The great national epic of Persia—the most complete English-language edition
Wherever Persian influence has spread, the stories of the Shahnameh become deeply embedded in the culture, as their appearance in such novels as The Kite Runner amply attests. Among the greatest works of world literature, this prodigious narrative, composed by the poet Ferdowsi in the late tenth century, tells the story of pre-Islamic Iran, beginning in the mythic time of creation and continuing forward to the Arab invasion in the seventh century. The sweep and psychological depth of the Shahnameh is nothing less than magnificent. Now one of the greatest translators of Persian poetry, Dick Davis, presents Ferdowsi’s masterpiece in an elegant combination of prose and verse.

Conjuring all the sweep of a great nineteenth-century novel, acclaimed author William Dalrymple unearths the fascinating story of the British Resident at the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad, James Kirkpatrick, who in 1798 fell in love with the great-niece of the Hyderabadi prime minister. To marry her, Kirkpatrick converted to Islam and even became a double agent working against the East India Company. Shedding light on the many eccentric Westerners during this period who "turned Turk," adopting Indian customs, dress, and religions, Darymple brings to life a compelling and largely unwritten story of Britain’s rule over India.

The book provides an introduction to the history of ancient Mesopotamia and its civilizations, incorporating archaeological and historical finds up to 1992.

Frost’s early poems, selected by poet David Orr for the centennial of “The Road Not Taken”

A Penguin Classics Deluxe edition

For one hundred years, Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” has enchanted and challenged readers with its deceptively simple premise—a person reaches a fork in the road, facing a choice full of doubt and possibility. The Road Not Taken and Other Poems presents Frost’s best-loved poem along with other works from his brilliant early years, including such poems as “After Apple-Picking,” “The Oven Bird,” and “Mending Wall.” Award-winning poet and critic David Orr’s introduction discusses why Frost remains so central (if often misunderstood) in American culture and how the beautiful intricacy of his poetry keeps inviting generation after generation to search for meaning in his work.

For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller from Wharton's top-rated professor
Named one of the best books of 2013 by Amazon, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal- as well as one of Oprah's riveting reads, Fortune's must-read business books, and the Washington Post's books every leader should read.
For generations, we have focused on the individual drivers of success: passion, hard work, talent, and luck. But today, success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others. It turns out that at work, most people operate as either takers, matchers, or givers. Whereas takers strive to get as much as possible from others and matchers aim to trade evenly, givers are the rare breed of people who contribute to others without expecting anything in return.
Using his own pioneering research as Wharton's youngest tenured professor, Adam Grant shows that these styles have a surprising impact on success. Although some givers get exploited and burn out, the rest achieve extraordinary results across a wide range of industries. Combining cutting-edge evidence with captivating stories, Grant shows how one of America's best networkers developed his connections, why the creative genius behind one of the most popular shows in television history toiled for years in anonymity, how a basketball executive responsible for multiple draft busts transformed his franchise into a winner, and how we could have anticipated Enron's demise four years before the company collapsed--without ever looking at a single number.
Praised by bestselling authors such as Susan Cain, Dan Pink, Tony Hsieh, Seth Godin, Dan Ariely, Gretchen Rubin, David Allen, Dan Gilbert, and Robert Cialdini--along with senior leaders from Google, McKinsey, Merck, Estee Lauder, Twitter, Nike, and NASA--Give and Take highlights what effective networking, collaboration, influence, negotiation, and leadership skills have in common. This landmark book opens up an approach to success that has the power to transform not just individuals and groups, but entire organizations and communities.

"To change China" was the goal of foreign missionaries, soldiers, doctors, teachers, engineers, and revolutionaries for more than three hundred years. But the Chinese, while eagerly accepting Western technical advice, clung steadfastly to their own religious and cultural traditions. As a new era of relations between China and the United States begins, the tales in this volume will serve as cautionary histories for businessmen, diplomats, students, or any other foreigners who foolishly believe that they can transform this vast, enigmatic country.

