E.Rick Jones was a penniless author while Fred, his twin brother, was a successful inventor and entrepreneur. Fred's advice on how Rick could improve his life was never any use because Rick, although he dreamed of becoming like his brother, in reality was hobbled by his timidity. When Rick was accused of being a paedophile, he found himself being investigated by the police and hounded by the media. The evidence appeared conclusive. No one would believe him that he was being framed and everyone he knew (including his wife) seemed to have a reason for wanting him imprisoned or murdered. There was no one he could trust. The media were doing their best to stir up a lynch mob and the police weren't interested in offering him protection. His brother thought his predicament hilarious. One way or another it seemed that his sheltered life was about to come to a painful end.
Until he won a short story competition with a prize of £50,000, E. Rick Jones didn't have any problems or at least no more than any other neurotic writer who spent most of his life in his writing shed at the end of his garden. The problem was that in order to claim the prize Rick was required to be the British representative at the Digitalquill Freedom Conference in Argentina. Unfortunately, certain ruthless people (who denied they had anything to do with MI6) thought that he was not the right person to represent his country and were happy to use threats and violence to convince him of this. However, there was another group of equally ruthless people who believed it was in his country's interest for him to go to S. America which was the last place he wanted to go because there was a frightening amount of magic realism there and that was one genre of writing he couldn't stand. Both groups regarded Rick as expendable. All he wanted was his shed.
"Sam Thomas has created one of the most unique sleuths in modern mystery fiction." -The Plain Dealer In this thrilling new mystery from the critically acclaimed author of The Witch Hunter's Tale midwife Bridget Hodgson travels to London where she's forced into a new profession-as a spy. It's 1649. Three years have passed since midwife Bridget Hodgson and her deputy Martha Hawkins fled York for the safety of the English countryside. But when a mysterious letter from London brings them to the capital, they are forced into service under Jonathan Marlowe, Oliver Cromwell's chief spymaster. Reunited with Bridget's nephew Will, the three seek out Parliament's enemies even as the nation awaits the trial of the King on charges of treason. Marlowe's first mission for Bridget is to spy upon Katherine Chidley, a notorious political radical and-Marlowe fears-a potential rebel against Parliament. The more time Bridget spends with Katherine, however, the closer the two become, and when Katherine's husband Daniel is murdered, Bridget and Martha join in the search for the killer. As the two uncover Daniel's secrets, the list of suspects grows ever longer, until it includes royalists, radicals, and a figure from Bridget's past, who is equal parts mysterious and deadly. When the killer strikes again, Bridget and Martha realize that he is bent on far more than mere murder, but intends to revive the civil wars or destroy England entirely.
This collection consists of 49 insightful essays by leading Cameroonian blogger Dibussi Tande, which originally appeared on his award-winning blog Scribbles from the Den. These essays tackle some of the most pressing and complex issues facing Cameroon today such as the stalled democratization process, the perennial Anglophone problem, the crisis of higher education, the absence of the rule of law, the lack of leadership renewal, a stifled collective memory, and a continued inability to harness technology for purposes of national development, among others. Scribbles from the Den goes beyond the news headlines to dispassionately analyze and unravel the complexities of Cameroonian politics and society.
E. Rick Jones was stoically living out his final days in an old folks' home when a young woman dropped a time-travelling device onto the tartan rug which encased his withered limbs. This did not surprise him because he had written about something of the sort in a short story. The opportunity to travel in time presented him with the chance to repair the injustices of a lifetime and revenge himself on the literary establishment which had ignored him. The only flaw in his plan was that the people to whom the device belonged wanted it back and the young woman who had stolen it kept reappearing at inopportune moments. The one chance he had of survival was to adjust time itself so that the story of his life reached a satisfactory conclusion. But if he did that the terrifyingly ruthless owners of the device would immediately know which timeline he was hiding in and come hunting for him. Given all the time in eternity there surely had to be a solution.
There are shortcuts through spacetime from one part of the universe to another. The trouble is you can never be sure what's at the other end of one or going to come through one to visit you. Suppose you make contact with aliens - can you be sure you can trust them? Or could they be tricking you into doing something which would be disastrous for you but which they'd find hilarious? Then there's the temptation of time-travel. It seems so simple to nip back into the past, alter a few things to make your present life exactly as you'd like it to be. Unfortunately there are always unforeseen consequences and things never turn out as you hope. Also space travel is more complicated than you expect because time goes at different speeds depending on how fast you are travelling. So your journey may only take a year but when you get back everyone else could be a century older. Nothing but problems - but entertaining for those who like sci-fi stories like the ones in this book. Have a good time...
