![]() ![]() ![]() The central message that immune balance as opposed to strength is a cornerstone of health is worth hearing. I highly recommend this extraordinary book.” (Douglas Preston, number-one best-selling author of The Lost City of the Monkey God) Heartfelt and moving, full of compassion, love, and the human drama, this is the work of a writer of high ethical character who is grappling with big issues and deep humanistic problems. But it is also a story about people facing mortality, about the passion of scientists searching for truth, and a meditation on death and how all of us struggle with the ultimate mystery. On one level it is a fascinating and engrossing account of the latest, and quite astonishing, discoveries involving the human immune system and how it works. “ An Elegant Defense by Matt Richtel is one of those rare nonfiction books that transcends the genre. An epic, first-of-its-kind audiobook, entwining leading-edge scientific discovery with the intimate stories of four individual lives, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist. A magnificently reported and soulfully crafted exploration of the human immune system - the key to health and wellness, life and death. ![]()
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![]() ![]() Ranger Darren Mathews is tough, honor-bound, and profoundly alive in corrupt world. ![]() 'In Bluebird, Bluebird Attica Locke has both mastered the thriller and exceeded it. Darren must solve the crimes - and save himself in the process - before Lark's long-simmering racial fault lines erupt. So when allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy, he travels up Highway 59 to the small town of Lark, where two murders - a black lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman - have stirred up a hornet's nest of resentment. Deeply conflicted about his home state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules - a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger working the backwoods towns of Highway 59, knows all too well. Winner of the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award 2018 ![]() ![]() ![]() Percy Jackson and the Olympians is expected to premiere on the streaming service in 2024. The announcement of The Chalice of the Gods comes as Disney+ is about to release a television series based on the books. Percy will have to fulfill a new quest in order to get the necessary letter of recommendation from Mount Olympus for his application to New Rome University.” ![]() “Unfortunately, the gods aren’t quite done with him. “After saving the world multiple times, Percy Jackson is hoping to have a normal senior year of high school,” reads the description of the book on Read Riordan. The Chalice of the Gods will have the book’s protagonist trying to get into college. The Percy Jackson & the Olympians fantasy novel series had been a pentalogy with five books published between 20: The Lightning Thief (2005), The Sea of Monsters (2006), The Titan’s Curse (2007), The Battle of the Labyrinth (2008) and The Last Olympian (2009). PERCY JACKSON AND THE OLYMPIANS: THE CHALICE OF THE GODS will go on sale September 26, 2023! - Rick Riordan October 18, 2022 ![]() Nearly a decade after the release of THE BLOOD OF OLYMPUS, Percy Jackson, Annabeth Chase, and Grover Underwood will star in a brand new adventure from Rick Riordan! ![]() ![]() ![]() She will take over instead, then leverage their combined strength to force her society to stop failing its women and girls. But now that Zetian has had a taste of power, she will not cower so easily. To tame her frightening yet valuable mental strength, she is paired up with Li Shimin, the strongest male pilot in Huaxia, yet feared and ostracized for killing his father and brothers. But when she gets her vengeance, it becomes clear that she is an Iron Widow, a rare kind of female pilot who can sacrifice males to power up Chrysalises instead. When 18-year-old Zetian offers herself up as a concubine-pilot, it's to assassinate the ace male pilot responsible for her sister's death. It doesn't matter that the girls die from the mental strain. ![]() The boys of Huaxia dream of pairing up with girls to pilot Chrysalises, giant transforming robots that can battle the aliens that lurk beyond the Great Wall of China. ![]() Pacific Rim meets The Handmaid's Tale in this blend of Chinese history and mecha science fiction for YA readers. The instant #1 New York Times bestseller, now available in a stunning new paperback look with bonus content. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Some of the team told reporters that they believed Spears liked the conservatorship arrangement, as long as her father wasn’t involved. Two years earlier, in the midst of health struggles and pressure from Spears, Jamie had stepped down from his duties overseeing her personal life, and now the team thought that perhaps she wanted to remove him as the conservator of her financial affairs. Members of Spears’s team, most of whom have had little or no direct contact with her for years, didn’t expect drastic changes to result. ![]() In April, Spears had requested a hearing, in open court, to discuss the terms of the arrangement. Yet her conservators, who include her father, Jamie Spears, have controlled her spending, communications, and personal decisions. Since the establishment of Spears’s conservatorship, she has released four albums, headlined a global tour that grossed a hundred and thirty-one million dollars, and performed for four years in a hit Las Vegas residency. Called a guardianship in most states, the arrangement is intended for people who cannot take care of themselves. Spears, who is thirty-nine, has spent the past thirteen years living under a conservatorship, a legal structure in which a person’s personal, economic, and legal decision-making power is ceded to others. On June 22nd, Britney Spears’s management team started getting nervous. