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Madam Secretary: A Memoir
The Holy Qur'an: Arabic Text with English Translation
Brick Lane
Nazneen is a teenager forced into an arranged marriage with a man considerably older than her—a man whose expectations of life are so low that misery seems to stretch ahead for her. Fearfully leaving the sultry oppression of her Bangladeshi village, Nazneen finds herself cloistered in a small flat in a high-rise block in the East End of London. Because she speaks no English, she is obliged to depend totally on her husband. But it becomes apparent that, of the two, she is the real survivor: more able to deal with the ways of the world, and a better judge of the vagaries of human behaviour. She makes friends with another Asian girl, Razia, who is the conduit to her understanding of the unsettling ways of her new homeland. This is a novel of genuine insight, with the kind of characterisation that reminds the reader at every turn just what the novel form is capable of. Every character (Nazneen, her disappointed husband and her resourceful friend Razia) is drawn with the complexity that can really only be found in the novel these days. In some ways, the reader is given the same all-encompassing experience as in a Dickens novel: humour and tragedy rub shoulders in a narrative that inexorably grips the reader. Whether or not Monica Ali can follow up this achievement is a question for the future; it's enough to say right now that Brick Lane is an essential read for anyone interested in current British fiction. —Barry Forshaw Supercity
Muhammad: Western Attempt to Understand Islam
You Are Really Rich: You Just Don't Know It Yet
The Rough Guide to Madrid
Aliens Book 2 Limited Edition: Bk. 2
Concept Design 2: Works from Seven Los Angeles Entertainment Designers and Seventeen Guest Artists
David Carson: 2ndsight - Grafik Design After the End of Print
The End of Print: The Graphic Design of David Carson
Empire: v. 9: Nozone
Arabic for Designers
Pictures
In the past, Bridges would give out self-published collections of his photographs to cast and crew as gifts at the end of a shoot. One might have spied these images in promotional items or magazines, but with Pictures fans of the movies can now have their own wonderful keepsake. —Doug Thomas, Amazon.com Paris: Mini Rough Guide
The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy: And Other Stories
Robota: Reign of Machines Story and Art
Trek
George Lucas: The Creative Impulse - Lucasfilm's First Twenty Years
Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
Polaroids from the Dead
Miss Wyoming
Meanwhile, John Johnson, debauched star of such Hollywood legends as Bel Air PI?, also longs to vanish. After a near-death experience, where he is treated to a vision of Susan's face, he roams the badlands of the western States. Back in L.A., a chance meeting sets him on a mission to unravel the mystery of Susan Colgate. Coupland has a genius for capturing the absurdities of modern existence and using them as backdrop for a tale of hope and fulfilment. The curses of the cyber-age—junk-mail and web-junkies, fast food, jaded TV weather forecasters—teem around the central st0ry, creating a vivid and darkly funny tale. His peripheral characters are just as richly drawn. A scriptwriter and his supernaturally intelligent girlfriend, a recluse who spends his evening generating Internet rumours—all manage to be blessed and cursed, numbed by their pointless existences but full of humanity when put to the test. Picture Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut co-writing Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and you come halfway to grasping Coupland's uniquely funny and thoughtful brand of storytelling. —Matthew Baylis City of Glass: Douglas Coupland's Vancouver
JPod
Jurassic Park
Rising Sun
Uncle Sam
The Arabs and Israel for Beginners
Horrorist, The # 2
The Rough Guide to Seattle
The Onion Presents Our Dumb Century
Arrival
Make Technology on Your Time Volume 01
The Bible Code
Red
San Francisco
Logo
The Mini Rough Guide to Boston
You Only Live Twice
On Her Majesty's Secret Service
The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent
The Autobiography of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper
Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop - from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication
Give Me Liberty
Martha Washington Goes to War
Martha Washington Saves the World
Idoru
Pattern Recognition
Talented, vulnerable heroine Cayce Pollard is an adept "coolhunter" with an intuitive gift for telling whether any image or logo will be a commercial flop. The downside is her tortured sensitivity—like an allergic reaction—to logo overexposure. She can just about bear to fly BA, but not cross-promoted Virgin... When she's consulted by top ad agency Blue Ant and gives the thumbs-down to their designer's latest concept, the edgy urban paranoia begins. A porn-site URL that she never accessed appears in her browser history, and the phone's redial button goes somewhere it shouldn't. The same faces appear around her as she flits between continents. Small world. Worryingly small. As new vistas open in viral marketing and stealth publicity, the big admen are all too interested in Cayce's private hobby: mystery fragments of haunting movie footage, released anonymously on the Web. This unknown "garage Kubrick" auteur has spawned a fascinated, obsessive online cult. Is this a brilliant marketing operation for a still-unknown product, or something with different, dark and painful roots? Cayce's personal