Once upon a time...in a kingdom high in the Pyrenees, three young princesses were forced to flee the chaos in their land -- vanishing without a trace and lost to their people...until the day a courageous prince can bring each princess home. Life in exile has taught the passionate Princess Amy to hate injustice, and on the enchanting English isle of Summerwind, she finds injustice personified in the powerful and wickedly handsome Jermyn Edmondson, marquess of Northcliff. Since he has stolen the islanders' livelihood, Amy decides to steal him. She kidnaps the arrogant nobleman, chains him with his own manacles, and holds him for ransom.It's a simple plan, destined to succeed. Surely Jermyn's uncle will pay his ransom. Alas, his uncle would be delighted if someone killed his nephew and left him to inherit the title and fortune. And holding the furious, guileful, sensual Jermyn chained in her basement provides a challenge to Amy's restraint...and her virtue.How could such a little revenge and blackmail go so passionately wrong?

A shy Louisiana librarian, Mary Warner fears she'll always be alone so she answers a personals ad from a rancher in Montana. Never before has she done anything so reckless, casting the only life she knows aside to travel to a strange place and marry a man she's never met. But something about this man calls to her and she knows this may be her very last chance at happiness.Tragedy made Travis Thompson the guardian of three orphaned children and determination leads him to do whatever it takes to keep the kids out of foster homes. When he decides to take a long shot on a personals ad, the results are surprising, and before he knows it, he has agreed to marry a mysterious Southern woman sight unseen.It could be the mistake of a lifetime. But Mary Warner may be exactly what this broken family needs. And with a little faith, a little trust, and a lot of love, two lonely hearts might just discover the true meaning of miracles.

A bold woman known as the "duchess of Magnus" was wagered and won in a card game. But the woman who arrived was her shy, quiet cousin Eleanor. Eleanor de Lacy must have been mad to agree to exchange identities with her stronger-willed cousin. She would never convince Remington Knight of the folly of this union especially since the man seemed so determined for it to take place. Worse still, she finds Remington dazzlingly attractive and she's charmed by his attempts to seduce her, even though he believes she is already his. But if he ever learns of Eleanor's deception, this daring rogue will wreak havoc . . . upon her reputation and her heart. Remington had expected a haughty, unbending aristocrat who would ensure his entrance into good society. But this "duchess" is a most pleasant surprise modest, warm-hearted, endearingly awkward, and a delight to the eye. In short, she is exactly the sort of bride Remington could fall passionately, completely in love with . . . . . . if he weren't so intent on his revenge.

Since the day she was scouted by a modeling agent while shopping at a London street fair when she was just nineteen, Alek Wek's life has been nothing short of a fantasy. When she's not the featured model in print campaigns for hip companies, or gracing the cover of Elle, she is working the runways of Paris, New York, and Milan to model for the world's leading designers, including Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel. But nothing in her early years prepared her for the life of a model.Born in Wau, in the southern Sudan, Alek knew only a few years of peace with her family before they were caught up in a ruthless civil war that pitted outlaw militias, the Muslim-dominated government, and southern rebels against each other in a brutal conflict that killed nearly two million people. Here is her daring story of fleeing the war on foot and her escape to London, where her rise from young model to supermodel was all the more notable because of Alek's non-European looks. A probe into the Sudanese conflict and an inside look into the life of a most unique supermodel, Alek is a book that will inspire as well as inform.

Autumn Rose has the chance to save the world she loves. But how much will she have to sacrificeAutumn Rose lives in a sleepy seaside town, but buried deep under the surface of her quiet life are dark secrets. Her grandmother is dead, murdered eighteen months ago, and the vibrant London social scene in which she was brought up is a world away. Even worse, at her new school she is shunned and condemned––all because of the swirling marks on her skin that prevent her from blending in with the crowd. Then the appearance at her school of a handsome young man—who has the same curious markings as Autumn—sends her world into turmoil. Suddenly the marks are deemed cool, and Autumn is thrust into the limelight. But her sudden popularity brings danger as her secrets threaten to come to light. And then there are her recurring dreams about a girl who is about to be seduced by a very dark prince . . . and Autumn must figure out how to save her before it is too late.

