Download : Wizard's First Rule (RosettaBooks into Film) [Kindle Edition] by Terry Goodkind

Wizard's First Rule

Wizard's First Rule, the first novel by Terry Goodkind, was a phenomenon from the moment it was published by Tor Books in 1994, selling more than 100,000 copies in North America alone. It still sells more than 100,000 copies a year and has gone on to bestsellerdom in the United Kingdom and in more than twenty foreign translations as well as audiobook form. It is now being developed as one of the most ambitious television miniseries of all time. Executive Producer Sam Raimi (director of the three Spider-Man movies), in collaboration with Disney/ABC, is creating a 22-episode adaptation of the book to be filmed in New Zealand. Richard and Kahlan's story unfolds over ten more novels, collectively known as the Sword of Truth series, concluding with Confessor in 2007.

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Download : The First Confessor (The Legend of Magda Searus) [Kindle Edition] by Terry Goodkind

The First Confessor

The First Confessor (The Legend of Magda Searus) by Terry Goodkind is exactly what the title claims, the story of the Magda Searus, the first Confessor. The events played out here are a crucial part of the back story of the Sword of Truth series. As the story opens, Magda Searus has just lost her husband, First Wizard Baraccus. Feeling lost and alone, Magda sets out to commit suicide in the same manner as her husband, by throwing herself off the wall of the Keep and falling to her death a thousand feet below.

At the last possible moment, she finds a note left by Baraccus, urging her to find truth. In the chapters that follow, the reader is given a closer look at the events laid out as backstory during the Sword of Truth series. How the war between the Old World and the New was first started, the making of the Sword of Truth, the hiding of the Temple of the Winds, the creation of the D'Haran bond, the dreamwalkers, the traitors in the Keep, and the reasoning behind the creation of the Confessors. And other events even further back in history are hinted at.

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Download : The Avengers [Paperback] by Rich Cohen

The Avengers

As a child visiting an Israeli kibbutz on a family vacation, Cohen met a relative who had survived the Holocaust and emigrated to Israel. Slight and gray-haired, Ruzka looked a lot like Cohen's grandmother, but her stories introduced him to a little-known, remarkable group of Jews: the Avengers, who fought Nazis in the gloomy forests of Eastern Europe and later battled for Israel's independence. 

As Cohen notes, these "were the kind of people who inspired Joseph Goebbels to write in his diary, 'One sees what the Jews can do when they are armed.'" An ardent Zionist, Ruzka left her home in Poland in 1939, as German troops were occupying the country, and made her way to Vilna, Lithuania, where she hoped to find passage to Palestine. Arrested as an "illegal immigrant" upon her arrival, she was released through the efforts of a Zionist youth group who gave her shelter in their headquarters.

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Download : But He Was Good to His Mother : The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters [Paperback] by Robert A. Rockaway

But He Was Good to His Mother

A seldom-covered aspect of true crime history and Jewish history, "But He was Good to His Mother" is a fine read for anyone interested in either. It delves into the histories of several gangsters, their misdeeds, relationships to the Jewish community and anecdotes that shed some light on what these crimelords were really like.

Plenty of photos are included. Rockaway does a fairly good job of striking a balance in tackling a delicate subject. He points out the occasional admirable deeds of the gangsters (protecting American Jews from anti-semites, for example) while making it quite clear that these were very bad men.

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Download : Fifty Shades Trilogy Bundle: Fifty Shades of Grey; Fifty Shades Darker; Fifty Shades Freed [Kindle Edition] by E L James

Fifty Shades Trilogy Bundle

Now available in a single volume, E L James’s New York Times #1 bestselling trilogy has been hailed by Entertainment Weekly as being “in a class by itself.” Beginning with the GoodReads Choice Award Romance Finalist Fifty Shades of Grey, the Fifty Shades Trilogy will obsess you, possess you, and stay with you forever. This bundle includes the following novels: 

FIFTY SHADES OF GREY: When college student Anastasia Steele goes to interview young entrepreneur Christian Grey, she encounters a man who is beautiful, brilliant, and intimidating. The unworldly Ana realizes she wants this man, and Grey admits he wants her, too—but on his own terms. When the couple embarks on a daring, passionately physical affair, Ana discovers Christian’s secrets and explores her own desires.

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Download : Fighting Ruben Wolfe [Paperback] by Markus Zusak

Fighting Ruben Wolfe

What a pleasure it was to finally get to read Zusak's first novel, the prequel to GETTING THE GIRL. The Wolfe family is just barely making it. Dad's trying to recover from an accident at work and needs to find work or he'll have to go on the dole (welfare). 