Book Description
Amy Tan has touched millions of readers with haunting and sympathetic novels of cultural complexity and profound empathy. With the same spirit and humor that characterize her acclaimed novels, she now shares her insight into her own life and how she escaped the curses of her past to make a future of her own. She takes us on a journey from her childhood of tragedy and comedy to the present day and her arrival as one of the world’s best-loved novelists. Whether recalling arguments with her mother in suburban California or introducing us to the ghosts that inhabit her computer, The Opposite of Fate offers vivid portraits of choices, attitudes, charms, and luck in action—a refreshing antidote to the world-weariness and uncertainties we all face today.
Amazon.com
Amy Tan begins The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings, a collection of essays that spans her literary career, on a humorous note; she is troubled that her life and novels have become the subject of a "Cliff’s Notes" abridgement. Reading the little yellow booklet, she discovers that her work is seen as complex and rich with symbolism. However, Tan assures her readers that she has no lofty, literary intentions in writing her novels--she writes for herself, and insists that the recurring patterns and themes that critics find in them are entirely their own making. This self-deprecating stance, coupled with Tan’s own clarification of her intentions, makes The Opposite of Fate feel like an extended, private conversation with the author.
Tan manages to find grace and frequent comedy in her sometimes painful life, and she takes great pleasure in being a celebrity. "Midlife Confidential" brings readers on tour with Tan and the rest of the leather-clad writers’ rock band, the Rock-Bottom Remainders. And "Angst and the Second Book" is a brutally honest, frequently hysterical reflection on Tan’s self-conscious attempts to follow the success of The Joy Luck Club.
In a collection so diverse and spanning such a long period of time, inevitably some of the pieces feel dated or repetitious. Yet, Tan comes off as a remarkably humble and sane woman, and the book works well both to fill in her biography and to clarify the boundaries between her life and her fiction. In her final, title essay, Tan juxtaposes her personal struggles against a persistent disease with the nation’s struggles against terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11. She declares her transformative, artistic power over tragedy, reflecting: "As a storyteller, I know that if I don’t like the ending, I can write a better one."
--Patrick O’Kelley
From Publishers Weekly
Tan's bestselling works of fiction are, in part, based on her own family history, and this robust book, her first nonfiction effort, explains much about where those stories came from and how they influenced her. The collection of "casual pieces" (previously published in such diverse venues as Harper's Bazaar, Ski Magazine, the New Yorker, Salon.com and even PW) covers Tan's childhood in California and Switzerland; her writing career; her relationships with her mother and her late editor, Faith Sale; and, most significantly, the role of fate in her life. Raised with "two pillars of beliefs" (Christian faith on her father's side; Chinese fate on her mother's), Tan finds luckboth good and badin all corners of her life. Ultimately, however, she knows "a higher power knows the next move and... we are at the mercy of that force." As she reflects on how things have happened in her 50-odd years, Tan's writing varies from poetic to prosaic. In an excerpt from a journal she kept during a 1990 trip to China, she eloquently describes Shanghai's streets: "Gray pants and white shirts are suspended from long bamboo poles that overhang the street. The laundry flaps in the wind like proletarian banners." But reading about Tan's adventures with her rock band, the Rock Bottom Remainders, feels a bit like reading someone else's high school yearbook's inside jokes, as she reminisces about truck-stop breakfasts and late-night sing-alongs. Still, this is a powerful collection that should enthrall readers of The Joy Luck Club and Tan's other novels. B&w photos.
From Booklist
Tan's readers are well versed in the basic elements of her mother's difficult life and demanding personality because her mother and her tragic family history have inspired a great deal of Tan's spellbinding fiction. Now in her first nonfiction book, Tan steps out from behind the veil of imaginative writing and presents a collection of arresting autobiographical essays that elicit a rich spectrum of responses from astonishment to shock, laughter, sympathy, and admiration. Tan tells the incredibly poignant tale of her parents' unlikely marriage, the stark anguish of losing both her father and brother within a year, and her restless mother's peripatetic ways, which caused Tan and her brothers to change schools innumerable times until they landed in Switzerland, where Tan netted the classic bad-boy boyfriend. Questions of memory, intuition, language, inheritance, and storytelling preoccupy Tan as she traces the serpentine path that led her to become a novelist, and recounts her mother's struggle with depression and Alzheimer's. Tan is mischievously hilarious in her reports on the writing life, and intensely moving in the most mysterious and haunting of her musings, her remembrances of the murder of her closest friend and the strange, prescient visions that preceded and followed this tragedy. No matter how much readers already revere Tan, their appreciation for her will grow tenfold after experiencing these provocative and unforgettable revelations.
Donna Seaman
From AudioFile
When a novelist turns to essays, there's a marked reduction in drama. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but it's not as thrilling. Unless you're Amy Tan. Her grandmother killed herself with opium. Her mother was jailed for adultery. Her father and brother were taken suddenly with brain tumors. Her dear friend, Peter, was murdered on her birthday and in a manner that had been foreshadowed in her dreams. Another friend suffocated while skiing. Tan herself has escaped death by a whisker again and again. When a clumsy fan asks if she's a contemporary author--in other words, "Are you dead yet?''--we sympathize with the confusion. Confessing, reporting, with a smile in her voice, she is a true-life adventurer you can't help but like and admire. B.H.C. 2004 Audie Award Finalist
Book Dimension
length: (cm)20.3 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)13.5

六年时间记录的芝加哥底层生活的第一手资料娓娓铺开：沉毅机智将自己幻想成社区保护神的黑帮老大，边贩毒边攒钱读书希望有朝一日脱离黑帮但终于身死狱中的年轻黑帮财务主管（《魔鬼经济学》中那篇黑帮经济学的数据就来自这位主管，他在对自己的命运绝望之后将手里的黑帮财务记录交给了Venkatesh教授），老谋深算有时狡猾毒辣但用尽全力保护社区中妇女儿童的贫民窟房屋主管老太太，为扶养孩子不惜和任何人睡觉的各种年轻黑人母亲，喜好洗劫黑帮成员随意欺压黑人的更可怕的警察，各色流落街头在夹缝中挣扎的流浪汉。。。比任何的小说电影更加真实精彩。而作者，本来做为一个客观的观察记录者，后来也不由得深陷其中。就像一直罩着他的黑帮大哥反复说的那句话：“在这个世界里，记住，你要不和我们一伙，要不和别人一伙。”

