Coming down from his carefree youth and unwanted fame, Jack Kerouac undertakes a mature confrontation of some of his most troubling emotional issues: a burgeoning problem with alcoholism, addiction, fear, and insecurity. He dutifully records his ever-changing states of consciousness, which culminate in a powerful religious experience. Big Sur was written some time after Jack Kerouac's best-known works, following a visit to northern California and the first feelings of midlife crisis. Kerouac stayed for several weeks in a cabin in Big Sur, California, and with friends in San Francisco. Upon returning home, he wrote this account in a two-week period. Critic Richard Meltzer referred to Big Sur as Kerouac's 'masterpiece, and one of the great, great works of the English language.'

Is Man the only animal that laughs? Why are clowns so scary? Do jokes make children more intelligent? Are men funnier than women? Can God take a joke? What's brown and sticky? Top comedian Jimmy Carr and fellow joke-lover Lucy Greeves tour the strange and wonderful world of jokes - to find out what's funny and why. With over 400 of the best jokes ever told, "The Naked Jape" is both a lesson in joke-making and a damn good laugh.

These three great plays by one of the founding fathers of the theatre of the absurd, are alive and kicking with tragedy and humour, bleakness and farce. In "Rhinoceros" we are shown the innate brutality of people as everyone, except for Berenger, turn into clumsy, unthinking rhinoceroses. "The Chairs" depicts the futile struggle of two old people to convey the meaning of life to the rest of humanity, while "The Lesson" is a chilling, but anarchically funny drama of verbal domination. In these three 'antiplays' dream, nonsense and fantasy combine to create an unsettling, bizarre view of society. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

What if Britain had stayed out of the First World War? What if Germany had won the Second? How would England look if there had been no Cromwell? What would the world be like if Communism had never collapsed? And what if John F. Kennedy had lived? In this acclaimed book, leading historians from Andrew Roberts to Michael Burleigh explore what might have been if nine of the most decisive moments in modern history had never happened.

A delightful tour through the intimate details of life in Victorian England, told by a historian who has cheerfully endured them all. Ruth Goodman believes in getting her hands dirty. Drawing on her own adventures living in re-created Victorian conditions, Goodman serves as our bustling and fanciful guide to nineteenth-century life. Proceeding from daybreak to bedtime, this charming, illustrative work celebrates the ordinary lives of the most perennially fascinating era of British history. From waking up to the rapping of a "knocker-upper man" on the window pane to lacing into a corset after a round of calisthenics, from slipping opium to the little ones to finally retiring to the bedroom for the ideal combination of "love, consideration, control and pleasure," the weird, wonderful, and somewhat gruesome intricacies of Victorian life are vividly rendered here. How to Be a Victorian is an enchanting manual for the insatiably curious.

With wit, humor, and an infectious love of astronomy that could win over even the science-phobic, this fun and fascinating book reminds us that outer space is anything but remote. The scientist behind the popular website badastronomy.com, Philip Plait presents some of the most fearsome end-of-the-world calamities (for instance, incoming asteroids and planet-swallowing black holes), demystifies the scientific principles at work behind them, and gives us the odds that any of them will step out of the realm of sci-fi to disrupt our quiet corner of the cosmos. The result is a book that is both terrifying and entertaining-a tour of the violent universe we live in, written with an enthusiasm that every stargazer will appreciate.

"Great philosophical biographies can be counted on one hand. Monk's life of Wittgenstein is such a one."--"The Christian Science Monitor."

Silvio Lupanello, a big shot in the village of Vigta, is found dead in his car in a rough part of town frequented by prostitutes and drug dealers. Enter Inspector Salvo Montalbano. With his mix of humor, cynicism, compassion, and love of good food, Montalbano goes into battle against the powerful and the corrupt who block his path to the real killer.

opens with a mysterious tete-a-tete with a mafioso, some inexplicably abandoned loot from a supermarket heist, and some dying words that lead inspector Montalbano to a secret grotto in a mountainous cave where two young lovers, dead fifty years and still embracing, are watched over by a life-size terra cotta dog. Montalbano's passion to solve this old crime takes him, heedless of personal danger, on a journey through the island's past and into a family's dark heart amid the horrors of World War II.