Mom's working hard and doing the best she can. Rumors are flooding the school that their sister Sarah has been "getting around." Ruben and Cameron have done nothing but lose at the dog races.

When Dad starts going door to door to beg for work, the boys resolve to do something, anything to redeem their pride and hide their embarrassment.

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Download : Getting The Girl [Paperback] by Markus Zusak

Getting The Girl

Cameron Wolfe, first introduced in Fighting Ruben Wolfe (Scholastic, 2001), wants a girlfriend. He wants sex. He wants to separate himself from his brothers' shadow. He wants to find himself and be something more than the underdog in the family.

And he doesn't know how to go about getting what he wants. He is attracted to a girl who treats him horribly so he stands outside her house at night, hoping for glimpses of her.

He likes his brother Ruben's girlfriend-and she treats him like a human being. When she and Ruben break up, Octavia shows an interest in Cameron and even though his brother already has another girlfriend, he beats up Cameron and Octavia walks away.

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Download : Underdogs [Hardcover] by Markus Zusak

Underdogs

Who will like this book? Fans of Zusak, for one. And boys. The protagonist, Cameron Wolfe, is a winsome kid, tough but sensitive, with two older brothers he worships (especially Ruben, who is an accomplished fighter and playboy) and a sister who tries to help steer him through the shoals of life. The plots and the writing style are much simpler than THE BOOK THIEF. Here you will find lots of one-sentence paragraphs, for instance, and dialogue filled with colorful Australian expressions.

It's the character that carries the day, however. Zusak's no doubt autobiographical Cam is charismatic in his lonesome cheerfulness as the runt of the family. Plots are secondary to his coming-of-age travails.

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Download : I Am the Messenger [Paperback] by Markus Zusak

I Am the Messenger

Markus Zusak might be my favorite author now, and I've read a lot of books by a lot of authors. I have not, however, read three books of such magnitude by the same author.

Upon completing GETTING THE GIRL, THE BOOK THIEF, and now I AM THE MESSENGER, I sit back in awe at the mastery of the writing, the power of the message, the truth of such stories. Winner of the 2003 Children's Book Council of Australia's Book of the Year Award and nominated for best young adult book at the 2006 L.A. Times Festival of Books, I AM THE MESSENGER (or THE MESSENGER in Australia) tells the story of Ed Kennedy, nineteen-year-old taxi cab driver and all-around average guy.

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Download : Tough Jews : Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams [Paperback] by Rich Cohen

Tough Jews

When we think gangster, hood, or wiseguy, we often associate these characters with such names as Capone, Luciano, or even Corleone. However, when organized crime reared its ugly head in the late 1920s in Brooklyn, at the foundation were men like Meyer Lansky and Ben Siegel--both Jews.

Rich Cohen's romantic account of Jewish gangsters, Tough Jews, brings to life the story of Jewish involvement in the world of organized crime. Cohen persuasively achieves his objective by recounting the stories he heard from his father, who grew up with his friends (including broadcaster Larry King) at the end of the gangster era in Brooklyn, finding heroes in men like "Kid Twist" Reles and Bugsy Goldstein.

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Download : Mission to Paris: A Novel [Hardcover] by Alan Furst

Mission to Paris: A Novel

It is the late summer of 1938, Europe is about to explode, the Hollywood film star Fredric Stahl is on his way to Paris to make a movie for Paramount France.

The Nazis know he’s coming—a secret bureau within the Reich Foreign Ministry has for years been waging political warfare against France, using bribery, intimidation, and corrupt newspapers to weaken French morale and degrade France’s will to defend herself. For their purposes, Fredric Stahl is a perfect agent of influence, and they attack him.

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Download : Istanbul Passage: A Novel [Hardcover] by Joseph Kanon

Istanbul Passage: A Novel

A neutral straddling Europe and Asia, Istanbul survived the Second World War as a magnet for refugees and spies, trafficking in secrets and lies rather than soldiers. Expatriate American businessman Leon Bauer was drawn into this shadow world, doing undercover odd jobs and courier runs in support of the Allied war effort.  

Now, as the espionage community begins to pack up and an apprehensive city prepares for the grim realities of postwar life, Leon is given one last routine assignment.

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Download : Three Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager [Kindle Edition] by Buzz Bissinger

Three Nights in August

Bissinger, whose "Friday Night Lights" celebrated high-school football in Texas, here explores baseball through the eyes of the St. Louis Cardinals' current manager, Tony La Russa. A three-game series against the Chicago Cubs in 2003 frames the narrative, and provides an opportunity to explore the quirks of the contemporary game; clubhouses offer four flavors of sunflower seeds, for instance, while a Cardinals' relief pitcher performs his pregame rituals in the nude. 