在线阅读本书
In October 1942, a panzer officer wrote Stalingrad is no longer a town... Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure'.
The battle for Stalingrad became the focus of Hitler and Stalin's determination to win the gruesome, vicious war on the eastern front. The citizens of Stalingrad endured unimaginable hardship; the battle, with fierce hand-to-hand fighting in each room of each building, was brutally destructive to both armies. But the eventual victory of the Red Army, and the failure of Hitler's Operation Barbarossa, was the first defeat of Hitler's territorial ambitions in Europe, and the start of his decline. An extraordinary story of tactical genius, civilian bravery, obsession, carnage and the nature of war itself, Stalingrad will act as a testament to the vital role of the soviet war effort.

Beaches, books and juniper berries: this season’s cover star SARAH JESSICA PARKER is photographed by Roe Etheridge in Amaganesett, Long Island
Our Book of the Season, JAPANESE GHOST STORIES, is centre of gravity to a series of hallucinatory artworks; correspondents around the world compile an obsessive yet fragmentary portrait of the book’s odd author, Lafcadio Hearn. Contributors include Lieko Shiga, John Self, Travis Elborough, Bess Lovejoy and Moeko Fujii.

This is an account of how the pleasures of the seaside were discovered in the Western World. Based on the premiss that how we see the landscape over time is shaped not just by nature but also by the cultural baggage we bring to it, this book argues that with few exceptions, people living before the 18th century knew nothing of the attractions of the coast. The sea was perceived as sinister and unchanging, an unfathomable force inspiring horror, associated with floods, sea monsters and the like. With the Enlightenment, a change occurred. The book follows a course from a theocentric interpretation of the shore as the line drawn by God's finger after the Flood, through the sea as experienced by Neoclassical travellers on the Grand Tour, to the beloved sea of the Romantic poets and the growth of the popular seaside resort that came in their wake.

In The Viral Storm award-winning biologist Nathan Wolfe - known as 'the Indiana Jones of virus hunters' for his work in jungles and rain forests across the world - shows the threat of a global pandemic is greater than we have ever imagined.
The Viral Storm examines how viruses like HIV, swine flu, and bird flu have almost wiped us out in the past - and may do so in the future. It explores why modern life makes us so vulnerable to global pandemics, and what new technologies can do to prevent them. Wolfe's provocative vision may leave you feeling distinctly uncomfortable - but it will reveal exactly what it is we are up against.

Laurie Baker was born in Birmingham, England in 1917. He graduated from the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design with architecture at the age of 20. He moved to India in 1945, and was initially a part of the World Leprosy Mission, which aimed at the conversion of once used asylums into hospitals which would shelter the people suffering from the disease.
In a meeting with Mahatma Gandhi that happened in 1943, Gandhi told Baker that his knowledge of western architecture would be of very little help in India, where the rural areas needed more attention than the cities. Gandhi gave Baker his idea of building houses, saying that the materials needed to build a house should be acquired from within 5 miles of the site. This idea was to have a great impact on the architect s life a few years down the line.
During his architectural career in India, Baker became renowned for building beautiful houses with local materials. These low-cost houses were aimed at clients from the lower class and the lower-middle class. To further spread awareness about cost-effective housing in India, he founded the Center of Science and Technology for Rural Development. The Government of India recognized Baker s outstanding contributions to the country s architecture by awarding him the Padma Shri in 1990.
This book, Laurie Baker: Life, Works And Writings, delves deep into Baker s life and gives the readers a comprehensive view of him.

An “intriguing” oral portrait of the people behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art ( Entertainment Weekly )
Using more than fifty interviews, award-winning writer Danny Danziger creates a fascinating mosaic of the people behind New York’s magnificent Metropolitan Museum of Art. From the aristocratic, acerbic director of the museum, Philippe de Montebello, to the curators who have a deep knowledge and passionate appreciation of their collections, from the security guards to the philanthropists who keep the museum’s financial life blood flowing, Danziger brings to life this extraordinary world through the words of those who are devoted to making the Met the American institution it surely is.

The Snow Leopard
In 1973, Peter Matthiessen and field biologist George Schaller traveled high into the remote mountains of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and possibly glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard. Matthiessen, a student of Zen Buddhism, was also on a spiritual quest to find the Lama of Shey at the ancient shrine on Crystal Mountain. The result is a remarkable account of a journey both physical and spiritual, as the arduous climb yields to Matthiessen a deepening Buddhist understanding of reality, suffering, impermanence, and beauty."