• Casanova by Ian Kelly
Ah, Casanova. Men want to be him, and women want to be with him. Or is it the other way around? He?s Romeo with cojones, Bond without the Beretta, a man more sinned with than sinning. In the annals of sexual conquest, there has seldom been a more entertaining and knowing chronicler. Casanova, according to Casanova, was a legend.
• What If a Large Asteroid Was Heading for Earth?
"But then an asteroid 6 miles across ? that?s bigger than Mt. Everest! ? slammed into the Gulf of Mexico just off the Yucatan Peninsula. The explosion was huge, setting fire to vast amounts of land, and creating a tsunami that must have scoured the Mexican and Texas coasts clean. It launched so much rock into the sky that they went on ballistic arcs, going up out of the atmosphere and then back down, setting fire to forests around the world."
• Dilettanti: The Antic and the Antique in Eighteenth-Century England by Bruce ...
A famous double portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds shows members of the Dilettanti Society sipping away while making rude gestures about vaginas while holding up gemstones from classical antiquity and admiring painted Greco-Roman vases.
• A Most Wanted Man by John Le Carré
The violent and crude final pages of the book force us to scrutinise our feelings over the last three hundred pages ? did we will this? Are we guilty of this ending, if only by five percent? The brutal inanity of the dialogue is a warning that in Le Carré?s world, we don?t get to argue over the proportions and scale of what we set in motion.
• The Drawings of Alfred Kubin
Kubin had something quite different in mind: with his hallucinatory incantations he was seeking to disturb the viewer; he felt driven to solve the riddle of humankind and creation in a spellbinding act.
• Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America by Meredith Mason Brown
It was brutal stuff. Massacres, scalpings, crops burned, winters with only salted meat to eat ? and this on both sides. Again Boone survived this melee, but it took a great deal of guile to do it. When his daughter Jemima was kidnapped by a Cherokee and Shawnee war party, for instance, he needed his backwoods know-how to track them down quickly and shoot the offenders.
• Love Junkie by Rachel Resnick
It takes an enormous amount of courage for Resnick to put her life story on the page. Her writing is as stripped, raw and intense as her emotions, and at times you don?t want to read further. But you do, anyway, with a kind of abject horror. The two main men that parade through her life, who ultimately woo, use and abuse her are truly the type of guys your mother would warn you to stay far away from.
• Driftless by David Rhodes
In his first book in more than thirty years Rhodes proves with ease why when he stopped writing after a paralyzing motorcycle crash in 1977 he was considered one of this country?s finest writers.
• What?s Killing the Honeybees?
"So the bigger conclusion is that we have soaked our landscape in toxic chemicals, many of which can interact to form even more toxic compounds, and there is absolutely no regulation or testing of this mixing. Most beekeepers and researchers I?ve spoken with believe pesticides are one factor, working in conjunction with introduced parasites, viruses, bacteria, and fungi, and quite possibly with deteriorating living conditions for bees. Bees could handle one or two of these stressors, but not all...
• Events Leading to America?s Involvement in Vietnam
Given the political vacuum in the South, a Communist takeover of all of Vietnam within two years, or even less, seemed unavoidable. Beyond vague ideas of somehow rallying the Vietnamese in the South and contingency plans for creating stay-behind agents to conduct guerrilla warfare against the Vietminh, the U.S. had little idea of how to prevent a complete Communist take-over.
• Résistance by Agnès Humbert
The early resistors soon discover that the Nazis don?t view their activities with similar lightheartedness. Oblivious to the reason why a German car might be parked outside the hospital her mother is in, Humbert walks straight into hell. A member of the Gestapo has infiltrated and betrayed their group, and she and her friends are rounded up for a show trial. It is only April 1941. What follows is an account that tests our 21st century belief in rationalism.
• School Rampage Killers: A Psychological Portrait
The shooter had convinced himself that killing was gutsy and masculine. Based on his misreadings of Nietzsche and from repeated viewings of the Oliver Stone film, Natural Born Killers, he had convinced himself that the killer was a kind of superior being, and that killing constituted a form of ?Natural Selection.?
• The Gulf Stream: Tiny Plankton, Giant Bluefin, and the Amazing Story of the P...
Aside from providing an easily assimilated scientific and historical overview, The Gulf Stream describes and mammoth natural system that helps drive the living organism that is earth. In these regards Ulanski has done his job as a writer.
• Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3 by Annie Proulx
Things are never fine just they way they are in Annie Proulx?s new collection of Wyoming stories. Women imperil themselves on mountains, animals go tits-up in ditches, young and old end up blighted or dead. Even the Devil can?t quite seem to make things work. Life is tough, Proulx says, and I ain?t peddling corn syrup.
• Dr. Shashi Tharoor: Understanding India
"India is a status-quo power: it wants nothing that Pakistan has. Pakistan?s rulers, however, are obsessed with Kashmir, which they have repeatedly tried and failed to wrest from India through war and militancy, and with a desire to ?cut India down to size? by bleeding it through terrorism. What needs to happen is for a new political culture to prevail in Pakistan, one that privileges peace, dialogue, co-operation, tourism and trade instead of resentment, bigotry, militarism, intolerance and vio...
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• The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington
• The Good Thief
• Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West
• Nano Comes to Clifford Falls: And Other Stories
• Unaccustomed Earth
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