It's time to take back our country.Now. It's that simple. It's that urgent.So begins Dick Morris and Eileen McGann's latest and most important book. They say that we must act before President Barack Obama fully implements his radical political agenda. Because after Obama has won his war on prosperity and canceled the war on terror, it will be too late to regain our liberty or our security.At a time when we needed a pragmatic centrist to lead us out of recession, we got a doctrinaire socialist who wants to use the crisis to put the government in charge of the economy and enact European socialism here in the United States. Cars, banks what's nextHe will keep at it until Washington governs every major business in America and sets all our salaries.It's a catastrophe.Dick Morris and Eileen McGann saw the meltdown coming. In their book Outrage, they called out the house of cards that was Fannie Mae. In Fleeced, they went after the credit card companies, the subprime mortgage lenders, and the hedge fund billionaires who conspired to wreck the economy and Barack Obama, whose policies, they predicted last summer, would "trigger a stock market crash." Now, in Catastrophe, Morris and McGann take a hard look at America in free fall and at how Obama is transforming a vulnerable America into a socialist state.They tell the truth about Obama and his radical policies: He will destroy our health care system so that no one gets adequate care. He designed his bank rescue plan to pave the way for nation-alization of the banks and socialization of the economy. He firmly believes in government control of our major industries he's already commandeered the banks and the automobile industry. He plans to reshape the political landscape to keep the left in power for decades by cooking the census, enfranchising illegal immigrants, muzzling talk radio, and coercing workers into unions. He is attacking those who fight terrorism while letting the terrorists go free. He gives aid to Hamas while Shariah Law threatens to take over America. He has repealed the Declaration of Independence and put us under a worldwide, European-dominated financial regulatory system. But Obama is not working alone. Morris and McGann spell out how Congress is complicit: How Senator Chris Dodd and Congressman Charlie Rangel use special interests and special friends for their own enrichment and glorification. How Ted Kennedy Jr. is exploiting his father's health care power. "This is no time for apathy or alienation or hopelessness," Morris and McGann remind us. "It's a time for action." And that action must begin now before it's too late.

The renowned science writer, mathematician, and bestselling author of Fermat's Last Theorem masterfully refutes the overreaching claims of the "New Atheists," providing millions of educated believers with a clear, engaging explanation of what science really says, how there's still much space for the Divine in the universe, and why faith in both God and empirical science are not mutually exclusive In recent years a highly publicized coterie of scientists and thinkers, including Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, and Lawrence Krauss, have vehemently contended that breakthroughs in modern science have disproven the existence of God, asserting we must accept that the creation of the universe came out of nothing, that religion is evil, that evolution fully explains the dazzling complexity of life, and more. However, in this much-needed book, veteran science journalist Amir Aczel profoundly disagrees and convincingly demonstrates that science has not, as yet, provided any definitive proof refuting the existence of God. Based on interviews with eleven Nobel Prize winners and many other prominent physicists, biologists, anthropologists, and psychologists, as well as leading theologians and spiritual leaders, Why Science Does Not Disprove God is a fascinating tour through the history of science and a brilliant and incisive analysis of the religious implications of our ever-increasing understanding of life and the universe. Throughout, Aczel reminds us that science, at its best, is about the dispassionate pursuit of truth not a weapon in cultural debates. Respectful of both science and faith and argued from the perspective of no single religious tradition Aczel's book is an essential corrective that should be read by all.

For the first time, Nia Vardalos, writer and star of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, tells her hilarious and heartfelt bumpy-road-to-parenting story that eventually leads to her meeting an almost-three-year old girl who she knows instantly is her daughter.Vardalos chronicles it all with her signature wit and candor but also weaves in delicious behind-the-scenes Hollywood stories on the making of her films from working with Tom Hanks to meeting Oprah to having dinner with the Queen of England.In Instant Mom, Vardalos writes how moments after she finds out she has been nominated for an Academy Award, she is alone and en route to a fertility clinic, trying yet again for a chance at motherhood, wondering how long she can continue. When she finally adopts her daughter via American Foster Care, Vardalos reveals what really came next how, with only fourteen hours' notice, she and her husband transitioned their preschool aged daughter into their home. The Appendix includes information on how to adopt from all over the world. Vardalos will donate proceeds from the book sales to charities.In her memoir, Instant Mom, Vardalos reveals how she broke into the movie industry, became a working screenwriter and actress . . . and finally became a mom. Instantly.

