sex and gender in the twenty-first century, the work-life juggle, and the politics of packing lunches and loading dishwashers. It confirms Sarah Moss as a unique voice in modern fiction and a writer of luminous intelligence.
ISBN:9781783783076
Author:Sarah Moss
Uncle Toms Cabin by Harriet Beecher S...
Brief Summary
The narrative drive of Stowe's classic novel is often overlooked in the heat of the controversies surrounding its anti-slavery sentiments. In fact, it is a compelling adventure story with richly drawn characters and has earned a place in both literary and American history.
Stowe's puritanical religious beliefs show up in the novel's final, overarching theme—the exploration of the nature of Christianity and how Christian theology is fundamentally incompatible with slavery.
ISBN:9781840224023
Author:Harriet Beecher Stowe
God Dies by the Nile by Nawal El Saadawi
Brief Summary
Nawal El Saadawi is the 2007 recipient of the African Literature Association's Fonlon-Nichols Award!
"People have become corrupt everywhere. You can search in vain for justice or true morality. They no longer exist."
Kafr El Teen is a beautiful, sleepy village on the banks of the Nile. Yet at its heart it is tyrannical and corrupt. The Mayor, Sheikh Hamzawi of the mosque, and the Chief of the Village Guard are obsessed by wealth and use and abuse the women of the village, taking them as slaves, marrying them and beating them. Resistance, it seems, is futile.
Zakeya, an ordinary villager, works in the fields by the Nile and watches the world, squatting in the dusty entrance to her house, quietly accepting her fate. It is only when her nieces fall prey to the Mayor that Zakeya becomes enraged by the injustice of her society and possessed by demons. Where is the loving and peaceful God in whom Zakeya believes? Nawal El Saadawi's classic attempt to square religion with a society in which women are respected as equals is as relevant today as ever.
ISBN:9781842778777
Author:Nawal El Saadawi
Female Circumcision The Interplay of ...
Brief Summary
A Kenyan woman theologian--"an insider"--examines arguments for and against the controversial practice of female circumcision.
Based on her interviews with fifty Kenyan women representing Christianity, Islam, African Initiated Churches, and traditional religion, Wangila emphasizes the importance of understanding the gender relationships and cultural beliefs behind the practice and the important role played by religion.
ISBN:9781570757105
Author:Mary Nyangweso Wangila
The Six Figure Second Income
Brief Summary
The Six-Figure Second Income: How to Start and Grow a Successful Online Business without Quitting Your Day Job.
Proven methods for building an online income stream
You don't have to quit your current job, or already have piles of money, or be 24 years old, or riding a booming economy, in order to start a successful online business.
The Six-Figure Second Income explains how to start orgrow a business even when you think you have plenty of strikes against you.
In the course of building an eight-figure real estate information marketing business, David Lindahl and Jonathan Rozektested dozens of tools and techniques. This book is centered on principles they derived from all the tests they ran, tools they used, and money they spent.
If you're tired of the gimmicks and skepticism that anyone can really succeed online, this book will give you the no-hype, no-nonsense advice you need.
ISBN:9780470633953
Author:David Lindahl and Jonathan Rozek
Leveraging the Universe Seven Steps t...
Brief Summary
With a series of simple steps, this New York Times bestseller teaches us how to harness the power of the Universe to achieve our highest goals.
You can’t know where or when the Universe will enter your affairs— only that it will. So just pitch your pitches, take your baby steps, enjoy the journey, and prepare to be astounded.
Building on the principles shared in Infinite Possibilities and Manifesting Change, New York Times bestselling author Mike Dooley offers his first "how-to” book, spelling out exactly what can, should, and must be done to harness the Universe and life’s magic and what should—at all costs—never be done. In just seven steps, from understanding the nature of reality to aligning your beliefs with your dreams, Dooley shares exactly what you can immediately do to chart a course for seeing lasting results.
Interwoven with the author’s inspiring personal history, from fear to fortune, to demonstrate firsthand how you can begin from wherever you are, find traction, and blast forward to success, Leveraging the Universe is about using the gifts of thought, word, and deed to harness an infinite grace that tirelessly strives to sweep you off your feet, surround you with friends, and create the life you most want.