La Russa comes across as a passionate, conflicted man. He's an animal-rights activist who drives an Escalade, and an information omnivore prone to misusing baseball statistics; and, while he's the sixth-winningest manager in history, he still gets so upset about losing that he has been known to stomp off the team bus and walk in solitude back to his hotel after a defeat.

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Download : The Chemistry of Tears [Kindle Edition] by ,Peter Carey

The Chemistry of Tears

An automaton, a man and a woman who can never meet, two stories of love—all are brought to incandescent life in this hauntingly moving novel from one of the finest writers of our time. London 2010: Catherine Gehrig, conservator at the Swinburne museum, learns of the sudden death of her colleague and lover of thirteen years.

As the mistress of a married man, she must struggle to keep the depth of her anguish to herself. The one other person who knows Catherine’s secret—her boss—arranges for her to be given a special project away from prying eyes in the museum’s Annexe. Usually controlled and rational, but now mad with grief, Catherine reluctantly unpacks an extraordinary, eerie automaton that she has been charged with bringing back to life.

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Download : Canada [Hardcover] by Richard Ford

Canada

Then fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons' parents rob a bank, his sense of normal life is forever altered. In an instant, this private cataclysm drives his life into before and after, a threshold that can never be uncrossed.

 His parents' arrest and imprisonment mean a threatening and uncertain future for Dell and his twin sister, Berner. Willful and burning with resentment, Berner flees their home in Montana, abandoning her brother and her life. But Dell is not completely alone. 

A family friend intervenes, spiriting him across the Canadian border, in hopes of delivering him to a better life. There, afloat on the prairie of Saskatchewan, Dell is taken in by Arthur Remlinger, an enigmatic and charismatic American whose cool reserve masks a dark and violent nature.

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Download : The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King [Hardcover] by Rich Cohen

The Fish That Ate the Whale

When Samuel Zemurray arrived in America in 1891, he was tall, gangly, and penniless. When he died in the grandest house in New Orleans sixty-nine years later, he was among the richest, most powerful men in the world. In between, he worked as a fruit peddler, a banana hauler, a dockside hustler, and a plantation owner. He battled and conquered the United Fruit Company, becoming a symbol of the best and worst of the United States: proof that America is the land of opportunity, but also a classic example of the corporate pirate who treats foreign nations as the backdrop for his adventures. 

In Latin America, when people shouted “Yankee, go home!” it was men like Zemurray they had in mind. Rich Cohen’s brilliant historical profile The Fish That Ate the Whale unveils Zemurray as a hidden kingmaker and capitalist revolutionary, driven by an indomitable will to succeed. Known as El Amigo, the Gringo, or simply Z, the Banana Man lived one of the great untold stories of the last hundred years. Starting with nothing but a cart of freckled bananas, he built a sprawling empire of banana cowboys, mercenary soldiers, Honduran peasants, CIA agents, and American statesmen. 

From hustling on the docks of New Orleans to overthrowing Central American governments, from feuding with Huey Long to working with the Dulles brothers, Zemurray emerges as an unforgettable figure, connected to the birth of modern American diplomacy, public relations, business, and war—a monumental life that reads like a parable of the American dream.

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Download : The Lower River [Kindle Edition] by Paul Theroux

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Ellis Hock never believed that he would return to Africa. He runs an old-fashioned menswear store in a small town in Massachusetts but still dreams of his Eden, the four years he spent in Malawi with the Peace Corps, cut short when he had to return to take over the family business. 

When his wife leaves him, and he is on his own, he realizes that there is one place for him to go: back to his village in Malawi, on the remote Lower River, where he can be happy again. Arriving at the dusty village, he finds it transformed: the school he built is a ruin, the church and clinic are gone, and poverty and apathy have set in among the people. They remember him—the White Man with no fear of snakes—and welcome him. 

But is his new life, his journey back, an escape or a trap? Interweaving memory and desire, hope and despair, salvation and damnation, this is a hypnotic, compelling, and brilliant return to a terrain about which no one has ever written better than Theroux.

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Download : The Man Who Quit Money [Kindle Edition] by Mark Sundeen

The Man Who Quit Money

In 2000, Daniel Suelo left his life savings-all thirty dollars of it-in a phone booth. He has lived without money-and with a newfound sense of freedom and security-ever since. The Man Who Quit Money is an account of how one man learned to live, sanely and happily, without earning, receiving, or spending a single cent. Suelo doesn't pay taxes, or accept food stamps or welfare. 

