Daedalus Books

A witty, tender novel about the travails of old middle age, from a Booker finalist Desmond Bates is a recently retired linguistics professor vexed by his encroaching deafness and at loose ends in his personal life. Without the purposeful routine of the academic year, he finds his role reduced to that of escort and house-husband while his wife as late-flowering career as the owner of a home design store flourishes. The monotony of his days is relieved only by wearisome journeys to London to check on the welfare of his querulous, elderly father, an ex-dance musician. But these discontents are nothing compared to the affliction of hearing loss, which is a constant source of domestic friction and social embarrassment. It is through his deafness that Desmond inadvertently gets involved with a young woman who seeks his support in matters academic and not so academic; and whose wayward and unpredictable behavior threatens to destabilize his life completely. Deaf Sentence is a funny, moving account of one man as effort to come to terms with deafness and death, aging and mortality, the comedy and tragedy of human life.

Alice Hoffman is my favorite writer. Alice Hoffman is one of our most beloved writers. Here on Earth was an Oprah Book Club selection. Practical Magic and Aquamarine were both bestselling books and Hollywood movies. Her novels have received mention as notable books of the year by the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, and People magazine, and her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the New York Times, The Boston Globe Magazine, Kenyon Review, Redbook, Architectural Digest, Gourmet, and Self. Now, in The Third Angel, Hoffman weaves a magical and stunningly original story that charts the lives of three women in love with the wrong men: Headstrong Madeleine Heller finds herself hopelessly attracted to her sister's fiance. Frieda Lewis, a doctor's daughter and a runaway, becomes the muse of an ill-fated rock star. And beautiful Bryn Evans is set to marry an Englishman while secretly obsessed with her ex-husband. At the heart of the novel is Lucy Green, who blames herself for a tragic accident she witnessed at the age of twelve, and who spends four decades searching for the Third Angel-the angel on earth who will renew her faith. Brilliantly evoking London's King's Road, Knightsbridge, and Kensington while moving effortlessly back in time, The Third Angel is a work of startling beauty about the unique, alchemical nature of love.

Easy-to-use and packed with new images and illustrations, the Macmillan First Dictionary is the one to beat This First Dictionary offers far more than the others — it's the most updated, contains charts and tables, and features more than double the illustrations and photos than similar dictionaries. This completely revised edition has been designed especially for beginning readers.

The missing piece of the internationally bestselling Kurt Wallander mystery series: the story of Wallander's beginnings, told in five gripping short mysteries. What happened to Wallander before the series began? Several years ago, right when I was done with the fifth book, Sidetracked, I realized that I had started to write stories in my head that took place long before the start of the series — from Henning Mankell's foreword. At last, a key addition to the Kurt Wallander mystery series: the book of short mysteries that takes us back to the beginning. Here we meet Wallander the twenty-one-year-old patrolman on his first criminal investigation, Wallander the young father facing an unexpected danger on Christmas Eve, Wallander on the brink of middle age solving a case of poisoning, the newly separated Wallander investigating the murder of a local photographer, and Wallander the veteran detective discovering unexpected connections between a downed mystery plane and the assassination of a pair of spinster sisters. Over the course of these five mysteries, he comes into his own as a murder detective, defined by his simultaneously methodical and instinctive work, and is increasingly haunted from witnessing the worst aspects of an atomized society. Written from the unique perspective of an author looking back upon his own creation to discover his origins, these mysteries are vintage Mankell. Essential reading for all Wallander fans, The Pyramid is also a wonderful showcase for Mankell's powers as a writer whose works transcend their chosen genre to become thrilling and moral literature (Michael Ondaatje).

From the founding editor of Everyman's Library comes this enthralling illustrated collection of 33 fairy tales. Favorite English characters such as Dick Whittington, Jack the Giant Killer, and King Arthur appear alongside Tom Thumb, Jack and the Bean-Stalk, and other figures from the wider world of folklore. This work includes a variety of full-colour plates.

Feathers fly when one smart duck decides to teach the farmyard know-it-alls a lesson, in this charming adventure from the beloved author of «Babe: The Gallant Pig» and «The Water Horse.»