Sleeping with a monster At first, Linda Bergstrom's marriage to her husband James was idyllic. They were young and in love; he was about to enter the Navy and she was eager to start a family. But it wasn't long before the dream exploded. James became abusive and violent, prone to sudden bursts of anger, long silences, and unexplained disappearances. But Linda vowed to hold on, despite the pain and fear . . . and her disturbing suspicions about her husband's secret life.Then, not long after their move to Houston, Texas, she made a terrifying discovery: James's hidden cache containing duct tape, a ski mask, and handcuffs. No longer could Linda Bergstrom deny the hideous truth.The man she lived with, the man she married for love, was a dangerous psychopath. And there was no escape and nowhere to run. Because no one not her friends, the Navy, or the police would believe her.

A life can change in an instant . . .No one knows this better than Miss Cleopatra Hadley,who went from poverty to plenty when she discovered one of England's richest men was her true father whowanted her to share his wealth . . . if she married intothe upper echelons of Society. A high price to pay for someone whose mother taught her just howdangerous a marriage could be. An imposing yet impoverished Scots nobleman,Lord Logan McKinney knows he must wed some vapidtitle-hunter with a substantial dowry in order torestore his once-thriving estate. Having the vibrantCleo nearby, however, makes his task even moreunpalatable for she tempts him like no other woman . . .just as he's precisely the sort of man she most fears:exciting, unpredictable, fiercely passionate. But whenattraction proves too powerful, they succumbto a kiss that quickly leads to lessonstoo scandalous for even thedarkest nights . . .

A fascinating exploration of the contents of Agatha Christie's seventy-three private notebooks, including illustrations and two unpublished Poirot stories When Agatha Christie died in 1976, at age eighty-five, she had become the world's most popular author. With sales of more than two billion copies worldwide, in more than one hundred countries, she had achieved the impossible more than one book every year since the 1920s, every one a bestseller.So prolific was Agatha Christie's output sixty-six crime novels, twenty plays, six romance novels under a pseudonym and more than one hundred and fifty short stories it was often claimed that she had a photographic memory. Was this trueOr did she resort over those fifty-five years to more mundane methods of working out her ingenious crimesFollowing the death of Agatha's daughter, Rosalind, at the end of 2004, a remarkable legacy was revealed. Unearthed among her affairs at the family home of Greenway were Agatha Christie's private notebooks, seventy-three handwritten volumes of notes, lists and drafts outlining all her plans for her many books, plays and stories. Buried in this treasure trove, all in her unmistakable handwriting, are revelations about her famous books that will fascinate anyone who has ever read or watched an Agatha Christie story.How did the infamous twist in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd really come aboutWhich very famous Poirot novel started life as an adventure for Miss MarpleWhich books were designed to have completely differ-ent endings, and what were theyWhat were the plot ideas that she considered but rejected?Full of details she was too modest to reveal in her own autobiography, this remarkable new book includes a wealth of excerpts and pages reproduced directly from the notebooks and her letters, plus, for the first time, two newly discovered complete Hercule Poirot short stories never before published.

A provocative critique of modern frivolity and a guide to being serious in an unserious age We used to live in a world run by serious people: politicians and religious leaders, writers and artists, journalists and academics, lawyers and business executives, who approached their work with maturity and mindfulness. Today it seems as if most of these figures have all but disappeared, leaving our country and our culture in the hands of amateurs, buffoons, and professional clowns. Yet, according to Lee Siegel, seriousness has been elusive in every age, and every age has its own particular obstacles to living seriously. In a unique combination of fiction, memoir, history, social criticism, satire, and spiritual reflection, Siegel illuminates our contemporary distractions of profit, popularity, and instant pleasure as we search for ways to be serious in culture, in politics, and in everyday life.Are You Seriousis a thoughtful and enlightening exploration of seriousness in all its incarnations, from the heights of intellectual endeavor to the depths of political conflict to how the word itself is used in ordinary situations, from romance to business. Siegel lays bare the forces in modern life that create the silliness all around us, and he describes how seriousness may be attained through the qualities of attention, purpose, and continuity, in satisfying lives forged in bonds of work and love.

