London's social season is in full swing, and Victorian aristocracy is atwitter over a certain gentleman who claims to be the direct descendant of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Adding to their fascination with all things French, an audacious cat burglar is systematically stealing valuable items that once belonged to the ill fated queen. But things take a dark turn. The owner of one of the pilfered treasures is found murdered after the theft is reported in the newspapers, and the mysterious thief develops a twisted obsession with Lady Emily Ashton. It takes all of Lady Emily's wit and perseverance to unmask her stalker and ferret out the murderer, while faced with a brewing scandal that threatens both her reputation and her romance with the dashing Colin Hargreaves.

Being undead sucks. Literally.Just ask C. Thomas Flood. Waking up after a fantastic night unlike anything he's ever experienced, he discovers that his girlfriend, Jody, is a vampire. And surprise! Now he's one, too. For some couples, the whole biting-and-blood thing would have been a deal breaker. But Tommy and Jody are in love, and they vow to work through their issues.But word has it that the vampire who initially nibbled on Jody wasn't supposed to be recruiting. Even worse, Tommy's erstwhile turkey-bowling pals are out to get him, at the urging of a blue-dyed Las Vegas call girl named (duh) Blue. And that really sucks.

Tras la muerte de sus padres en un accidente automovilístico, el joven Andrés Segovia y sus hermanos se ven obligados a mudarse a México con el resto de la familia. Esta decisión, a pesar de haber sido tomada con la mejor de las intenciones, es un error que trastornará para siempre la vida de Andrés.Después de varios a?os de vivir en México luchando contra el estigma de ser un hispano nacido en Estados Unidos y sintiéndose siempre fuera de lugar, Andrés decide regresar a los Estados Unidos. Las autoridades lo detienen un día y lo ponen bajo la tutela de una terapeuta llamada Grace Delgado, una viuda que vive en El Paso. Su relación se convierte pronto en una gran amistad, y justo cuando comienzan a florecer y a disfrutar de su vida juntos, se descubren secretos inconcebibles acerca de la muerte de los padres de Andrés . . . secretos que bien pueden destruir la posibilidad que tienen de ser felices.

While their husbands are out making money, making deals, and making . . . whatever, the trophy wives of New Falls are slipping not so quietly into middle age. Lauren, Bridget, Dana, and Caroline pretend to each other that their only problems are parties, plastic surgery, and which Mikimotos to buy. But behind the closed doors of their gracious homes there are broken hearts and broken promises . . . the stuff that gossip is made of. And the newest dish du jour is a whopper! The husband of one of their oldest friends, who dumped his wife for a newer model—a sexier, flashier, sleeker hairdresser—is found dead, his ex-wife, Kitty, standing over him . . . holding the smoking gun. Kitty claims she's innocent, and there are plenty of women around town who might want the rat dead. Now it's up to the women to discover where in their high-priced suburb a killer is hiding, and which good little wife has done something very, very wicked.

"Now we're just alike." So begins Fiona and Patricia's friendship that warm autumn morning in first grade in Lake Charles, Louisiana, their bond forged ever closer by Fiona's abusive mother and Patricia's neglectful one. Their relationship is a source of continuity and strength through their move to L.A. to become actresses; through Fiona's marriage and Patricia's sudden fame. When husband and career pressures exact a toll, the women wonder if their friendship can survive. Then a dark secret from their past emerges, threatening to destroy not only their bond, but all they've worked for as well.The Safety of Secrets is a beautifully written exploration of the bonds forged in childhood and challenged decades later, of the fulfillment of dreams and the damage they can cause, and of secrets being uncovered and the truth we find inside.

Forty-two and divorced, Holli Templeton has just begun to realize the pleasures of owning her life for the first time. But the experience is short-lived. Her son Conner has unexpectedly fled college in Rhode Island and moved to Texas with his troubled girlfriend, Kilian. This alone is difficult to handle, but as Holli begins to understand the depth of the girl's problems, concern turns to crisis.Conner's situation is worsening, and as if that's not enough, Holli notices signs of serious decline in the beloved Texas grandmother who raised her. She has no choice but to leave the comfort zone of life in New York and return to her hometown in Texas to care for the people she loves.In the tight space between these two generations, Holli initially feels lost. The journey back stirs so many unresolved hurts from her childhood. But something else happens in this uneasy homecoming. Comfort arrives in the ethereal presence of the mother long lost to her, and Holli is surprised to find that as she struggles to help her son and grandmother, the wounds of her own past begin to heal.The space between before and after—easily the most challenging place she has ever known—begins to reveal an unanticipated hope for what the future might hold.