Welcome to Business Failure 101. In the 1960s, IBM CEO Tom Watson called an executive into his office after his venture lost $10 million. Watson asked the man if he knew why head been called in. The man said he assumed he was being fired. Watson told him, a Fired? Hell, I spent $10 million educating you. I just want to be sure you learned the right lessons. In Billion-Dollar Lessons, Paul Carroll and Chunka Mui draw on research into more than 750 business failures to reveal the misguided tactics that mire companies again and again. There are thousands of books about successful companies but virtually none about the lessons to be learned from those that crash and burn. Lesson One: The Cold Hard Facts Between 1981 and 2006, 423 major publicly held U.S. companies with combined assets totaling $1.5 trillion filed for bankruptcy. Hundreds more took huge write-offs, discontinued major operations, or were acquired under duress. Again and again, companies follow the same wrong-headed strategies that brought down businesses in the past. The sub-prime mortgage crisis that cost companies tens of billions of dollars in 2007 and 2008 echoes the ill-conceived strategies that pushed Green Tree Financial and Conseco into bankruptcy years earlier. Tom Watsonas executiveas $10 million lesson seems cheap by comparison. Lesson Two: Failure Patterns Carroll and Mui found that the number one cause of failure was misguided strategyanot sloppy execution, poor leadership, or bad luck. These strategic errors fall into seven categories, including: *Pursuing nonexistent synergies: Quaker Oatsa purchase of Snapple was supposed to capitalize on distribution synergies but insteadled to a $1.7 billion write-off. *Moving into an aadjacenta market that isnat really adjacent: Avon decided its aculture of caringa qualified it to operate retirement homes. Subsequent write-offs totaled $545 million. *Buying more problems than efficiencies through misguided consolidation: Despite pioneering the discount department store years before Sam Walton came along, Ames Department Stores flubbed consolidation efforts, landing in bankruptcy twice before eventually liquidating. Lesson Three: Avoid Making the Same Mistakes. But thereas light at the end of the tunnel: Billion-Dollar Lessons provides proven methods that managers, boards, and even investors can adopt to avoid making the same mistakes. While thereas no way to guarantee success, this book draws on vivid, off-the-beaten-track examples to help you avoid failure by showing you how to thoroughly assess potentially disastrous strategies before they bring your company down. Required Reading Think of Billion-Dollar Lessons as the flip side of Good to Great, but just as eye-opening and essential as that business classic. Thereas enormous value in learning from companies that lost millions (if not billions) in pursuit of strategies that led to spectacular flameouts. Everyone makes mistakes, but why make the same mistakes over and over?

Here is another brilliantly original novel from the cult author of Snowcrash and Cryptonomicon. Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians. There, he and his cohorts are sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, unpredictable saecular world, an endless landscape of casinos and megastores that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, dark ages and renaissances, world wars and climate change. Until the day that a higher power, driven by fear, decides it is only these cloistered scholars who have the abilities to avert an impending catastrophe. And, one by one, Raz and his friends, mentors, and teachers are summoned forth without warning into the unknown.

Photographs from the Internet phenomenon Stuffonmycat.com clearly demonstrate the alphabet from A-Z by identifying all the stuff that is on the cat! This is the first Stuff on My Cat book for children!

As a child raised by his mother in post-war Germany, Peter Debauer becomes fascinated by a story he discovers in the proof pages of a novel edited by his grandparents. It is the tale of a German prisoner of war who escapes from a Russian camp and braves countless dangers to return home to a wife who believes him to be dead. But the novel is incomplete — Peter has inadvertently used the end pages of the proof for his homework — and he becomes obsessed by the question of what happened when the soldier and his wife met again. Years later, the adult Peter remembers the novel and embarks on a search for the missing pages that soon becomes a search for his own father, a German soldier whom he always believed was killed in the war. Peter's quest leads him into a love story of his own, and as he begins to unravel the mystery of his father's disappearance, he is forced to question his own identity. He learns that reality is sometimes a reflection of the expectations of others, and that truth and fiction often intertwine.

In this cogent volume, renowned Christian historian Martin Marty delivers a brief yet sweeping account of Christianity and how it spread from a few believers two thousand years ago to become the world's largest religion. Comprising nearly one third of the world's population-more than two billion followers-Christianity is distinctive among major faiths in that it derives both its character and its authority from the divinity of its central figure, Jesus Christ. Examining this facet of Christianity from historical and sociological viewpoints, Marty lays bare the roots of this faith, in turn chronicling its success throughout the world. Writing with great style, and providing impeccable interpretations of historical, canonical, and liturgical documents, Marty gives readers of all faiths and levels of familiarity with Christian practices and history a highly useful and supremely accessible primer. He depicts the life of Christ and his teachings and explains how the apostles set out to spread the Gospel. With a special emphasis on global Christianity, he shows how the religion emerged from its ancestral homelands in Africa, the Levant, and Asia Minor, was imported to Europe, and then spread from there to the rest of the world, most often via trade and conquest. While giving a broad overview, Marty also focuses on specific issues, such as how Christianity struggles with the polar tensions inherent to many of the faith's denominations, and how it attempts to reconcile some of its stances on armed conflict, justice, and dominion with the teachings of Christ. The Christian World is a chronicle of one of the great belief systems and its many followers. It's a magnificent story ofemperors and kings, war and geography, theology and politics, saints and sinners, and the earthly battle to save souls. Above all, it's a remarkable testament to the teachings of Christ and how his message spreads around the globe to touch human experience everywhere.

The fascinating black-and-white and color photographs in this volume lead observers through 175 years of the history of photo journalism. The book will captivate you with its varied and striking images: viewers will be touched, shocked, amused or even moved to tears. Individual chapters provide a clear, chronological summary of themes such as Revolutions, Entertainment, the Third Reich or the Role of Women.

Woolf's first distinctly modernist novel follows an aloof yet beloved young man from his childhood through his student days to his too-early death during World War I. Annotated and with an introduction by Vara Neverow.

Crossing Hitler is a biography of the German trial lawyer Hans Litten (1903-1938), who dedicated his brief career to an uncompromising struggle against Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, and suffered accordingly in Hitler's concentration camps. Through the prism of this one remarkable advocate, the book explores the rise of the Nazis, the vibrant criminal courts of the Weimar Republic, and the terror of Nazi rule in Germany after 1933. During the trial of four Nazi paratroopers in 1931, Litten grilled Hitler in a merciless three-hour examination, forcing Hitler into multiple contradictions and evasions and finally reducing him to helpless and humiliating rage. Two years later Hitler was in power, and Litten was sent to in concentration camps of the Third Reich, where he worked on translations of medieval German poetry and operated as a one-man university. After five years of torture and hard labor, Litten gave up hope of survival, and took his own life 1938.

Monty Python is, arguably, more popular today than it was nearly 40 years ago, when the group first burst onto the comedy scene. Since that time, new generations continue to discover the wit, the genius, and the sheer silliness of the six men that comprised Python. In 1978, Kim 'Howard' Johnson spent several weeks in Tunisia on the set of Life of Brian and kept a detailed journal of what he saw and heard on the set. The result is a unique, eyewitness account that reveals the Pythons at work in a way that nothing else written about them could do.Monty Python's Tunisian Holiday: My Life With Brian presents a piece of history that very few have ever been able to experience, a peek on the set of a classic Python film.

This one-of-a-kind anthology, including an audio CD, brings eight great English-language poets to life. «Catching Life by the Throat» unites the sound, sense, and sensibility that lie at the heart of great poetry. It features eight great poets, with brief, accessible essays concerning their life and work and a selection of their poems, and it is accompanied by an 80-minute CD recorded live at the British Library: Ralph Fiennes reading Auden, Edward Fox reading Eliot, Roger Moore reading Kipling, Harold Pinter reading Larkin, and more. Whether you believe (like Robert Frost, who inspired the title) that poetry is a way of «taking life by the throat» or (like T. S. Eliot) that it «is one person talking to another», nobody does it better than the poets featured in this book. For a novice discovering the rich heritage of English-language verse or a seasoned poetry reader, «Catching Life by the Throat» is an extraordinary introduction to eight iconic poets.

Julian Trent, you have been found guilty by this court of perpetrating a violent and unprovoked attack on an innocent family including a charge of attempted murder. You have shown little or no remorse for your actions and I consider you a danger to society. When defense lawyer Geoffrey Mason hears the judgeas ruling at Londonas Old Bailey, he quietly hopes that a substantial sentence will be handed down to his arrogant young client. That Julian Trent only receives eight years seems all too lenient. Little does Mason realize that heall be looking Trent in the eyes again much sooner than that. Setting aside his barristeras gown and wig, Mason heads to Sandown racetrack to don his colorful racing silks. As an amateur jockey, he fulfills his true passion by pounding the turf in the heat of a steeplechase. Yet when a fellow rider is brutally murderedaa pitchfork driven through his chestaMasonas racing hobby soon becomes too close to his work. The prime suspect is one of their brethren, champion jockey Steve Mitchell, and the evidence against him seems overwhelming. Mason is reluctant to heed Mitchellas plea for legal helpabut he soon finds himself at the center of a sinister web of violence, threats and intimidation. Mason is left fighting a battle of right and wrong, and more immediately, a battle of life and death his own.

All offers of surrender from Leningrad must be rejected, wrote Adolph Hitler on September 29, 1941, at the outset of Operation Barbarossa. In this struggle for survival, we have no interest in keeping even a proportion of the city's population alive. During the famed 900-day siege of Leningrad, the German High Command deliberately planned to eradicate the city's population through starvation. Viewing the Slavs as sub-human, Hitler embarked on a vicious program of ethnic cleansing. By the time the siege ended in January 1944, almost a million people had died. Those who survived would be marked permanently by what they endured as the city descended into chaos. In Leningrad, military historian Michael Jones chronicles the human story of this epic siege. Drawing on newly available eyewitness accounts and diaries, he reveals the true horrors of the ordeal — including stories long-suppressed by the Soviets of looting, criminal gangs, and cannibalism. But he also shows the immense psychological resources on which the citizens of Leningrad drew to survive against desperate odds. At the height of the siege, for instance, an extraordinary live performance of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony profoundly strengthened the city's will to resist. A riveting account of one of the most harrowing sieges of world history, Leningrad also portrays the astonishing power of the human will in the face of even the direst catastrophe.

The number of women who have ruled as queens or empresses, or governed as presidents or prime ministers, remains but a small subset of the total of those who have attained ultimate political power. But this elite group of women, who — through dynastic succession, democratic election or other means — have reached the heights of political and ceremonial leadership, includes some of the most influential and charismatic figures of world history. Queen, Empress, Concubine paints vivid portraits of the lives of 50 extraordinary women who have held positions of executive or ceremonial power throughout history, from the Queen of Sheba to Margaret Thatcher. Each biographical profile sets its subject clearly in the culture and context of its time, enabling author Claudia Gold not only to tell the stories of 50 courageous and fiercely independent women, but also to provide a fascinating and informative alternative social history of the last 3500 years.

Children and adults alike will be awestruck as a stunning three-dimensional medieval world unfolds before their eyes The sliding castle gate on the front cover serves as an entrance into a world from long ago. Inside, vibrant art and amazingly intricate pops guide readers through life as it really was for Sir Hugo, a brave and noble knight From pages and ladies, to castles and cathedrals, this book is certain to educate and entertain readers both young and old This sturdy 8 1/2 x 11 paper-over-board book includes multi-level detailed pops and acetate windows. This book comes packaged in a resealable polybag.

Following the success of Battle and Weapon, Battle at Sea looks at every aspect of warfare on, above, and under the sea. This dramatic book catalogs the stories of the people, ships, and organizations behind history's greatest naval conflicts.

»When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it», notes the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Middlesex in his introduction to this collection of love stories from literature. «But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.» Here then are 27 such cures for lovesickness and antidotes to adultery — by Harold Brodkey, Grace Paley, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Milan Kundera, and Vladimir Nabokov.

Shakespeare was blinded by love, Dorothy Parker felt the heartache of jilted lovers, Sappho saw the sensuality in love, and Byron despaired that there is little to be said about a happy marriage. From the artist whose illustrations charmed readers in The Sweet Life and Off the Beaten Path comes a delightful and amusing lover's-eye view of human behavior. Laura Stoddart has selected and elegantly illustrated this collection of brief, witty quotations from men and women who have experienced love firsthand. All for Love is a heartwarming treat for those reveling in love for the first time, contemplating marriage, celebrating an anniversary... or putting the whole business behind them.

Most people have heard of blini, borscht and pirozhki (relatives of the pirogi), but what's the story behind these traditional Eastern European dishes? While vodka, caviar and Crimean sparkling wine found their way onto the shelves of Western European supermarkets a long time ago, Russian cuisine is just starting to be discovered. This new book in the popular Culinaria series presents an extraordinarily varied and fascinating multi-ethnic cuisine. This book helps you learn about the great variety of Russian appetizers, called pelmeni; how Ukrainian ravioli are made; warenyky, the Georgian national dish, or chatschapuri, the traditional Armenian festive meal; or about Azerbaijan's summer fresh vegetable dishes. In this stunningly illustrated volume, the authors present you with the entire range of cuisine enjoyed in this fascinating part of the world, enticing you to discover new culinary terrain!