quest, or flight, converges on the source of the Footage, helped and threatened by memorably offbeat characters. In Britain, these include a pettily sadistic woman who seems to know Cayce's most carefully concealed phobias, and an embittered collector of obsolete mechanical calculators made in Liechtenstein. Tokyo: a lovesick Japanese geek whose "otaku" friends find a hidden digital signature in the Footage. Moscow: a strange girl whose uncle is a fabulously wealthy—and dangerously protected—Russian mafioso... Here's Cayce in a Japanese hotel, showing that wittily lyrical Gibson view of the world and his deft use of brand names: She uses the remote as demonstrated, drapes drawing quietly aside to reveal a remarkably virtual-looking skyline, a floating jumble of electric Lego, studded with odd shapes you wouldn't see elsewhere, as if you'd need special Tokyo add-ons to build this at home. This world of glittering surfaces and pulsating data connections is mined with surprises, betrayals, flurries of violence and unexpected allies. This is a very 21st century novel: compulsive reading, and vintage Gibson. —David Langford Giger's Alien
The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War
A Child's Life: And Other Stories
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: Get Seriously Involved with the Classic Guide to Surviving the Opposite Sex
Smart Design: Driving Technology to Suit Our Needs
The Simpsons: The Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family: The Complete Guide to Your Favorite Family
Istanbul
Dubai & the United Arab Emirates
Dubai is in many ways quite unlike most cities on the planet, changing with breathtaking rapidity in the last 20 years or so. No longer a minor Gulf trading town, it is now in one of the most jawdroppingly wealthy of cosmopolitan destinations. Every aspect of its gaudy pleasures is examined here, and (as one would expect from this publisher), we are told the truth; and there is never an attempt to gloss over aspects that some might find controversial (as, for instance, this sentence: ‘This is one of the world's most glamorous, spectacular and futuristic urban destinations fuelled by a heady cocktail of petrodollars, visionary commercial acumen and naked ambitions’). It's this clear-sightedness that makes Gavin Thomas’ guide so valuable — who, after all, doesn't want to know all the truth about the city they are visiting? Everything here is treated with enthusiasm and intelligence, and the carefully chosen photos (notably of the Arabian antiques) are eye-catching. But even here, the honesty shines through: the fact that the city is famous for the kitschest of kitsch souvenirs is celebrated, along with the respectable artefacts. If you're planning a trip to Dubai but not planning to take this guide along with you, you'll be doing yourself a disservice. With the dizzying profusion of restaurants alone, the kind of sympathetic guidance provided here is very valuable indeed. —Barry Forshaw The Arabian Nights
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Christopher is an intelligent youth who lives in the functional hinterland of autism—every day is an investigation for him because of all the aspects of human life that he does not quite get. When the dog next door is killed with a garden fork, Christopher becomes quietly persistent in his desire to find out what has happened and tugs away at the world around him until a lot of secrets unravel messily. Haddon makes an intelligent stab at how it feels to, for example, not know how to read the faces of the people around you, to be perpetually spooked by certain colours and certain levels of noise, to hate being touched to the point of violent reaction. Life is difficult for the difficult and prickly Christopher in ways that he only partly understands; this avoids most of the obvious pitfalls of novels about disability because it demands that we respect—perhaps admire—him rather than pity him. —Roz Kaveney We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion
The Cinema of George Lucas
Children of Dune
Prima's Official Strategy Guide: Star Wars - Knights of the Old Republic
London
Dog Moon
The Rough Guide to Vancouver: with Victoria, Whistler, an the Sunshine Coast
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software
Most game players, alas, live on something close to day-trader time, at least when they're in the middle of a game—thinking more about their next move than their next meal, and usually blissfully oblivious to the 10-or-20-year trajectory of software development. No-one wants to play with a toy that's going to be fun after a few decades of tinkering—the toys have to be engaging now, or kids will find other toys. Johnson has a knack for explaining complicated and counterintuitive ideas cleverly without stealing the scene. Though we're far from fully understanding how complex behaviour manifests from simple units and rules, our awareness that such emergence is possible is guiding research across disciplines. Readers unfamiliar with the sciences of complexity will find Emergence an excellent starting point, while those who were chaotic before it was cool will appreciate its updates and wider scope. —Rob Lightner Jamming: The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity
Batman Animated
No Logo: No Space. No Choice. No Jobs
