Life Under Glass


Book Description

Life Under Glass tells the fascinating story of four men and four women who lived and worked inside the Biosphere 2 structure, where they recycled their air, water, food, and wastes, setting a world record for time spent in a closed ecological system. This is the only account written during the unprecedented experiment while the team was enclosed inside.




Magic Under Glass


Book Description

Nimira is a foreign music-hall girl forced to dance for pennies. When wealthy sorcerer Hollin Parry hires her to sing with a piano-playing automaton, Nimira believes it is the start of a new and better life. In Parry's world, however, buried secrets are beginning to stir. Unsettling below-stairs rumors swirl about ghosts, a madwoman roaming the halls, and Parry's involvement with a league of sorcerers who torture fairies for sport. Then Nimira discovers the spirit of a fairy gentleman named Erris is trapped inside the clockwork automaton, waiting for someone to break his curse. The two fall into a love that seems hopeless, and breaking the curse becomes a race against time, as not just their love, but the fate of the entire magical world may be in peril. Look out for the follow-up to this book, Magic Under Stone, out next year!




Life Under Glass


Book Description

"This book is a revised second edition of the first edition. Second ed. includes foreword, introduction, and afterword materials provided by authors. The story itself is that of a two year experiment in the 1990s, the first fully closed system experiment in the world. The authors share the story of "living inside": from their fully self-sufficient diet, daily maintenance of the experiment, and the ways they kept themselves nourished, and entertained for their two years away from the world on the outside. The added edition will also include some highlights, lightly detailing a few of the findings of their experiment"--




Kingdom Under Glass


Book Description

In this epic account of an extraordinary life lived during remarkable times, Jay Kirk follows the adventures of legendary explorer and taxidermist Carl Akeley, who revolutionized taxidermy and environmental conservation and created the famed African Hall at New York's Museum of Natural History. Akeley risked death time and again in the jungles of Africa as he stalked animals for his dioramas and hobnobbed with outsized personalities of the era, such as Theodore Roosevelt and P. T. Barnum. Kingdom Under Glass is "a rollicking biography...an epic adventure...[and] a beguiling novelistic portrait of a man and an era straining to hear the call of the wild" (Publishers Weekly).




Mouse Under Glass


Book Description

This volume presents an evaluation of the quality and financial successes of the Disney Company's ventures. It also provides an overview of and behind-the-scenes information about 30 Disney animated films from "Snow White" through "The Hunchback of Notre Dame". The author relates each film to its original tale, gives the Disney version, and tells what and why cuts were made. The exposed secrets consist of such things as "Plot Holes," "Bloopers," "Hidden Images," and "Strange Reactions." Anecdotes about the growth of the Disney industry and the development of the theme-park rides are included. One of the most enticing sidebars offers over 50 names that were originally considered for the seven dwarfs.




The Glass Castle


Book Description

A triumphant tale of a young woman and her difficult childhood, The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience, redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and wonderfully vibrant. Jeannette Walls was the second of four children raised by anti-institutional parents in a household of extremes.




The Glass Hotel


Book Description

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility, an exhilarating novel set at the glittering intersection of two seemingly disparate events—the exposure of a massive criminal enterprise and the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a ship at sea. “The perfect novel ... Freshly mysterious.” —The Washington Post Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby's glass wall: Why don’t you swallow broken glass. High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis's billion-dollar business is really nothing more than a game of smoke and mirrors. When his scheme collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call. In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison. Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives. Look for Emily St. John Mandel’s bestselling new novel, Sea of Tranquility!




Life Under Glass


Book Description




Monsters under Glass


Book Description

Monsters under Glass explores our enduring fascination with hothouses and exotic blooms, from their rise in ancient times, through the Victorian vogue for plant collecting, to the vegetable monsters of twentieth-century science fiction and the movies, comics, and video games of the present day. Our interest in hothouses can be traced back to the Roman emperor Tiberius, but it was only in the early nineteenth century that a boom in exotic plant collecting and new glasshouse technologies stimulated the imagination of novelists, poets, and artists, and the hothouse entered the creative language in a highly charged way. Decadent writers in England and Europe—including Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde—transformed the hothouse from a functional object to a powerful metaphor of metropolitan life, sexuality, and being replete with a dark underside of decay and death; and of consciousness itself, nurtured and dissected under glass. In a study as wide-ranging, vivid, and beautiful as our beloved exotic blooms themselves, Jane Desmarais charts the history and influence of these humid, tropical worlds and their creations, providing a steamy window onto our recent past.




When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge


Book Description

"A gut-wrenching story told with honesty, restraint, and dignity." —Ha Jin, National Book Award-winning author of Waiting Chanrithy Him felt compelled to tell of surviving life under the Khmer Rouge in a way "worthy of the suffering which I endured as a child." In a mesmerizing story, Chanrithy Him vividly recounts her trek through the hell of the "killing fields." She gives us a child's-eye view of a Cambodia where rudimentary labor camps for both adults and children are the norm and modern technology no longer exists. Death becomes a companion in the camps, along with illness. Yet through the terror, the members of Chanrithy's family remain loyal to one another, and she and her siblings who survive will find redeemed lives in America. A Finalist for the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize.