万本电子书0元读

万本电子书0元读

The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden
The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden
Johnson, Robert A.
¥77.49
In the tradition of Annie Dillard and Natalie Goldberg, this resource for writers and non-writers alike shows the act of writing to be a dynamic means of knowing, healing, and creating the body, mind, and spirit.
My First New York
My First New York
New York Magazine
¥78.55
A book as effervescent and alive as the city itself.My First New York features candid accounts of coming to New York by more than fifty of the most remarkable people who have called the city home. Here are true stories of long nights out and wild nights in, of first dates and lost loves, of memorable meals and miserable jobs, of slow walks up Broadway and fast subway rides downtown.The contributors a mix of actors, artists, comedians, entrepreneurs, musicians, politicians, sports stars, writers, and others reflect an enormous variety of experiences: few have arrived with less than filmmaker Jonas Mekas, a concentration-camp survivor on a UN refugee ship; few have swanned in with more than designer Diane von Furstenberg, a princess. And an extraordinary number managed to land in New York just as something historic was happening the artist Cindy Sherman arrived in the middle of the Summer of Sam; restaurateur Danny Meyer came on the day John Lennon was shot.Arranged chronologically, these moving and memorable stories combine to form an impressionistic history of New York since the Great Depression. They also provide an accidental encyclopedia of New York hotspots through the ages: from the Cedar Tavern and the Gaslight to Lutce and Elaine's, from Max's Kansas City and the Mudd Club to the Odeon and Bungalow 8, they're all here, dots on the unbroken line of the Next Next things.Taken together, My First New York is a collection of fifty-six testaments to a larger revelation, one that new arrivals of all stripes and all eras have experienced again and again in New York, regardless of how the city proceeds to treat them: what the songwriter Rufus Wain-wright calls "having cracked the code of living life to the fullest."
Keep the Change
Keep the Change
Dublanica, Steve
¥94.10
An irreverent, pavement-pounding, eye-opening exploration of a neglected part of the American economy: tipping Tipping is huge in America. Almost everyoneleaves at least one tip every day. More thanfive million American workers depend onthem, and we spend $66 billion on tips each year.And everyone recognizes that queasy feeling inbars and restaurants, barbershops and beautyparlors, hotels and strip clubs, and everywhereelse when the check arrives or the tip jar looms.Omnipresent yet poorly understood, tipping hasworked its way into almost every part of daily life.In Keep the Change, bestselling author SteveDublanica dives into this unexplored world, in acomical yet serious attempt to turn himself intothe Guru of the Gratuity. As intrepid and irreverentas Michael Moore or A. J. Jacobs, Dublanicatravels the country to meet shoeshine men, strippers,bartenders, bellhops, bathroom attendants,and many others, all in an effort to overcome hisown sweaty palms when faced with those perennialquestions: Should I tipHow muchThroughouthe explores why tipping has spread; he explainshow differences in gender, age, ethnicity, and nationalityaffect our attitudes; and he reveals just whatthe cabdriver or deliveryman thinks of us after we've left a tip.Written in the lively style that made WaiterRant such a hit, Keep the Change is a fun and enlighteningquest that will change the way wethink and tip.
Loose Diamonds
Loose Diamonds
Ephron, Amy
¥78.55
With her wonderful sense of humor, marvelously candid voice, and astonishing perception, Amy Ephron weaves together the most insightful, profound, and just plain funny stories of her life to form a tapestry of a woman's experiences from childhood through young adulthood, marriage, divorce (and remarriage), and everything in between. Writing with great honesty and exacting prose, Ephron gives us an evocative, engaging, and often piercing look at modern life.Throughout Loose Diamonds, Amy Ephron celebrates unforgettable memories and friendships, and the things that make life livable (such as her Filofax, which she would be lost without), all with a quick wit and a delicate eye.
Love Wins Companion
Love Wins Companion
Bell, Rob
¥78.32
For those looking to go deeper with Rob Bell's bestselling pioneering book Love Wins, this companion offers: Insights and commentary by theologians, Bible scholars, scientists, and pastors Deep analysis of all relevant Bible passages on heaven, hell, and salvation Detailed chapter summaries, discussion questions, and Bible studies for individuals, groups, and classes Excerpts from works throughout Christian history illustrating the variety of teachers also debating the issues Bell wrestles with New material by Bell on his mission for the book and how people can take the next step
The Peter Principle
The Peter Principle
Peter, Laurence J.
¥88.56
The classic #1 New York Times bestseller that answers the age-old questionWhy is incompetence so maddeningly rampant and so vexingly triumphantThe Peter Principle, the eponymous law Dr. Laurence J. Peter coined, explains that everyone in a hierarchy from the office intern to the CEO, from the low-level civil servant to a nation's president will inevitably rise to his or her level of incompetence. Dr. Peter explains why incompetence is at the root of everything we endeavor to do why schools bestow ignorance, why governments condone anarchy, why courts dispense injustice, why prosperity causes unhappiness, and why utopian plans never generate utopias.With the wit of Mark Twain, the psychological acuity of Sigmund Freud, and the theoretical impact of Isaac Newton, Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull's The Peter Principle brilliantly explains how incompetence and its accompanying symptoms, syndromes, and remedies define the world and the work we do in it.
Conundrums
Conundrums
Pearce, Harry
¥84.16
Conundrum is a mind-stretch. Encrypting idioms into their typographic equivalents, Harry enlivens our everyday language and challenges readers to see that "time after time after time" or, at least, "more often than not" "the writing is on the wall." For fans of word puzzles, sudoku, crosswords, and all manner of mind games, Conundrum offers an artfully packaged, cleverly designed new challenge. Drawing upon, literally in this case, graphic puzzles that he began creating as a child, Harry's developed over 100 witty conundrums for this book that will stretch the mind as well as delight the senses. A member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale, a frequent lecturer and contributor to design discourse, an internationally recognized leader in design, and a founder of Lippa Pearce, one of the UK's most respected design agencies, Harry refines the way we see and communicate. Conundrum achieves nothing less than changing how we understand and interact with language.
Swing Low
Swing Low
Toews, Miriam
¥88.56
One morning, Mel Toews put on his coat and hat, walked out of town, and took his own life. A loving husband and father, a faithful member of the Mennonite church, and an immensely popular schoolteacher, Mel was a pillar of his close-knit community. Yet after a lifetime of struggling with bipolar disorder, he could no longer face the darkness that clouded his world. In this moving meditation on illness, family, faith, and love, Mel's daughter, critically acclaimed novelist and reporter Miriam Toews, recounts her father's life as he would have told it, in his own voice, right up to the day of his final walk. Swing Low is a bold, gracefully written, and compassionate recounting of one man's heartbreaking battle with depression.
Periodic Tales
Periodic Tales
Aldersey-Williams, Hugh
¥95.11
Like the alphabet, the calendar, or the zodiac, the periodic table of the chemical elements has a permanent place in our imagination. But aside from the handful of common ones (iron, carbon, copper, gold), the elements themselves remain wrapped in mystery. We do not know what most of them look like, how they exist in nature, how they got their names, or of what use they are to us. Welcome to a dazzling tour through history and literature, science and art. In Periodic Tales, you'll meet iron that rains from the heavens and neon as it lights its way to vice. You'll learn how lead can tell your future and why zinc may one day line your coffin. You'll discover what connects the bones in your body with the White House in Washington, the glow of a streetlight with the salt on your dinner table.From ancient civilizations to contemporary couture, from the oxygen of publicity to the phosphorous in your pee, the elements are near and far and all around us. Unlocking their astonishing secrets and colorful pasts, Periodic Tales is a passionate journey through mines and artists' studios, to factories and cathedrals, into the woods and to the sea to discover the true stories of these fascinating but mysterious building blocks of the universe.
Rockers and Rollers
Rockers and Rollers
Johnson, Brian
¥84.16
By night, Brian Johnson sings in the biggest rock ’n’ roll band on the planet. But by day, AC/DC’s frontman drives balls to the wall. Cars and rock ’n’ roll—they were made for each other. When he was a young boy growing up in a working-class English town, Brian developed what would become a lifelong passion for cars, trolling junkyards and even pretending to drive the family car. From there, he steamed up the windows of his old Mini Cooper as a teenager, spent untold time in hygienically challenged tour buses with helpful signs such as No Shitting Allowed. Shagging Expected, was chauffeured in leather-trimmed limos, and raced cars to a checkered flag. Featuring guest stars Cliff Williams, Malcolm and Angus Young, and many, many others, even Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rockers and Rollers is a tribute to Brian’s obsession with four wheels. By turns surprising, poignant, funny, and maybe a little bit bawdy, these are the stories of a man who drives as hard as he rocks.
High Strung
High Strung
Tignor, Stephen
¥83.03
The golden age of tennis came crashing down suddenly at the 1981 U.S. Open when the stoical Swede, Bj?rn Borg, lost to his brash young rival, John McEnroe, in the final at Flushing Meadows. Through the lens of that era's final tournament, and the play of the other semifinalists, Jimmy Connors and Vitas Gerulaitis, High Strung chronicles the lives and careers of the men who made those Wild West days of tennis so memorable: "Ice Borg," who secretly harbored an inner madman; McEnroe, the tortured, bratty genius; Connors, the game's beloved blue-collar anti-hero; Ilie Nastase, the Romanian clown; Gerulaitis, the New York charmer; and Ivan Lendl, who became a harbinger of tennis's high-powered future. The struggles these men shared were as compelling off the court as they were on.
The Myth of the Great War
The Myth of the Great War
Mosier, John
¥90.77
Based on previously unused French and German sources, this challenging and controversial new analysis of the war on the Western front from 1914 to 1918 reveals how and why the Germans won the major battles with one-half to one-third fewer casualties than the Allies, and how American troops in 1918 saved the Allies from defeat and a negotiated peace with the Germans.
Lit
Lit
Karr, Mary
¥56.15
The Liars' Club brought to vivid, indelible life Mary Karr's hardscrabble Texas childhood. Cherry, her account of her adolescence, "continued to set the literary standard for making the personal universal" (Entertainment Weekly). Now Lit follows the self-professed blackbelt sinner's descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness and to her astonishing resurrection. Karr's longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting blueblood poet produces a son they adore. But she can't outrun her apocalyptic past. She drinks herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide. A hair-raising stint in "The Mental Marriott," with an oddball tribe of gurus and saviors, awakens her to the possibility of joy and leads her to an unlikely faith. Not since Saint Augustine cried, "Give me chastity, Lord but not yet!" has a conversion story rung with such dark hilarity. Lit is about getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; learning to write by learning to live. Written with Karr's relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up as only Mary Karr can tell it.
The Boys of Summer
The Boys of Summer
Kahn, Roger
¥99.65
This is a book about young men who learned to play baseball during the 1930s and 1940s, and then went on to play for one of the most exciting major-league ball clubs ever fielded, the team that broke the color barrier with Jackie Robinson. It is a book by and about a sportswriter who grew up near Ebbets Field, and who had the good fortune in the 1950s to cover the Dodgers for the Herald Tribune. This is a book about what happened to Jackie, Carl Erskine, Pee Wee Reese, and the others when their glory days were behind them. In short, it is a book about America, about fathers and sons, prejudice and courage, triumph and disaster, and told with warmth, humor, wit, candor, and love.