Many galaxies away on a frigid planet called Spxtro, humans are nearly extinct. It is up to the survivors of The Great Combustion to build a new society. 800 years later, under the rule of a corrupt Parliament, humanity is once again divided. The rich lived in the Inner City while the poor lived in the Slums where supplies were scarce. Out of curiosity and mischief, Titus sneaks out of the Academy and the Inner City to visit the Slums. There he met a former hitman who taught him the way of the Slums. When Mia Elliot's body turned up in the wastelands near the Slums, Titus vows to find and punish the ones responsible for her gruesome death. Some digging revealed the Parliament's involvement and human experimentation. Can Titus bring down the corrupted Parliament and free Luna from the system?
New York Times bestselling author of The Wordy Shipmates and contributor to NPR’s This American Life Sarah Vowell embarks on a road trip to sites of political violence, from Washington DC to Alaska, to better understand our nation’s ever-evolving political system and history. Sarah Vowell exposes the glorious conundrums of American history and culture with wit, probity, and an irreverent sense of humor. With Assassination Vacation, she takes us on a road trip like no other—a journey to the pit stops of American political murder and through the myriad ways they have been used for fun and profit, for political and cultural advantage. From Buffalo to Alaska, Washington to the Dry Tortugas, Vowell visits locations immortalized and influenced by the spilling of politically important blood, reporting as she goes with her trademark blend of wisecracking humor, remarkable honesty, and thought-provoking criticism. We learn about the jinx that was Robert Todd Lincoln (present at the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley) and witness the politicking that went into the making of the Lincoln Memorial. The resulting narrative is much more than an entertaining and informative travelogue—it is the disturbing and fascinating story of how American death has been manipulated by popular culture, including literature, architecture, sculpture, and—the author’s favorite—historical tourism. Though the themes of loss and violence are explored and we make detours to see how the Republican Party became the Republican Party, there are all kinds of lighter diversions along the way into the lives of the three presidents and their assassins, including mummies, show tunes, mean-spirited totem poles, and a nineteenth-century biblical sex cult.
For fifty years the truth about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has been obscured. This book releases us from a crippling distortion of American history. At 1:00 p.m. on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead, the victim of a sniper attack during his motorcade through Dallas. That may be the only fact generally agreed upon in the vast literature spawned by the assassination. National polls reveal that an overwhelming majority of Americans (75%) believe that there was a high-level conspiracy behind Lee Harvey Oswald. Many even believe that Oswald was entirely innocent. In this continuously absorbing, powerful, ground-breaking book, Vincent Bugliosi shows how we have come to believe such lies about an event that changed the course of history. The brilliant prosecutor of Charles Manson and the man who forged an iron-clad case of circumstantial guilt around O. J. Simpson in his best-selling Outrage Bugliosi is perhaps the only man in America capable of writing the definitive book on the Kennedy assassination. This is an achievement that has for years seemed beyond reach. No one imagined that such a book would ever be written: a single volume that once and for all resolves, beyond any reasonable doubt, every lingering question as to what happened in Dallas and who was responsible. There have been hundreds of books about the assassination, but there has never been a book that covers the entire case, including addressing every piece of evidence and each and every conspiracy theory, and the facts, or alleged facts, on which they are based. In this monumental work, the author has raised scholarship on the assassination to a new and final level, one that far surpasses all other books on the subject. It adds resonance, depth, and closure to the admirable work of the Warren Commission. Reclaiming History is a narrative compendium of fact, forensic evidence, reexamination of key witnesses, and common sense. Every detail and nuance is accounted for, every conspiracy theory revealed as a fraud on the American public. Bugliosi's irresistible logic, command of the evidence, and ability to draw startling inferences shed fresh light on this American nightmare. At last it all makes sense. Some images in this ebook are not displayed due to permissions issues.
Otto Weininger's controversial book Sex and Character, first published in Vienna in 1903, is a prime example of the conflicting discourses central to its time: antisemitism, scientific racism and biologism, misogyny, the cult and crisis of masculinity, psychological introspection versus empiricism, German idealism, the women's movement and the idea of human emancipation, the quest for sexual liberation, and the debates about homosexuality. Combining rational reasoning with irrational outbursts, in the context of today's scholarship, Sex and Character speaks to issues of gender, race, cultural identity, the roots of Nazism, and the intellectual history of modernism and modern European culture. This new translation presents, for the first time, the entire text, including Weininger's extensive appendix with amplifications of the text and bibliographical references, in a reliable English translation, together with a substantial introduction that places the book in its cultural and historical context.