He lives in caves in the Utah canyonlands, forages wild foods and gourmet discards. He no longer even carries an I.D. Yet he manages to amply fulfill not only the basic human needs-for shelter, food, and warmth-but, to an enviable degree, the universal desires for companionship, purpose, and spiritual engagement. In retracing the surprising path and guiding philosophy that led Suelo into this way of life, Sundeen raises provocative and riveting questions about the decisions we all make, by default or by design, about how we live-and how we might live better.

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Download : Father's Day: A Journey into the Mind and Heart of My Extraordinary Son [Kindle Edition by Buzz Bissinger

Father's Day

A remarkable memoir from the best-selling author of Friday Night Lights and Three Nights in August. Buzz Bissinger’s twins were born three minutes—and a world—apart. Gerry, the older one, is a graduate student at Penn, preparing to become a teacher. His brother Zach has spent his life attending special schools. He’ll never drive a car, or kiss a girl, or live by himself. He is a savant, challenged by serious intellectual deficits but also blessed with rare talents: an astonishing memory, a dazzling knack for navigation, and a reflexive honesty that can make him both socially awkward and surprisingly wise. 

Buzz realized that while he had always been an attentive father, he didn’t really understand what it was like to be Zach. So one summer night Buzz and Zach hit the road to revisit all the places they have lived together during Zach’s twenty-four years. Zach revels in his memories, and Buzz hopes this journey into their shared past will bring them closer and reveal to him the mysterious workings of his son’s mind and heart. The trip also becomes Buzz's personal journey, yielding revelations about his own parents, the price of ambition, and its effect on his twins. As father and son journey from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, they see the best and worst of America and each other. 

Ultimately, Buzz gains a new and uplifting wisdom, realizing that Zach’s worldview has a sturdy logic of its own: a logic that deserves the greatest respect. And with the help of Zach’s twin, Gerry, Buzz learns an even more vital lesson about Zach: character transcends intellect. We come to see Zach as he truly is: patient, fearless, perceptive, kind—a man of excellent character. This book features a teaser chapter from Bissinger’s story of strategy, heart, and baseball, Three Nights in August.

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Download : Gone Girl: A Novel [Kindle Edition] by Gillian Flynn

Gone Girl: A Novel

Marriage can be a real killer. One of the most critically acclaimed suspense writers of our time, New York Times bestseller Gillian Flynn takes that statement to its darkest place in this unputdownable masterpiece about a marriage gone terribly, terribly wrong. 

The Chicago Tribune proclaimed that her work “draws you in and keeps you reading with the force of a pure but nasty addiction.” Gone Girl’s toxic mix of sharp-edged wit and deliciously chilling prose creates a nerve-fraying thriller that confounds you at every turn. On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy Dunne’s fifth wedding anniversary. 

Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick’s clever and beautiful wife disappears from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River. Husband-of-the-Year Nick isn’t doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife’s head, but passages from Amy's diary reveal the alpha-girl perfectionist could have put anyone dangerously on edge. 

Under mounting pressure from the police and the media—as well as Amy’s fiercely doting parents—the town golden boy parades an endless series of lies, deceits, and inappropriate behavior. Nick is oddly evasive, and he’s definitely bitter—but is he really a killer?

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Download : Buried in the Sky by Peter Zuckerman

Buy This Book

When Edmund Hillary first conquered Mt. Everest, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay was at his side. Indeed, for as long as Westerners have been climbing the Himalaya, Sherpas have been the unsung heroes in the background. In August 2008, when eleven climbers lost their lives on K2, the world’s most dangerous peak, two Sherpas survived. They had emerged from poverty and political turmoil to become two of the most skillful mountaineers on earth. Based on unprecedented access and interviews, Buried in the Sky reveals their astonishing story for the first time.

Peter Zuckerman and Amanda Padoan explore the intersecting lives of Chhiring Dorje Sherpa and Pasang Lama, following them from their villages high in the Himalaya to the slums of Kathmandu, across the glaciers of Pakistan to K2 Base Camp. When disaster strikes in the Death Zone, Chhiring finds Pasang stranded on an ice wall, without an axe, waiting to die. The rescue that follows has become the stuff of mountaineering legend.

At once a gripping, white-knuckled adventure and a rich exploration of Sherpa customs and culture, Buried in the Sky re-creates one of the most dramatic catastrophes in alpine history from a fascinating new perspective. 16 pages of color illustrations; 8 maps.

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