Coming of Age on Zoloft
Coming of Age on Zoloft
Sharpe, Katherine
¥83.92
When Katherine Sharpe arrived at her college health center with an age-old complaint, a bad case of homesickness, she received a thoroughly modern response: a twenty-minute appointment and a pre*ion for Zoloft a drug she would take for the next ten years. This outcome, once unlikely, is now alarmingly common. Twenty-five years after Prozac entered the marketplace, 10 percent of Americans over the age of six use an SSRI antidepressant.In Coming of Age on Zoloft, Sharpe blends deeply personal writing, thoughtful interviews, and historical context to achieve an unprecedented portrait of the antidepressant generation. She explores questions of identity that arise for people who start medication before they have an adult sense of self. She asks why some individuals find a diagnosis of depression reassuring, while others are threatened by it. She presents, in young people's own words, their intimate and complicated relationships with their medication. And she weighs the cultural implications of America's biomedical approach to moods.
Season to Taste
Season to Taste
Birnbaum, Molly
¥95.11
An aspiring chef's moving account of finding her way in the kitchen and beyond after a tragic accident destroys her sense of smellAt twenty-two, just out of college, Molly Birnbaum spent her nights reading cookbooks and her days working at a Boston bistro, preparing to start training at the prestigious Culinary Institute of America. She knew exactly where she wanted the life ahead to lead: She wanted to be a chef. But shortly before she was due to matriculate, she was hit by a car while out for a run in Boston. The accident fractured her skull, broke her pelvis, tore her knee to shreds and destroyed her sense of smell. The flesh and bones would heal...but her sense of smell?And not being able to smell meant not being able to cook. She dropped her cooking school plans, quit her restaurant job, and sank into a depression.Season to Taste is the story of what came next: how she picked herself up and set off on a grand, entertaining quest in the hopes of learning to smell again. Writing with the good cheer and great charm of Laurie Colwin or Ruth Reichl, she explores the science of olfaction, pheromones, and Proust's madeleine; she meets leading experts, including the writer Oliver Sacks, scientist Stuart Firestein, and perfumer Christophe Laudamiel; and she visits a pioneering New Jersey flavor lab, eats at Grant Achatz's legendary Chicago restaurant Alinea, and enrolls at a renowned perfume school in the South of France, all in an effort to understand and overcome her condition.A moving personal story packed with surprising facts about our senses, Season to Taste is filled with unforgettable de*ions of the smells Birnbaum rediscovers from cinnamon, cedarwood, and fresh bagels to rosemary chicken, lavender, and apple pie as she falls in love, learns to smell from scratch, and starts, once again, to cook.
The Girl Who Fell to Earth
The Girl Who Fell to Earth
Al-Maria, Sophia
¥83.03
When Sophia Al-Maria's mother sends her away from rainy Washington State to stay with her husband's desert-dwelling Bedouin family in Qatar, she intends it to be a sort of teenage cultural boot camp. What her mother doesn't know is that there are some things about growing up that are universal. In Qatar, Sophia is faced with a new world she'd only imagined as a child. She sets out to find her freedom, even in the most unlikely of places. Both family saga and coming-of-age story, The Girl Who Fell to Earth takes readers from the green valleys of the Pacific Northwest to the dunes of the Arabian Gulf and on to the sprawling chaos of Cairo. Struggling to adapt to her nomadic lifestyle, Sophia is haunted by the feeling that she is perpetually in exile: hovering somewhere between two families, two cultures, and two worlds. She must make a place for herself a complex journey that includes finding young love in the Arabian Gulf, rebellion in Cairo, and, finally, self-discovery in the mountains of Sinai. The Girl Who Fell to Earth heralds the arrival of an electric new talent and takes us on the most personal of quests: the voyage home.