Let us suppose for a moment that paper were to disappear.Would anything be lost?Everything would be lost.aper surrounds us. Not only as books, letters and diaries, but as beer mats and birth certificates, board games and business cards, fireworks and flypaper, photographs and playing cards, tickets and tea bags. We are paper people.But the age of paper is coming to an end. E-books regularly outsell physical books. E-tickets replace the paper variety. Archives are digitized. The world we know was made from paper, and yet everywhere we look, paper is beginning to disappear. As we enter a world beyond paper, Ian Sansom explores the paradoxes of the greatest of man-made materials and shows how some kinds of paper, and the ghosts and shadows of paper, will always be with us.Paper: An Elegy is a history of paper in all its forms and functions. Both a cultural study and a series of personal reflections on the meaning of paper, this book is a timely meditation on the very paper it is printed on.

Miss Jessie's is a memoir and business guide rich with inspirational life lessons and unique business advice from Miko Branch, the Chief Executive Officer of the dynamic Miss Jessie's the company that revolutionized the hair-care industry.When Miko and her sister, Titi, were children, their grandmother Miss Jessie taught them independence and showed them the value of being "do it yourself" women, all while whipping up homemade hair concoctions at her kitchen table. As a co-founder of Miss Jessie's, Miko reveals how she and Titi applied their grandmother's lessons to create a successful business from scratch. Miss Jessie's chronicles the Branch sisters' remarkable story. When they were children, their stern father encouraged them to become self-reliant and not to depend on their looks to get ahead. Taking this message to heart, they blossomed into business owners and leaders in their field, using ingenuity and without borrowing a dime. They soaked up the entrepreneurial and creative culture of the early hip-hop era on the streets of Brooklyn in the late 1990s, and in the high-end salons of Manhattan. They blended these inspirations to establish a business that has gone from their kitchen table to the shelves of major retailers around the globe, revolutionizing the hair-care industry. A charming and enlightening look at the women behind the brand, Miss Jessie's is chock-full of entertaining stories and invaluable instruction that can be applied to any business: an authentic expression that the American Dream is possible.

Massive fire-breathing dragons can be terrifying or kind, evil or accomplices of the hero, but they're never supporting characters, and all expert fantasy artists know how to depict them. Now, for the first time ever, a master dragon drawer reveals his secrets for doing this, taking you along for the ride as he meets these breathtaking creatures face-to-face.Inside you'll find: Easy to follow step-by-step instructions for creating realistic drawings of dragons. Dozens of different types of dragons, along with their unique anatomical and personality traits. An exploration of the digital and hand-drawing steps a dragon drawer must know.

What started as an underground party business—run and dominated by youths and hustlers—grew into the music business's greatest and biggest success. The Underground Is Massive is the first-ever big-picture history of the American electronic dance music underground, viewed through the lens of nineteen parties over thirty years—from the black, gay underground clubs of Chicago and Detroit's elite teen-party scene through nineties "electronica" to today's EDM-festival juggernaut, the book takes in the rise of the Internet and Burning Man, 9/11, and the collapse of the record business—and vividly charts why and how it took nearly three decades after electronic dance music became a global youth soundtrack for it to hit big in the land that birthed it. Through unparalleled insider access to anecdotes, interviews, and history, Michaelangelo Matos demystifies how what once belonged to a devoted audience of casual partiers and diehard dancers has become America's soundtrack of choice and changed the music industry completely. Matos expertly tackles the vast diversity of EDM's musical landscape, its technologically prophetic yet illicit origins, and the path by which underground raves grew into fiercely successful music festivals. Taking in legendary artists from Frankie Knuckles to Moby as well as the biggest names in EDM—Diplo, Skrillex, Deadmau5, David Guetta, Ti?sto, and Daft Punk—Matos's deep mix of sources and wide-lens overview of the culture make every chapter a page-turning revelation.

An original collection of incandescent cultural criticism, both experimental and personal, full of pragmatic advice for how to live a considered, joyful existence in our era of screen living and hipster irony, by a Gen-X Princeton professor and contributor to the New York TimesThe essays in The Other Serious examine the signature pheno?mena of our moment: the way our lives contradict themselves, how exaggeration and excess seep into our collective subconscious, why gender is becoming more rather than less complicated, and how we interact with the material things that surround us. It is a book about the delicacy and bluntness of American life, about how pop culture sticks its finger deeply into the ethical dilemmas of our time, and how to negotiate between the old and the new, the high and the low, the global and the local, the sacred and the profane. At the heart of these reflections lies a central question: What should you do when you don't know what to do?Taken together, these essays comprise a guide for the overhaul of "the administrativersity" of contemporary American life, a bureaucratic prison where the brain needn't work anymore. These pieces investigate the writer's own way of thinking putting forth new ideas, questioning them, and urging the reader to adopt the same spirit of critical reexamination.