Bruno Dante is the best boiler-room salesman in Los Angeles. There's only one problem: he can't keep a good thing going. When he becomes involved with a beautiful but dangerous fellow Orbit Computer Supplies employee—sexy ex-stripper, gangbanger, and crackhead Jimmi Valiente—Bruno's ready to chuck his job and his most recent twelve–step program. Leaping headfirst into an impossibly destructive love-hate relationship with the addictive Jimmi, Bruno finds it's not long at all before his world begins to spiral out of control . . . again.

Food Can Make You Younger!Dr. Michael Roizen presents his program for eating the RealAge way: a diet that is good for your overall health, plus works to delay or even reverse aging. If there's one thing you will learn from this book, it's that no matter who you are, if you eat foods that are high in nutrients and low in calories you will be on the road to renewed health and vitality.The RealAge Diet Shows You How To:Use foods to regain the energy of your youthEat nutritiously while still enjoying delicious food choicesChoose the right vitamins and supplements to keep you youngModify various popular weight-loss diets to maximize their age-reducing benefitsRead between the lines of restaurant menus to find the most healthful optionsMake your RealAge younger with every bite

He came to mainstream prominence as a machine more human than his creators in Blade Runner, terrified us as a hitchhiker bent on his own death and the death of anyone who got in his way in The Hitcher, and unforgettably portrayed a lonely king roaming the night as a wolf and pining for the love of a hawk during the day in Ladyhawke. Rutger Hauer has dazzled audiences for years with his creepy, inspiring, and villainous portrayals of everyone from a cold-blooded terrorist in Nighthawks to a blind martial arts master in Blind Fury, but his movie career was nothing compared to his real-life adventures of riding horses, sword fighting, and leaving home at fifteen to scrub decks on a freighter and explore the world.From poverty to working with a traveling theater troupe to his breakout European performance in Turkish Delight and working with legendary directors such as Paul Verhoeven (RoboCop and Basic Instinct) and Ridley Scott (Alien and Gladiator), Hauer has collected All Those Moments here.

In Paducah, Kentucky, seventeen-year-old Thomas feels as reined in as the mighty Ohio, a river confined by high floodwalls protecting his small Southern hometown. But all boundaries vanish when Thomas experiences first love with Alice, his new history teacher, a woman eight years his senior and when he meets Shiloh, a misfit vagabond and anarchist who becomes his new role model. Fleeing to rural Vermont, this unlikely trio boldly pursues freedom, intimacy, and seclusion, unfettered by commitments and rules. But a life apart from the world does not ensure a life apart from the past and for one of them, the past that emerges will threaten tragedy.

With its revolutionary work-study program and focus on character development, the Cristo Rey Network's values-based education model has presented a new vision in school administration and reinvented urban education. In Putting Education to Work, the inspiring Cristo Rey story is told from its humble beginnings in an inner-city Chicago neighborhood to its current network of 28 participating schools and 9,000 students in underserved communities across the nation, boasting an unprecedented 100 percent college acceptance rate. Through amazing stories of hardship and transformation, the effectiveness of the Cristo Rey method is brought to life, embodied by lifelong learners who can now reimagine their futures, unleash their inner potential, and fulfill their hopes and dreams by preparing for success in college and in life.Proceeds from this book will go toward the Cristo Rey Network's mission of providing quality Catholic college preparatory education to young people who live in urban communities with limited educational options. By purchasing this book, you become part of the Network, joining schools, employers, university partners, and other benefactors in providing the opportunity for college success to thousands of students across America today.

An insider's view of the most successful show in the history of TV, 60 Minutes. The most popular TV show in America isn't American Idol, and it's not Survivor. Month in, month out, the most–watched program in America is 60 Minutes, drawing a staggering 25 million viewers in an average week. For its entire 34–year history, 60 Minutes was the brainchild (and personal fiefdom) of Don Hewitt, the take–no–prisoners visionary who hustled the show into being and kept it afloat with a mixture of chutzpah, tough talk, scheming, and journalistic savvy. But now that Hewitt is 80 and grudgingly considering retirement, the show's direction is increasingly up for grabs, and the transition will surely be marked by some serious fireworks. As author David Blum provides a fly–on–the–wall perspective on the show's upheavals, he'll also trace its past; although the show has aired some 5,000 pieces and has made household names of Mike Wallace, Ed Bradley, Leslie Stahl, and Morley Safer, much of the backstage story––the passionate pursuit of stories, the behind–the–scenes wrangling, and the stars' prima donnish behavior––has gone untold. With full access to the producers, stars, and executives, Blum will give readers an unprecedented view of the personalities and events that have shaped 60 Minutes – and a new perspective on how current events become news.