How to Be Black
How to Be Black
Thurston, Baratunde
¥83.03
If You Don't Buy This Book, You're a Racist.Have you ever been called "too black" or "not black enough"Have you ever befriended or worked with a black personIf you answered yes to any of these questions, this book is for you.Raised by a pro-black, Pan-Afrikan single mother during the crack years of 1980s Washington, DC, and educated at Sidwell Friends School and Harvard University, Baratunde Thurston has over thirty years' experience being black. Now, through stories of his politically inspired Nigerian name, the heroics of his hippie mother, the murder of his drug-abusing father, and other revelatory black details, he shares with readers of all colors his wisdom and expertise in how to be black.Beyond memoir, this guidebook offers practical advice on everything from "How to Be The Black Friend" to "How to Be The (Next) Black President" to "How to Celebrate Black History Month."To provide additional perspective, Baratunde assembled an award-winning Black Panel three black women, three black men, and one white man (Christian Lander of Stuff White People Like) and asked them such revealing questions as:"When Did You First Realize You Were Black?""How Black Are You?""Can You Swim?"The result is a humorous, intelligent, and audacious guide that challenges and satirizes the so-called experts, purists, and racists who purport to speak for all black people. With honest storytelling and biting wit, Baratunde plots a path not just to blackness, but one open to anyone interested in simply "how to be."
To the Heart of the Nile
To the Heart of the Nile
Shipman, Pat
¥95.39
In 1859, at age fourteen, Florence Szász stood before a room full of men and waited to be auctioned to the highest bidder. But slavery and submission were not to be her destiny: Sam Baker, a wealthy English gentleman and eminent adventurer, was moved by compassion and an immediate, overpowering empathy for the young woman, and braved extraordinary perils to help her escape. Together, Florence and Sam -- whose love would remain passionate and constant throughout their lives -- forged into literally uncharted territory in a glorious attempt to unravel a mysterious and magnificent enigma called Africa.A stunning achievement, To the Heart of the Nile is an unforgettable portrait of an unforgettable woman: a story of discovery, bravery, determination, and love, meticulously reconstructed through journals, documents, and private papers, and told in the inimitable narrative style that has already won Pat Shipman resounding international acclaim.
The Wall Street Journal Guide to Power Travel
The Wall Street Journal Guide to Power Travel
McCartney, Scott
¥95.39
Imagine a world without late planes, missed connections, lost luggage, bumped passengers, cramped seating, high fees and higher fares, surly employees, and security lines. . . . Ordinary travel is an extraordinary ordeal. Yet despite the high prices and huge hassles, travel is essential along with the need for tips, tricks, and techniques to improve the journey. The Wall Street Journal Guide to Power Travel is an entertaining road trip and a helpful guide, drawn from Scott McCartney's popular Middle Seat column, which explains why bad things happen to good travelers and what you can do to improve your lot. Expert advice and tips include: How to get cheap fares, first-class upgrades, and better seats. How to minimize chances of lost luggage and what to do when baggage doesn't show up. How to avoid delays, get around TSA bottlenecks, and minimize the chances you'll get stuck at some distant airport and what to do if you do get stuck. How to complain to an airline and get some attention, right down to what to ask for in compensation and how to get the government's attention.
Patriot Battles
Patriot Battles
Stephenson, Michael
¥95.39
Drawing on hundreds of specialist sources, contemporary and archival, Patriot Battles is the comprehensive one-volume study of the military aspects of the War of Independence. The first part of the book offers a richly detailed examination of the nuts and bolts of eighteenth-century combat: For example, who fought and what motivated them, whether patriot or redcoat, Hessian or FrenchmanHow were they enlisted and trainedHow were they clothed and fedWhat weapons did they use, and how effective were theyWhen soldiers became casualties or fell ill, how did medical services deal with themWhat roles did loyalists, women, blacks, and Indians play?The second part of the book gives a closer look at the war's greatest battles, with maps provided for each. Which men were involved, and how manyWhat was the state of their morale and equipmentWhat parts did terrain and weather playWhat were the qualities of the respective commanders, and what tactics did they employHow many casualties were inflictedAnd no less important, how did the soldiers fightThroughout, many cherished myths are challenged, reputations are reassessed, and long-held assumptions are tested. For all readers, Patriot Battles becomes not only one of the most satisfying and illuminating works to be added to the literature on the War of Independence in many years but also a refreshing wind blowing through some of its dustier corridors.