The first sixteen tales in this collection were published by Canongate in 1983 with the title Unlikely Stories, Mostly. This collection also has fifty-seven tales from later books, plus sixteen new ones written for the hardback publication of this collection. This last section, Tales Droll and Plausible, shows that Gray's recent twenty-first-century fiction is as uncomfortably funny and up to date as his earliest.
In Man-Eaters, a horrifying study of the world's most dangerous predatory animals and their human trophies, author Michael Bright unleashed hundreds of gruesome true stories about savage, flesh-eating predators and their human prey to shock the unshockable. If you think we're at the top of the food chain, think again. And watch your back!
On autopsy, the brain of an Alzheimer's patient can weigh as little as 30 percent of a healthy brain. The tissue grows porous. It is a sieve through which the past slips. As her mother loses her grasp on their shared history, Elizabeth Kadetsky sifts through boxes of the snapshots, newspaper clippings, pamphlets, and notebooks that remain, hoping to uncover the memories that her mother is actively losing as her dementia progresses. These remnants offer the false yet beguiling suggestion that the past is easy to reconstruct—easy to hold. At turns lyrical, poignant, and alluring, The Memory Eaters tells the story of a family's cyclical and intergenerational incidents of trauma, secret-keeping, and forgetting in the context of 1970s and 1980s New York City. Moving from her parents' divorce to her mother's career as a Seventh Avenue fashion model and from her sister's addiction and homelessness to her own experiences with therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, Kadetsky takes readers on a spiraling trip through memory, consciousness fractured by addiction and dementia, and a compulsion for the past salved by nostalgia.
Now a major motion picture starring Drew Barrymore, Ted Danson, Kristen Bell, Tim Blake Nelson, John Krasinski, and Vinessa Shaw—an account of the dramatic rescue of three gray whales trapped under the ice in Alaska in 1988. Set in Cold War–era 1988, Big Miracle tells the real story behind the remarkable, bizarre, and oftentimes uproarious event that mesmerized the world for weeks. On October 7, an Inuit hunter near Barrow, Alaska, found three California Gray whales imprisoned in the Arctic ice. In the past, as was nature's way, trapped whales always died. Not this time. Tom Rose, who was covering the event for a Japanese TV station, compellingly describes how oil company executives, environmental activists, Inupiat people, small business people, and the U.S. military boldly worked together to rescue the whales. He also tells the stories of some of the more than 150 international journalists who brought the story to the world's attention. The rescue was followed by millions of people around the world as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev joined the forces of their two nations to help free the whales.
“Parker’s exquisitely titled book is as off-kilter as a Kurt Vonnegut novel, and wholly absorbing.” —Maclean’s Jeff Parker went to Russia intending to write a book about the country’s resurgence as a major global superpower under President Vladimir Putin and about the emergence, for perhaps the first time in history, of a Russian middle class. But Russia tends to resist any attempt to pin it down. In the midst of the social and financial upheaval of the years that followed, the answers Parker sought only raised more questions: What was Russia? How did it work? How did people live? And how could they eat kholodetz (meat jelly)? As tensions strain once again between Russia and the West, Parker looks beyond the global politics to the heart of everyday life by giving us the story of his friendship with Igor, a barkeep and draft dodger. Igor is not the model perestroika-generation man nor some kind of Putin-era everyman; he is, like The Dude in The Big Lebowski, a man for his time and place. He is the metaphor for a Russia in crisis, and, as Keith Gessen wrote, “his story is the story of Russia over the last twenty years.” Where Bears Roam the Streets gives a moving account of a friendship between two people who grew up on the opposing sides of the Cold War and paints a smart, funny, revealing portrait of a country that continues to beguile.
"Wild Ones is a tour through our environmental moment and the eccentric cultural history of people and wild animals in America that inflects it. With propulsive curiosity and searing wit, and without that easy moralizing and nature worship of environmental journalism's older guard, [Jon] Mooallem merges reportage, science, and history into a humane and endearing meditation on what it means to live in, and bring life into, a broken world."--Back cover.
Throughout the twentieth century, glaciologists and geophysicists from Denmark, Norway and Sweden made important scientific contributions across the Arctic and Antarctic. This research was of acute security and policy interest during the Cold War, as knowledge of the polar regions assumed military importance. But scientists also helped make the polar regions Nordic spaces in a cultural and political sense, with scientists from Norden punching far above their weight in terms of population, geographical size or economic activity. This volume presents an image of Norden that stretches far beyond its conventional limits, covering a vast area in the North Atlantic and the Arctic Sea, as well as parts of Antarctica. Rich in resources, scarce in population, but critically important in global and regional geopolitics, these spaces were contested by major powers such as Russia, the United States, Canada and, in the Antarctic, Argentina, Australia, South Africa and others. The empirical focus on Danish, Norwegian and Swedish influence in the polar regions during the twentieth century embraces a diverse array of themes, from the role of science in policy and diplomacy to the tensions between nationalism and internationalism, with clear relevance to the important role science plays in contemporary discussions about Nordic engagement with the polar regions.
How long do you stay in each job? Millions of us change roles on average every three years. A nation of job-hoppers, every promotion or change presents the same issues and worries and there's no getting away from those first day nerves. Ultimate New Job will prepare you for the toughest few months of your life, when fitting in is everything and first impressions count. Covering every aspect of starting a new job or internship, it tackles the top fifteen questions that people ask when starting a new position, from handling the offer and resigning from your current post, to researching the organisation, networking and finding your place within the team. With realistic, practical advice, Ultimate New Job tackles all of your concerns head on, making your first weeks and months as smooth a transition as possible - for you and your new employer.
On April 16, 2007, Cho Seung-Hui, a student at Virginia Tech with a history of mental illness, became the perpetrator of the most infamous school shooting in the history of the United States. In the aftermath of the killings and Cho‘s subsequent suicide, one primary question emerged: Why? Suicidal Mass Murderers: A Criminological Study of Why They