Following the long-running success he has enjoyed on bestseller lists in Europe, Inspector Salvo Montalbano is now winning over American readers and critics alike as “one of the most engaging protagonists in detective fiction” (
). Now, in
, Andrea Camilleri’s savvy and darkly comic take on Sicilian life leads Montalbano into his most bone-chilling case yet.In two seemingly unrelated crimes, a young Don Juan is found murdered and an elderly couple is reported missing after an excursion to the ancient site of Tindari. As Montalbano works to solve both cases, he stumbles onto Sicily’s ghastly “new age” of brutal and anonymous criminality.

The earthy and urbane Sicilian detective Inspector Montalbano casts his spell on more and more fans with each new mystery from Andrea Camilleri.Two seemingly unrelated deaths form the central mystery of Rounding the Mark. They will take Montalbano deep into a secret world of illicit trafficking in human lives, and the investigation will test the limits of his physical, psychological, and moral endurance. Disillusioned and no longer believing in the institution he serves, will he withdraw or delve deeper into his work?

Winning fans in Europe and America for their dark sophistication and dry humor, Andrea Camilleri?s crime novels are classics of the genre. Set once again in Sicily,
pits Inspector Montalbano against his greatest foe yet: the weight of his own years. Still recovering from the gunshot wound he suffered in
, he must overcome self-imposed seclusion and waxing self-doubt to penetrate a web of hatred and secrets in pursuit of the strangest culprit he?s ever hunted. A mystery unlike any other, this emotionally taut story brings the Montalbano saga to a captivating crossroads.

Traces the history of sugar production and consumption, examines its relationship with slavery, class ambitions, and industrialization, and describes sugar's impact on modern diet and eating habits.

An ACE can be found
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Independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the area. Her bold presence draws three very different suitors: the gentleman-farmer Boldwood, soldier-seducer Sergeant Troy and the devoted shepherd Gabriel Oak. Each, in contrasting ways, unsettles her decisions and complicates her life, and tragedy ensues, threatening the stability of the whole community. The first of his works set in the fictional county of Wessex, Hardy's novel of swift passion and slow courtship is imbued with his evocative descriptions of rural life and landscapes, and with unflinching honesty about sexual relationships.

Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have never heard these stories, think their mothers' advice is irrelevant to their modern American lives – until their own inner crises reveal how much they've unknowingly inherited of their mothers' pasts.
With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.

A tour de force of investigative journalism-this is the story of the violent rise and fall of Pablo Escobar, the head of the Colombian Medellin cocaine cartel. Escobar's criminal empire held a nation of thirty million hostage in a reign of terror that would only end with his death. In an intense, up-close account, award-winning journalist Mark Bowden exposes details never before revealed about the U.S.-led covert sixteen-month manhunt. With unprecedented access to important players-including Colombian president C&eacutesar Gaviria and the incorruptible head of the special police unit that pursued Escobar, Colonel Hugo Martinez-as well as top-secret documents and transcripts of Escobar's intercepted phone conversations, Bowden has produced a gripping narrative that is a stark portrayal of rough justice in the real world.
"The story of how the U.S. Army Intelligence and Delta Force commandos helped Colombian police track down and kill Pablo Escobar is a compelling, almost Shakespearean tale." ( Los Angeles Times )
"Absolutely riveting. . . . Mark Bowden has a way of making modern nonfiction read like the best of novels." ( The Denver Post )

First serialized in 1887 in London magazines, Sherlock Holmes remains the greatest detective of all time. He was an instant hit with the public with his incisive mind and fearless approach to the truth. At a time when forensic science was just beginning to emerge, Holmes became the master of arcane knowledge and the criminal mind. His stunning leaps of deduction were the bane of England's evildoers and the envy of Scotland Yard. Arthur Conan Doyle killed Holmes off in 1891 when he tired of writing the stories, but public demand forced him to revive his hero shortly thereafter, and he continued with further adventures until 1927. Doyle wrote four Sherlock Holmes novels, and his short stories have been collected into five anthologies. Published over an astounding forty years, from A Study in Scarlet in 1887, to his final short stories published between 1921 and 1927, Holmes continues to thrill today. His name still evokes a vision of the smoking pipe and deerstalker hat, and remains synonymous with clever deduction and the ability to ferret out the truth from a maze of conflicting evidence. Enjoy all of Sherlock Holme's exploits in WingSpan Classic books. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes The Return of Sherlock Holmes A Study in Scarlet The Sign of The Four The Hound of the Baskervilles The Valley of Fear His Last Bow The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

The second of Leys's trilogy on China's Cultural Revolution, describing the cultural and political upheaval under Mao's regime and expressing criticism of its Western supporters.