In No Logo, Klein patiently demonstrates, step by step, how brands have become ubiquitous, not just in media and on the street but increasingly in the schools as well. The global companies claim to support diversity but their version of "corporate multiculturalism" is merely intended to create more buying options for consumers. When Klein talks about how easy it is for retailers like Wal-Mart and Blockbuster to "censor" the contents of videotapes and albums, she also considers the role corporate conglomeration plays in the process. How much would one expect Paramount Pictures, for example, to protest against Blockbuster's policies, given that they are both divisions of Viacom? Klein also looks at the workers who keep these companies running, most of whom never share in any of the great rewards. The president of Borders, when asked whether the bookstore chain could pay its clerks a "living wage" wrote that "while the concept is romantically appealing, it ignores the practicalities and realities of our business environment". Those clerks should probably just be grateful they're not stuck in an Asian sweatshop, making pennies an hour to produce Nike sneakers or other must-have fashion items. Klein also discusses at some length the tactic of hiring "permatemps" who can do most of the work and receive few, if any, benefits like health care, paid vacations or stock options. While many workers are glad to be part of the "Free Agent Nation" observers note that, particularly in the high-tech industry, such policies make it increasingly difficult to organise workers and advocate for change. But resistance is growing and the backlash against the brands has set in. Street-level education programmes have taught kids in the inner cities, for example, not only about Nike's abusive labour practices but about the astronomical mark-up in their prices. Boycotts have commenced: as one urban teen put it, "Nike, we made you. We can break you". But there's more to the revolution, as Klein optimistically recounts: "Ethical shareholders, culture jammers, street reclaimers, McUnion organisers, human-rights hacktivists, school-logo fighters and Internet corporate watchdogs are at the early stages of demanding a citizen-centred alternative to the international rule of the brands ... as global, and as capable of co-ordinated action, as the multinational corporations it seeks to subvert". No Logo is a comprehensive account of what the global economy has wrought and the actions taking place to thwart it. —Ron Hogan Fax From Sarajevo: Story of Survival
Ray Gun: Out of Control
Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0
Percy Gloom
Islam for Beginners
Oblagon : Concepts of Syd Mead
Syd Mead's Sentury
While There is Light
Happy Birthday Martha Washington
Marks of Excellence: History and Taxonomy of Trademarks
Vimanarama
Being Digital
Negroponte's text is mostly a history of media technology rather than a set of predictions for future technologies. In the beginning, he describes the evolution of CD-ROMs, multimedia, hypermedia, HDTV (high-definition television), and more. The section on interfaces is informative, offering an up-to-date history on visual interfaces, graphics, virtual reality (VR), holograms, teleconferencing hardware, the mouse and touch-sensitive interfaces, and speech recognition. In the last chapter and the epilogue, Negroponte offers visionary insight on what "being digital" means for our future. Negroponte praises computers for their educational value but recognizes certain dangers of technological advances, such as increased software and data piracy and huge shifts in our job market that will require workers to transfer their skills to the digital medium. Overall, Being Digital provides an informative history of the rise of technology and some interesting predictions for its future. Antonio Gaudi: Master Architect
Metro Maps of the World
The Little Book of Hindu Deities: From the Goddess of Wealth to the Sacred Cow
Coming of Age: Celebrating 21 Years of Mela in the UK
Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992-95
Sacco never descends into sensationalism or exploitation of the war's victims, but instead adopts a subjective gaze that places readers in hiding spots from which they can only catch glimpses of the murders and rapes. Sacco leaves the particulars of these crimes up to the imagination of his readers, which is appropriate enough given the unthinkable nature of what took place in Gorazde. The real impact of Safe Area lies in Sacco's immersion in the daily life of Gorazde. While other journalists left Gorazde as soon as they had the clips they needed, Sacco lived in the town for weeks at a time, becoming a vicarious resident. Although the conflict was largely over by this point, Gorazde was still surrounded and Sacco was an eyewitness to his friends' struggle not only to survive but also to maintain their sanity. Safe Area is not just a catalogue of horrors and a condemnation of international indifference; it's also a moving portrayal of the human capacity to endure almost any hardship. Sacco refuses to fall into any clichés about the triumph of the human spirit here—the people of Gorazde themselves reject such notions—but he does offer up Safe Area as a testament to its survival. —Peter Darbyshire, Amazon.ca Palestine
The Complete Persepolis: Now A Major Motion Picture
The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA
Frankenstein
Gorky Park
The Grand Trunk Road: From Delhi to the Khyber Pass
The Wild Palms Reader
The Way of Nowhere: Eight Questions to Release Our Creative Potential
Ex Machina: The First Hundred Days - Vol 01
Aliens Earth War #1-4
Wild Palms
The Time Machine
The Rough Guide to Berlin
How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion
The Rough Guide History of Islam
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