A timeless and visionary blueprint for conscious living and quantum change as we approach the next century.

Bill Parcells was living in self-imposed exile from the National Football League sidelines. The Tuna had earned living-legend status after coaching the Giants, Patriots, and Jets from the skid-row district of the NFL and transforming those teams into champions. The final weeks of the 2002 season found Parcells working as an analyst at the ESPN studios. His heart aching, Parcells was like a televangelist with no cripples to heal. The Tuna urgently yearned for another lost cause.In Dallas, Cowboys' owner Jerry Jones described by author Mike Shropshire as "a man involved in a heroic struggle to overcome what had been diagnosed as a terminal face-lift" was suffering through sleepless nights. Although his once-proud pro football powerhouse traveled beneath a banner that read "America's Team," it had suffered three straight 5-11 seasons. This team was so sick, it had bedsores.After a clandestine meeting aboard Jones's private jet, parked at a New Jersey airport, Parcells agreed to abandon his East Coast roots and travel south to restore life to the Cowboys. The Tuna and Jones needed each other in the worst kind of way, so a shotgun wedding was performed. The pundits of the national media joined hands and shouted, "Parcells and Jones can't stand each other! They're too set in their ways! It'll never work!"As usual, the pundits were wrong. With Parcells the ultimate motivator and so-called Jock Whisperer applying his craft, Dallas rolled to a 10-6 regular-season record and shocked the NFL by making the playoffs. When the Tuna Went Down to Texas details the saga of how this unlikely partnership of men "too brittle for tango lessons, but not yet blind enough for assisted living" amazed the sports world and serves as absolute proof that while the truth is not always stranger than fiction, it's usually a lot funnier.

Weis was taught football by some of the best minds in the game: Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick. Parcells would give him a life-defining break in 1990 by hiring him as an assistant on the New York Giants staff. For a Jersey guy who loved sports, this was a dream come true, especially when Weis won his first championship in his debut year in the NFL. He'd always wanted to be a sports announcer the next Marv Albert but he'd caught the coaching bug and was now in a position to learn from the best. And he did, following Parcells to the New England Patriots and then to the New York Jets. Under enormous pressure and exacting standards, Weis flourished and later became offensive coordinator.When Parcells stepped down as coach of the Jets, Weis joined his colleague and friend Bill Belichick, who was the newly named Patriots head coach. Together they would thrive, building a storied franchise, a rare modern-day dynasty that won three Super Bowls in four years. Through it all, Weis designed offensive schemes that would befuddle even the best defenses in the NFL, and he coached a number of players to greatness, including Pro Bowlers Ben Coates, Curtis Martin, and, of course, Tom Brady.The chance of a lifetime arrived in December of 2004: Weis was offered the opportunity to lead one of the most prestigious football schools in the country, Notre Dame home of coaching legends Knute Rockne, Frank Leahy, Ara Parseghian, Dan Devine, and Lou Holtz. And so began a new chapter in Weis's career. Weis took over a program in dire need of direction, and now he is in the process of building his own legacy with his unique vision.Off the field, Weis faced his other challenges. Seeking to improve his health and lose weight, he decided to get gastric bypass surgery. What he thought would be a routine procedure turned into a nightmare as he nearly bled to death, lapsed into a coma, and was read the last rites. It was a horrifying experience, yet he battled back in inspiring fashion and still demands nothing less of himself despite the long-lasting aftereffects.He has had his joys, too. Weis considers his wife, Maura, his best friend. They have two beautiful children: Charlie, his "best buddy," and Hannah, who he and his wife consider their "guiding angel." Hannah is developmentally delayed and has been the inspiration leading to the establishment of Hannah and Friends, a nonprofit foundation seeking to improve the quality of life for people with special needs. No Excuses is not only illuminating and insightful, it is an extraordinary look inside one of football's greatest minds who has helped shape today's game.

