From New York Times Bestselling Author Maria V. Snyder Choose: a quick death… or slow poison… Locked deep in the palace dungeon for killing her abuser, Yelena knows she’ll never be free again. The laws in Ixia are strict, and murderers must be executed, no matter the reason. But just as she’s resigned herself to her fate, she’s offered an extraordinary reprieve. As the food taster, Yelena will eat the best meals, have rooms in the palace—and risk assassination by anyone trying to kill the Commander of Ixia. To make matters worse, the chief of security deliberately feeds her Butterfly’s Dust, and only by appearing for her daily antidote will she delay an agonizing death from the poison. As Yelena tries to escape her new dilemma, disasters keep mounting. Rebels plot to seize Ixia and Yelena develops magical powers she can’t control. Her life is threatened again, and in order to survive, she must unravel the secrets behind the past she’s been running from. The Chronicles of Ixia Series by Maria V Snyder Book One: Poison Study Book Two: Magic Study Book Three: Fire Study Book Four: Storm Glass Book Five: Sea Glass Book Six: Spy Glass Book Seven: Shadow Study Book Eight: Night Study Book Nine: Dawn Study
One of Washington Independent Review of Books' 50 Favorite Books of 2018 • A Buzzfeed Best Book of 2018 "Morbidly witty." —Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times "A heady mix of erudite history and delicious gossip." —Aja Raden, author of Stoned Hugely entertaining, a work of pop history that traces the use of poison as a political—and cosmetic—tool in the royal courts of Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the Kremlin today The story of poison is the story of power. For centuries, royal families have feared the gut-roiling, vomit-inducing agony of a little something added to their food or wine by an enemy. To avoid poison, they depended on tasters, unicorn horns, and antidotes tested on condemned prisoners. Servants licked the royal family’s spoons, tried on their underpants and tested their chamber pots. Ironically, royals terrified of poison were unknowingly poisoning themselves daily with their cosmetics, medications, and filthy living conditions. Women wore makeup made with mercury and lead. Men rubbed turds on their bald spots. Physicians prescribed mercury enemas, arsenic skin cream, drinks of lead filings, and potions of human fat and skull, fresh from the executioner. The most gorgeous palaces were little better than filthy latrines. Gazing at gorgeous portraits of centuries past, we don’t see what lies beneath the royal robes and the stench of unwashed bodies; the lice feasting on private parts; and worms nesting in the intestines. In The Royal Art of Poison, Eleanor Herman combines her unique access to royal archives with cutting-edge forensic discoveries to tell the true story of Europe’s glittering palaces: one of medical bafflement, poisonous cosmetics, ever-present excrement, festering natural illness, and, sometimes, murder.
"The book examines the configurations of surveillance, sovereignty, and the accompanying forms of subjectivity and knowledge in the transition to modernity. The association of sovereignty with intelligence extended far beyond the identification of sovereignty with the personal power of the sovereign. In Montaigne's France, sovereignty appeared in a disseminated form. Montaigne's Essais exemplify the situation of the courtier self-fashioned to serve an absent sovereign; like Lacan's subject, he is looked at from all sides. Montaigne's description of the search for self-knowledge as self-spying reveals how deeply this quest was implicated in a culture of courtly surveillance. At Elizabeth's court, observation evolved into political espionage based on a system of courtly patronage and employed as a means of policing sexuality centered on the unmarried monarch. Sidney's Arcadia inscribes ways of coping, with the anxieties produced by this surveillance-fraught environment.".
The subject of leadership is not new to mankind, having been practised in one form or another over the centuries. Students of administration and leadership can frequently find various definitions and concepts of this subject. Although descriptions, titles and labels may be popularized or even canonized, the primary qualification — and responsibility — of leadership will always be seeking knowledge about any given situation. From Wine-Taster To Wall-Builder seeks to give practical examples and lessons taken from actual leadership situations. This is done by examining the performance of leaders when faced with colossal tasks and volatile situations, while also employing very basic principals of effective leadership.
The first book in the bestselling Evertaster Series takes Guster, his family, and young readers on fantastic adventures around the world as they seek a legendary secret recipe to satisfy the world’s pickiest eater.