They say kids don't come with a set of instructions the AstroTwins beg to differ!Are you a Cancer mom trying to understand your Sagittarius daughterAre you a Virgo mother with a Pisces son who seems to be your polar oppositeWondering why your little Taurus was such an easy baby, but your Aquarius was anything butEven if you've only ever read your horoscope in the back of a magazine for fun or never given astrology a second thought, you'll be amazed at the insights you'll get from Momstrology, a guide to parenting by the stars.From choosing a preschool, to picking hobbies and activities, to understanding what it means when your toddler gets clingy, or your big kid wants to quit soccer, or your tween talks back, Momstrology is a unique guide through all of the phases of your child's life. Offering charts for every astrological sign to decipher your child's good days and bad days, likes and dislikes, and how your child deals with authority, limits, separation, and siblings, the AstroTwins offer real-world advice, from a cosmic perspective, that is always supportive and never overwhelming. With a section devoted to understanding your strengths and challenges as a mom based on your sign and another section that matches you with your children to see how you all mesh together, Momstrology is a parenting guide like no other.Let Momstrology be your go-to guide in the trenches of parenthood...through tears and triumphs and meltdowns and milestones, for every age and stage.

A revised edition of the first book of poems by Stephen Mitchell, the renowned translator of Rilke's poetry, The Book of Job, and the Tao Te Ching. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

James Dean to Hopper I saw what you did today. Today you were great. Jack Nicholson to Hopper We're geniuses, you know thatIsn't it great to be a geniusThe chopper-riding hippie outlaw in Easy Rider. The prophetic madman in the jungle in Apocalypse Now. The terrifying psychopath in Blue Velvet. The kid gone wrong in Rebel Without a Cause. The actor taken under the wing of James Dean who longed to be the next Orson Welles. The hell-raising director who revolutionized Hollywood. An enigmatic man from Dodge City, Kansas, on an endless quest to realize the American Dream.Dennis Hopper has been described as a rebel, an icon, an addict plagued by demons, and one of the most important champions of the pop-art movement. Friend to Warhol, muse to David Lynch, mentor to Sean Penn, champion of Ice-T, Dennis Hopper built a career that was a half-century of rebellion waged at the edge of American popular culture.Tom Folsom's Hopper is a wild ride through Dennis's many lives. Featuring hundreds of interviews with Hopper's fellow actors, artists, musicians, and residents of Taos, New Mexico (where he spent much of his most manic time), as well as his ex-wives and many other people who knew him, Hopper takes you on an extraordinary and sometimes troubling journey. From Dennis's early days with his grandparents on a dusty farm in Kansas, where he watched trains go by on their way to Los Angeles, to his formative time in Hollywood as one of a bright new crop of actors straddling the edge of the studio system, to the rebellious 1960s and the start of the independent film movement, to the drug-addled 1970s and beyond, when Hopper staged one of the greatest Hollywood comebacks of all time Tom Folsom has crafted a biography as unconventional as Dennis Hopper himself.

Never before has the so-called mainstream media shown such naked political bias as in the 2012 presidential election. In 2012 Barack Obama was narrowly reelected, with naked support from a liberal media desperate to hide his failures, trumpet his accomplishments, and discredit his GOP rivals. Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Gingrich, Santorum: one by one the media took them apart using hidden-camera exposés, innuendo from anonymous accusers, repetition of harmful sound bites, and irrelevant—even untrue—storytelling. As soon as Mitt Romney emerged as the Republican Party's nominee, the liberal media went to work in earnest. They repeated Obama's campaign caricatures that Romney terrified his family dog, enjoyed firing people, and was nothing more than a willing tool of wealthy radical-right extremists. The Washington Post published a 5,400-word "exposé" on the allegation that in 1965 he may have pinned down a boy and cut his hair. Those same Post readers were then treated to 5,500 words on Barack Obama's lifelong love of basketball. Unquestionably, 2012 was the year when the liberal news media did all in their power to steal the presidential election—and they arguably succeeded. Media Research Center Founder and President Brent Bozell and MRC Director of Media Analysis Tim Graham provide the dramatic and conclusive evidence to prove this point—and show conservatives how to put an end to the leftist media agenda threatening democracy itself.