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Transformations occur that are not wholly undesired. These stories, which often involve people, animals, and situations that might at first glance seem akin to those of The Arabian Nights, quickly bend and twist preconceived notions of how a fairy tale ought to commence and end. Fascinated by her eyes, the prince becomes more and more enthralled with the stories that she begins to tell. Curious, this boy wanders into this forbidden zone and he and the girl strike up a conversation. ![]() ![]() It opens with a deceivingly simple frame story: A girl with odd, tattooed eyes has been sequestered in a garden. T he Orphan’s Tale: In the Night Garden is the first volume of a duology (the second volume, The Orphan’s Tale: In the Cities of Coin and Spice, is due to be released next week in the US). Whether or not one will enjoy this type of story depends heavily upon the skills of the author and how well each story relates to each other and to the frame story. This makes for a reading experience that is unlike most of the fiction that is published under the SF aegis every year. While the other three finalists that I reviewed so far were either the beginning or the continuation of a multi-volume saga, Valente’s book is not so much a novel as it is a frame story that has dozens of other stories nested within it. Valente’s first “major release,” The Orphan’s Tale: In the Night Garden, differs significantly from the other finalists. ![]() ![]() ![]() You have a detective whose hiring has surpassed finding the answers he was hired to find and getting into the “why” of why he was hired. ![]() The story is pretty straightforward and in line with a lot of pulp stories. This entry in the collection is one of the better entries in that it is a good exploration in the noir genre and also doesn’t find itself too buried in vernacular and clever attempts at writing. I really like some of the stuff Azzarello did with the series, but I also hate a lot of the stuff Azzarello did with the series. It is very push-pull for 100 Bullets and me. Following 100 Bullets Volume 4: A Foregone Tomorrow, the series features art by Eduardo Risso, and issues in this collection were also collected as part of 100 Bullets-Volume 2 and 100 Bullets Omnibus-Volume 1. ![]() Written by Brian Azzarello, 100 Bullets Volume 5: The Counterfifth Detective is a DC Comics crime comic book collection published under the Vertigo imprint. Milo is about to discover that the past he thought he knew might not be as clear as he believed. ![]() Wrapped in bandages, Milo finds himself approached by Agent Graves who tells Milo that he has a chance to get even with the man who set him up…but Milo quickly finds himself caught in a spiral of lies and allies who might not be who they say they are. Milo Garret is a hardboiled detective who is recovering after losing a fight with his windshield after a car accident. ![]() ![]() The second volume of Battle Angel Alita, a series also known as Gunnm, picks up where the first left off: young, namesake cyborg Alita, under the care of cyberneticist Dr. ![]() Hard to believe if you’ve only read volume 1 of the series, I know. I even had a moment of sympathy for the antagonist of the last volume, who makes a somewhat surprising appearance here. ![]() This volume now also gets the reader more invested in the characters as they are facing some hardships. While still being strong in both look and style We get a lot more details on the world these characters live in, which positions the series clearer as dystopian fiction than the first volume did. There’s again a nice upgrowth to see in the main character. This second volume offers a much deeper story and successfully walks the fine line between showing Alita’s weaknesses as well as her growing strength. This way he's asking some tough questions of his heroine, who’s already struggling with her very existence anyway. Kishiro lets Alita fall in love with a human being that also happens to be a scrapper who dispossesses cyborgs of their spinal columns to earn money for his move up to Zalem (the city towering above the scrapyard). An improvement over the first volume, thanks to it being a more emotional read. ![]() ![]() "Unfortunately grown-ups don't behave any better." Gombrich's view of history as an adventure will appeal to all ages, but perhaps this book's best recommendation is that it was banned by the Nazis for being "too pacifist". ![]() "Schoolchildren are often intolerant," he explains. ![]() Yet in a final chapter, recalling the rise of Hitler, an older and wiser Gombrich concedes that his optimism was misplaced and that in the last century humanity took "a painful step backwards", betraying the ideals of the Enlightenment. The book's civilising and humanising mission is never in doubt as history unfolds up to the "tolerance, reason and humanity" of the Enlightenment. Like all the best teachers, Gombrich simplifies but never patronises, adding a good measure of humour and charm. He was still working on an English version when he died aged 92. T he German version of this marvellous history for children was written in a mere six weeks in 1935 by an unknown 26-year-old art history graduate who later became known as the distinguished art historian EH Gombrich. Gombrich 25,437 ratings, 4.11 average rating, 2,434 reviews Open Preview A Little History of the World Quotes Showing 31-60 of 69 China is, in fact, the only country in the world to be ruled for hundreds of years, not by the nobility, nor by soldiers, nor even by the priesthood, but by scholars. ![]() ![]() ![]() She based the fictional Three Pines on her village, cleverly incorporating places in and around it throughout the entire series. While the novels are a work of fiction, author Louise Penny drew inspiration for the setting from her hometown Knowlton Village, on the Townships trail in Canada. Image Credit: Laurent Guerin/Amazon Prime Interestingly, the award-winning ‘Still Life’ was first adapted on screen in the 2013 movie ‘Still Life: A Three Pines Mystery.’ The Amazon Prime show is the novel’s second adaptation and chronicles Armand’s early days in Three Pines. It is also the first book in a series of mystery novels revolving around Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, a detective who solves crimes in the small town of Three Pines. It is an adaptation of Louise Penny’s debut novel ‘Still Life,’ published in January 2005. No, ‘Three Pines’ is not based on a true story. ![]() If you wish to explore the same, you’ve found an ally in us. Moreover, the authentic portrayal of an idyllic village makes one wonder if Three Pines and its residents exist in real life. Featuring compelling performances from talented actors like Alfred Molina, Rossif Sutherland, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, and Tantoo Cardinal, the detective drama show covers several socially relevant issues through its relatable characters. Tackling a group of unwelcoming villagers hell-bent on driving out of Three Pines, Armand rushes to solve the crimes before more people die. ![]() |