Rob Ryder made that pledge to his wife, and he was determined to stick to it. As technical consultant on blockbuster sports films, he had seen up close how the film business works and what kind of chaos can, and usually does, ensue. And now he was ready to take it on!Hollywood Jock is the suspenseful, dramatic, outrageous, and honest true story of the year when Rob Ryder, screenwriter, laid it all on the line -- and kicked, scratched, wheeled, dealed, and fought like hell to hit the Tinseltown big time. It is a chronicle of schmoozing producers, shopping screenplays, corralling sports legends, and dodging irate actors -- a fascinating perspective on the highs, the very lows, and the behind-the-scenes madness that makes the world of Hollywood so endlessly compelling . . . and infamously brutal.

A collection of offbeat, funny, and often moving backstories of the many entertainers and athletes covered by award-winning Newsweek journalist Allison Samuels, Off the Record reveals the inner worlds of today's A-list black celebrities.With anecdotes on everyone from Snoop Dogg, Shaquille O'Neal, Denzel Washington, Eddie Murphy, and Whitney Houston, this "all-access" book is filled with insightful stories that never made it into the pages of the mainstream press.From her start at CAA's infamous agent training program which included tasks such as blowing up 200 dinosaurs for the lobby when Steven Spielberg made a quick visit, and picking up Ted Danson's half-million-dollar weekly paycheck there was no chore too small. But these humble beginnings gave Samuels access to Hollywood's A-list and led to her eventual focus on the world of black entertainers.

"John Koethe's The Constructor is a scrupulous, elegant account of the meditative intellect as an instrument continually registering the passage of time. Exquisitely modulated and brutally honest, these poems would be harrowing were they not so seductively beautiful. No one writing in this country today sees as deeply as Koethe into the tears that lie at the heart of things, and no contemporary investigation of the life of the mind may be called complete that does not accommodate the lush intricacy of his terrifying recognitions."-- George Bradley"I prize John Koethe's intimate expanses and unsettling reveries, his tender contemplations and odd mental landscapes. He is an heir to Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery and, like them, he gives us the sensation of thinking itself, of a certain fleeting, daily, solitary consciousness rescued from oblivion and held aloft."-- Edward Hirsch

Paranoid yet judiciously reasonable, innocent yet calculating, strange yet strangely endearing, Emmet Barfield finds the world around him looming larger and larger the more he struggles to make his way within it. With Emmet as our guide, Force of Gravity transforms the world through a solitary consciousness until the reader's perceptions become as inverted as if seen through a modern version of Alice's looking glass.Emmet's world is a place where shopping in a market requires the cunning of a carefully considered crime, where a bustling city street in summer appears as desolate as a forgotten wasteland, where a stray cat adopted for company becomes as menacing as one's darkest foe, and where a mother and son riding a ski lift suddenly find themselves dizzy with the threat of death. Through his eyes, the world becomes newly alive with the terrible vividness and weird beauty of an undiscovered territory.

A Hollywood insider draws from his four decades of experience to create a scathingly brilliant and caustically comedic bird's-eye view behind the scenes of comedy television.A wickedly delicious roman-a-clef about the making of a sitcom called My Urban Buddies, this satirical romp of a novel portrays life on the other side of the television lens, hilariously sending up self-serious Hollywood stereotypes across the board.Programmed-for-success director J. T. Baker has to bring an up-and-coming sitcom to fruition after its initial director shoots himself in the head with a nail gun. Comically annotated with helpful and enlightening Hollywood glossary terms ("Creative-type director: One who has no hope of working in this town again"; "Eccentric: Affecting a style of dress, coiffure, speech, mannerisms, etc., carefully calculated to give the impression of creative credibility"), Benson creates an exaggerated world of crazy writers; backstabbing executives, agents, and producers; foul-mouthed everyone-elses; and hardcore cynics—and the ridiculous inner monologues behind them.

The day after they moved in, Coraline went exploring.... In Coraline's family's new flat are twenty-one windows and fourteen doors. Thirteen of the doors open and close. The fourteenth is locked, and on the other side is only a brick wall, until the day Coraline unlocks the door to find a passage to another flat in another house just like her own. Only it's different. At first, things seem marvelous in the other flat. The food is better. The toy box is filled with wind-up angels that flutter around the bedroom, books whose pictures writhe and crawl and shimmer, little dinosaur skulls that chatter their teeth. But there's another mother, and another father, and they want Coraline to stay with them and be their little girl. They want to change her and never let her go. Other children are trapped there as well, lost souls behind the mirrors. Coraline is their only hope of rescue. She will have to fight with all her wits and all the tools she can find if she is to save the lost children, her ordinary life, and herself. Critically acclaimed and award-winning author Neil Gaiman will delight readers with his first novel for all ages.