ISBN:9781582703152
Author:Mike Dooley
The Book of General Ignorance
Brief Summary
Misconceptions, misunderstandings, and flawed facts finally get the heave-ho in this humorous, downright humiliating book of reeducation based on the phenomenal British bestseller.
Challenging what most of us assume to be verifiable truths in areas like history, literature, science, nature, and more, The Book of General Ignorance is a witty "gotcha” compendium of how little we actually know about anything. It’ll have you scratching your head wondering why we even bother to go to school.
Think Magellan was the first man to circumnavigate the globe, baseball was invented in America, Henry VIII had six wives, and Mount Everest is the tallest mountain? Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong again. You’ll be surprised at how much you don’t know! Check out THE BOOK OF GENERAL IGNORANCE for more fun entries and complete answers to the following:
How long can a chicken live without its head?
About two years.
What do chameleons do?
They don’t change color to match the background. Never have; never will. Complete myth. Utter fabrication. Total Lie. They change color as a result of different emotional states.
How many legs does a centipede have?
Not a hundred.
How many toes has a two-toed sloth?
It’s either six or eight.
Who was the first American president?
Peyton Randolph.
What were George Washington’s false teeth made from?
Mostly hippopotamus.
What was James Bond’s favorite drink?
Not the vodka martini.
ISBN:9780307394910
Author:John Mitchinson and John Lloyd
Pivot The Only Move That Matters Is Y...
Brief Summary
If you've got the perfect job or business, congratulations. But if you are even a little bit uncertain that your current gig is the right one, it is time to start thinking about your next move. In the new world of work, it's the only move that matters.
What's next? is a question we all have to ask and answer more frequently in an economy where the average job tenure is only four years, roles change constantly even within that time, and smart, motivated people find themselves hitting professional plateaus. But how do you evaluate options and move forward without getting stuck? Jenny Blake's solution: It's about small steps, not big leaps—and the answer is already right under your feet. This book will teach you how to pivot from a base of your existing strengths.
Pivoting is a crucial strategy for Silicon Valley tech companies and startups. Jenny Blake—a former training and career development specialist at Google who now runs her own company as a career and business consultant and speaker—shows how pivoting can also be a successful strategy for individuals looking to make changes in their work lives, whether within their role, organization or business, or setting their sights on bigger shifts.
When you pivot, you double down on your existing strengths and interests to move in a new, related direction, instead of looking so far outside of yourself for answers that you skip over your hard-won expertise and experience. It empowers you to navigate changes with flexibility and strength—now and throughout your entire career.
Much like the lean business principles that took Silicon Valley by storm, pivoting is the crucial skill you need to stay agile, whether or not you are actively looking for a new position.
No matter your age, industry, or bank account balance, Jenny's advice will help you move forward strategically. Her Pivot Method will teach you how to:
• Double down on existing strengths, interests, and experiences. Identify what is working best and where you want to end up, then start to bridge the gap between two.
• Scan for opportunities and identify new skills without falling prey to analysis paralysis or compare and despair. Explore options by leveraging the network and experience you already have.
• Run small experiments to determine next steps. Do side projects to test ideas for your next move, taking the pressure off having the entire answer up front.
• Take smart risks to launch with confidence in a new direction. Set benchmarks to decide when the time is right to go all-in on your new direction.
Pivot also includes valuable insight for leaders who want to have more frequent career conversations with their teams to help talented people pivot within their roles and the broader organization.
No matter your current position, one thing is clear: your career success and satisfaction depends on your ability to determine your next best move. If change is the only constant, let's get better at it.
ISBN:978591848202
Author:Jenny Blake
Everything Under by Daisy Johnson
Brief Summary
Words are important to Gretel, always have been. As a child, she lived on a canal boat with her mother, and together they invented a language that was just their own. She hasn’t seen her mother since the age of sixteen, though – almost a lifetime ago – and those memories have faded. Now Gretel works as a lexicographer, updating dictionary entries, which suits her solitary nature.
