Dick Hill
101) Hollywood Nocturnes
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Nobody plays accordion like Dick Contino. His skilled fingers can find beauty in even the schmaltziest borscht belt favorites, and with his matinee-idol looks he could be a real star. Right now, though, he's slumming it as the headliner in a Grade Z teenybopper picture called Daddy-O. He's too good for this movie, and finishing it is going to take him to a very dark place. Daddy-O and Dick Contino are both real, their stories dredged out of the past...
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Gerd Gigerenzer is one of the researchers of behavioral intuition responsible for the science behind Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller Blink. Gladwell showed us how snap decisions often yield better results than careful analysis. Now, Gigerenzer explains why our intuition is such a powerful decision-making tool. Drawing on a decade of research at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Gigerenzer demonstrates that our gut feelings are actually...
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Roger Ferris is one of the CIA's soldiers in the war on terrorism. He has come out of Iraq with a shattered leg and an intense mission-to penetrate the network of a master terrorist known only as "Suleiman." Ferris's plan for getting inside Suleiman's tent is inspired by a masterpiece of British intelligence during World War II: He prepares a body of lies, literally the corpse of an imaginary CIA officer who appears to have accomplished the impossible...
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Hendrik Hertzberg, celebrated political analyst for the New Yorker, watches the long presidential campaign of 2007 and 2008 as it unfolds to reveal the transformation of the Democratic Party, the meteoric rise of Barack Obama, and other seismic shifts in our national political consciousness. Hertzberg wrote about the events that culminated in the victory of Barack Obama in two venues, one Olympian and one immediate: his "Comments" for "The Talk of...
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First published in 1893, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is the first published fiction work of American author Stephen Crane. A harrowing depiction of a pretty young girl's life in the slums of turn-of-the-century New York City and her eventual decline into prostitution, Crane's novel is a starkly realistic examination of poverty and the challenges brought about by the rapid industrialization the United States underwent in the late 1800s. An enduring...
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From his dazzling conducting debut in 1943 until his death in 1990, Leonard Bernstein's star blazed brilliantly. In this fresh and revealing biography of Bernstein's political life, Barry Seldes examines Bernstein's career against the backdrop of cold war America - blacklisting by the State Department in 1950, voluntary exile from the New York Philharmonic in 1951 for fear that he might be blacklisted, signing a humiliating affidavit to regain his...
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Is this what's in store?June 12, 2030, started out like any other day in memory-and by then, memories were long. Since cancer had been cured fifteen years before, America's population was aging rapidly. That sounds like good news, but consider this: millions of baby boomers, with a big natural predator picked off, were sucking dry benefits and resources that were never meant to hold them into their eighties and beyond. Young people around the country...
108) Branch Rickey
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The idea of integrating baseball began as a dream in the mind of Branch Rickey. In 1947, as president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, he defied racism on and off the field to bring Jackie Robinson into the major leagues, changing the sport and the nation forever. Rickey's is the classic American tale of a poor boy from Ohio whose deep-seated faith and dogged work ethic took him to the pinnacle of success, earning him a place in the Hall...
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Follow the Money is a harrowing behind-the-scenes account of how a cabal of powerful, tightly connected Texas Republicans have quietly hijacked American politics for their own personal gain. It tells the story of how the Texas political system came to be hijacked by a sophisticated, well-funded group of conservative Republicans who, once they were able to elevate George W. Bush to president, then went about applying their hardball, high-dollar politicking...
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In this far-reaching examination of contemporary American culture, John Zogby, one of the nation's foremost pollsters, explores who today's Americans are, identifying patterns in our social makeup that hint at the way we'll be. Companies from multinational corporations down to family-owned small businesses can benefit from this detailed information about where we are and where we're going.Zogby gets to the bottom of this topic by doing what he does...
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The Lost History of Christianity will change how we understand Christian and world history. Leading religion scholar Philip Jenkins reveals a vast Christian world to the east of the Roman Empire and how the earliest, most influential churches of the East-those that had the closest link to Jesus and the early church-died. In this paradigm-shifting book, Jenkins recovers a lost history, showing how the center of Christianity for centuries used to be...
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In The Age of Reagan, Sean Wilentz offers a fresh, brilliant chronicle of America's political history since the fall of Nixon. The past thirty-five years have marked an era of conservatism. Although briefly interrupted in the late 1970s and temporarily reversed in the 1990s, a powerful surge from the Right has dominated American politics and government. Wilentz accounts for how an extreme conservative movement once deemed marginal managed to seize...
113) Against the Day
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Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all. With a worldwide...
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In the 1950s, America was a land of overdone roast beef and canned green beans-a gastronomic wasteland. Most restaurants relied on frozen, second-rate ingredients and served bogus "Continental" cuisine. Authentic French, Italian, and Chinese foods were virtually unknown. There was no such thing as food criticism at the time, and no such thing as a restaurant critic. Cooking at home wasn't thought of as a source of pleasure. Guests didn't chat around...
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In 2006, world oil consumption will exceed one thousand barrels per second. The news marks an important change that will have a far-reaching impact on world economies, investments, and business profitability.
In A Thousand Barrels a Second, Chief Energy Economist of ARC Financial Peter Tertzakian examines the future of oil and offers insights into what it will take to rebalance our energy needs and seize new opportunities. He answers the top questions...
116) The Dogs of Riga
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On the Swedish coastline, two bodies, victims of grisly torture and cold execution, are discovered in a life raft. With no witnesses, no motives, no crime scene, Detective Kurt Wallander is frustrated and uncertain he has the ability to solve a case as mysterious as it is heinous. But after the victims are traced to the Baltic state of Latvia, a country gripped by the upheaval of Soviet disintegration, Major Liepa of the Riga police takes over the...
117) Crawfish Mountain
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Justin Pitre was born and raised on his grandfather's Louisiana bayou, and he has made a promise to keep his family's prized 500-acre property safe. But across town, Big-Tex oil bigwig Tom Huff and his company have major plans to cash in on the resources that lie below the bayou.
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Americans have been shocked in the past few years to discover how vulnerable our nation is to disaster, be it terrorist attack or act of God. But what's truly shocking, argues leading security expert Stephen Flynn, is how little we have learned from the cataclysms of September 11 and Hurricane Katrina. When it comes to catastrophe, America is living on borrowed time-and squandering it. In this eye-opening, vitally important new book, Flynn issues...
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Full of captivating profiles and expert insights into the lives and lifestyles of the nouveau riche, Richistan tells the real story of a new gilded age. The recent explosion of wealth has created a new breed of multimillionaires. Ed Bazinet, for example, who turned miniature ceramic villages into a $250 million fortune. Or Tim Blixseth, who became a billionaire by trading remote stretches of timberland. Richistan takes readers inside a rarified world...
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WASPs finally get their due in this stimulating history by one of the world's leading geneticists.Saxons, Vikings, and Celts is the most illuminating book yet to be written about the genetic history of Britain and Ireland. Through a systematic, ten-year DNA survey of more than 10,000 volunteers, Bryan Sykes has traced the true genetic makeup of British Islanders and their descendants. This historical travelogue and genetic tour of the fabled isles,...