Choose: a quick death… or slow poison… Locked deep in the palace dungeon for killing her abuser, Yelena knows she’ll never be free again. The laws in Ixia are strict, and murderers must be executed, no matter the reason. But just as she’s resigned herself to her fate, she’s offered an extraordinary reprieve. As the food taster, Yelena will eat the best meals, have rooms in the palace — and risk assassination by anyone trying to kill the Commander of Ixia. To make matters worse, the chief of security deliberately feeds her Butterfly’s Dust, and only by appearing for her daily antidote will she delay an agonizing death from the poison. As Yelena tries to escape her new dilemma, disasters keep mounting. Rebels plot to seize Ixia and Yelena develops magical powers she can’t control. Her life is threatened again, and in order to survive, she must unravel the secrets behind the past she’s been running from. Previously published. The Chronicles of Ixia Series by Maria V Snyder Book One: Poison Study Book Two: Magic Study Book Three: Fire Study Book Four: Storm Glass Book Five: Sea Glass Book Six: Spy Glass Book Seven: Shadow Study Book Eight: Night Study Book Nine: Dawn Study
We all love stories--whether printed, passed down orally from generation to generation, or made into films. We love stories whether they are fictional, true, mythical, or legendary. Stories are part of our human history, and they help us understand being human. But there is one story that underpins all other stories--the story of why we exist. All great human stories must interact with this story. His Story explores this fundamental story by retelling the story of the Bible. His Story tells the Biblical story of how God has opened up a doorway into our universe and how this impacts the metanarrative of all of our lives. If you want to read the overarching story of the Bible in one short book, then His Story is for you. If you want to know the backstory of your life, His Story is for you. His Story is simply written, but doesn't oversimplify. It is a book for people who might call themselves Christians, but also for all those who are curious about the ultimate story. His Story--the story of why we are here.
Tasting Difference examines early modern discourses of racial, cultural, and religious difference that emerged in the wake of contact with foreign peoples and foreign foods from across the globe. Gitanjali Shahani reimagines the contact zone between Western Europe and the global South in culinary terms, emphasizing the gut rather than the gaze in colonial encounters. From household manuals that instructed English housewives how to use newly imported foodstuffs to "the spicèd Indian air" of A Midsummer Night's Dream, from the repurposing of Othello as an early modern pitchman for coffee in ballads to the performance of disgust in travel narratives, Shahani shows how early modern genres negotiated the allure and danger of foreign tastes. Turning maxims such as "We are what we eat" on their head, Shahani asks how did we (the colonized subjects) become what you (the colonizing subjects) eat? How did we become alternately the object of fear and appetite, loathing and craving? Shahani takes us back several centuries to the process by which food came to be inscribed with racial character and the racial other came to be marked as edible, showing how the racializing of food began in an era well before chicken tikka masala and Balti cuisine. Bringing into conversation critical paradigms in early modern studies, food studies, and postcolonial studies, she argues that it is in the writing on food and eating that we see among the earliest configurations of racial difference, and it is experienced both as a different taste and as a taste of difference.
Was there ever such a family? Fired from his job at the University for letting all the mice free from their cages in the biology labs, Mr Delahay went home to find that his house was falling into the river. Moving into his mother's large, old house proved no solution. His equally large family -- two girls and four boys, three of them triplets -- were too mischievous and troublesome for his mother to stand. So she banished most of them to British Columbia where they had adventures with Sasquatches and a carwash owner named Buck whose life's dream it was to capture one of these Wild Men of the Woods. Returning to their home town in Ontario, the Delahays find that their having a home again depends on the oldest boy's skill at telling a story that will keep an eccentric old lady so interested she will let them stay with her yet one more night until she finds out how the story ends. Well, eventually, the story does have to end, but not before a great deal of hilarity and a great deal of wild adventures involving a motorbiker, a confidence woman masquerading as a baby sitter, and a leap through a Suicide Door. This is a different kind of story, filled with unexpected turns that even include a story within the story that you can try finishing yourself!