A phone call from the hospital interrupts Gretel’s isolation and throws up questions from long ago. She begins to remember the private vocabulary of her childhood. She remembers other things, too: the wild years spent on the river; the strange, lonely boy who came to stay on the boat one winter; and the creature in the water – a canal thief? – swimming upstream, getting ever closer. In the end there will be nothing for Gretel to do but go back.
Daisy Johnson’s debut novel turns classical myth on its head and takes readers to a modern-day England unfamiliar to most. As daring as it is moving, Everything Under is a story of family and identity, of fate, language, love and belonging that leaves you unsettled and unstrung.
ISBN:9781910702345
Author:Daisy Johnson
The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh
Brief Summary
Imagine a world very close to our own: where women are not safe in their bodies, where desperate measures are required to raise a daughter. This is the story of Grace, Lia, and Sky kept apart from the world for their own good and taught the terrible things that every woman must learn about love.
And it is the story of the men who come to find them - three strangers washed up by the sea, their gazes hungry and insistent, trailing desire and destruction in their wake.
Hypnotic and compulsive, The Water Cure is a fever dream, a blazing vision of suffering, sisterhood, and transformation.
ISBN:9780241334744
Author:Sophie Mackintosh
Warlight by Michael Ondaatje
Brief Summary
In a narrative as mysterious as memory itself – at once both shadowed and luminous – Warlight is a vivid, thrilling novel of violence and love, intrigue and desire. It is 1945, and London is still reeling from the Blitz and years of war. 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel, are apparently abandoned by their parents, left in the care of an enigmatic figure named The Moth.
They suspect he might be a criminal, and grow both more convinced and less concerned as they get to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women with a shared history, all of whom seem determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel.
But are they really what and who they claim to be? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all he didn’t know or understand in that time, and it is this journey – through reality, recollection, and imagination – that is told in this magnificent novel.
ISBN:9781787330726
Author:Michael Ondaatje
The Land Grabbers The New Fight over ...
Brief Summary
How Wall Street, Chinese billionaires, oil sheiks, and agribusiness are buying up huge tracts of land in a hungry, crowded world.
An unprecedented land grab is taking place around the world. Fearing future food shortages or eager to profit from them, the world’s wealthiest and most acquisitive countries, corporations, and individuals have been buying and leasing vast tracts of land around the world. The scale is astounding: parcels the size of small countries are being gobbled up across the plains of Africa, the paddy fields of Southeast Asia, the jungles of South America, and the prairies of Eastern Europe. Veteran science writer Fred Pearce spent a year circling the globe to find out who was doing the buying, whose land was being taken over, and what the effect of these massive land deals seems to be.
The Land Grabbers is a first-of-its-kind exposé that reveals the scale and the human costs of the land grab, one of the most profound ethical, environmental, and economic issues facing the globalized world in the twenty-first century. The corporations, speculators, and governments scooping up land cheap in the developing world claim that industrial-scale farming will help local economies. But Pearce’s research reveals a far more troubling reality.
While some mega-farms are ethically run, all too often poor farmers and cattle herders are evicted from ancestral lands or cut off from water sources. The good jobs promised by foreign capitalists and home governments alike fail to materialize. Hungry nations are being forced to export their food to the wealthy, and corporate potentates run fiefdoms oblivious to the country beyond their fences.
Pearce’s story is populated with larger-than-life characters, from financier George Soros and industry tycoon Richard Branson, to Gulf state sheikhs, Russian oligarchs, British barons, and Burmese generals. We discover why Goldman Sachs is buying up the Chinese poultry industry, what Lord Rothschild and a legendary 1970s asset-stripper are doing in the backwoods of Brazil, and what plans a Saudi oil billionaire has for Ethiopia. Along the way, Pearce introduces us to the people who actually live on, and live off of, the supposedly "empty” land that is being grabbed, from Cambodian peasants, victimized first by the Khmer Rouge and now by crony capitalism, to African pastoralists confined to ever-smaller tracts.
Over the next few decades, land grabbing may matter more, to more of the planet’s people, than even climate change. It will affect who eats and who does not, who gets richer and who gets poorer, and whether agrarian societies can exist outside corporate control. It is the new battle over who owns the planet.
ISBN:9780807003244
Author:Fred Pearce