Twelve-year-old Angela and thirteen-year-old Tony are neighbors and best of friends who have a penchant for getting into trouble. While playing in Angela's creepy basement one day, they discover a secret portal that leads them to a magical world beyond their wildest imaginings. In this new and exciting realm, they train to become wizards, meeting an eclectic cast of characters along the way. But even in this place, Angela and Tony become embroiled in mischief. After all, what kid wouldn't want the power to transform into a beastly dragon or the ability to command any inanimate object to fly across the room? As the two become enveloped in the realm of mysterious creatures and beings, they must face a cruel and evil wizard who plans to overtake the magical world. Can Angela and Tony defeat him before the wizard destroys everything they've come to love?
“One of those can’t-put-it-down-until-the-last-page-is-turned monsters that has readers all over the country missing sleep.”—Minneapolis Tribune Corky is a brilliant entertainer with a bright future ahead of him. He has good looks, many women, and enormous talent. He also had a secret and a certainty: a secret that must be hidden from his public at all costs; and a certainty that the dark forces of magic were out to destroy him. “Fascinating . . . This dazzling psychological thriller cannot be put down! . . . The most imaginative and enjoyable novel I've read since Marathon Man. . . . [A] bizarre journey into the world of illusion.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch “Kept me up half the night. . . . A brilliantly alarming novel!”—Cosmopolitan
This book is about American jazz history and a very special place in San Francisco that was called Earthquake McGoon's, which was one of the longest running jazz clubs in America. Included in Meet Me At McGoon's are some 860 photos and illustrations, a complete index and an updated list of Turk Murphy recordings at the time of writing this book.
Learn at home with help from The Wonder Years/Hallmark actress, math whiz, and New York Times bestselling author Danica McKellar using her acclaimed McKellar Math books! Fairies, butterflies, and magic help to make this math-focused board book positively enchanting! Join ten flower friends for a night of excitement that mixes a little math with a lot of magic. As each flower turns into a butterfly, children will discover different ways to group numbers to create ten, an essential building block of math, all while watching each flower's dream come true. (And keep an eye out for the adorable caterpillar who wishes he could fly, too!) In this, the second book in the McKellar Math line, Danica McKellar once again sneaks in secret addition and subtraction concepts to help make your child smarter and uses her proven math success to show children that loving numbers is as easy as a wave of a wand and a BING BANG BOO! "[Danica McKellar's] bringing her love of numbers to children everywhere." --Brightly on Goodnight, Numbers "Danica McKellar is now on a mission to make math fun for even the youngest of kids." --L.A. Parent Magazine Don't Miss Even More Math Fun in Bathtime Mathtime!
Peggy Goody and the Magic Triangle is a book about a twelve-year-old girl,who is innocently drawn into a world of fairy and wizard magic. She is given fairy magic for helping a fairy who was badly injured and trapped high up in a tree in the forest. The fairy was about to be captured by a band of Demodoms, red hairy creatures that roam the forest. After a massive struggle, Peggy manages to get the fairy down from the tree and safely home. The Silver Fairy thanks Peggy and rewards her with fairy magic. Peggy puts her magic to good use and gets involved in many daring and dangerous adventures and saves many lives. The book has has seventeen chapters, each on a new adventure. By chapter 17, Peggy is fifteen years old and has been given much more magic by the fairies, and her adventures take on a more sinister and dangerous tone, when she meets Savajic Menglor.
Cheating and deception are terms often used but rarely defined. They summon up unpleasant connotations; even those deeply involved with cheating and deception rationalize why they have been driven to it. Particularly for Americans and much of Western civilization, official cheating, government duplicity, cheating as policy, and conscious, contrived deception, are all unacceptable except as a last resort in response to threat of extinction. As a distasteful tool, deception is rarely used to achieve national interests, unless in relation to the deployment of military force. As an area of study, it has by and large been ignored.Intrigued by attitudes toward cheating and deception, the authors decided to analyze its roots, structure, and process. They asked fundamental questions: are there categories of deception, general steps in the process of deception, and ways to evaluate its results across time and in different modes? The book that results is a typology of kinds of deception, beginning with military deception, but extending into other categories and stages.In his introduction to this new edition, Bell outlines how the book came to be written, describes the mixed emotions toward the subject displayed by govenmental and nongovernmental funding sources, and speculates about its critical and commercial reception. He discusses widespread new interest in the subject, the research that has been undertaken since this book was first published, and its limitations.This book provides a general overview of this complex subject, creating a framework for analysis of specific instances of cheating or deception. It will be of particular interest to political scientists, those interested in military affairs and strategy, and psychologists. The general reader will find the book written with a light touch, drawing examples of cheating and deception in the pursuit of love and money. The specialist reader will be intrigued by its broad-ranging examples drawn from policy and politics,
The “engrossing” (Wall Street Journal) story of the biggest con in wine history In 2002, Rudy Kurniawan, an unknown twentysomething, burst into the privileged world of ultrafine wines. Blessed with a virtuoso palate, and with a seemingly limitless supply of coveted bottles, Kurniawan quickly became the leading purveyor of rare wines to the American elite. But in April 2008, at a New York auction house, dozens of Kurniawan's trophy bottles were abruptly pulled from sale. Journalist Peter Hellman was there, and he began to investigate: Were the bottles fake? Were there others? And was Kurniawan himself a dupe . . . or had he ensnared the world's top winemakers, sellers, and drinks in a web of deceit?