Gypped


Book Description

PI Regan Reilly and her husband Jack, head of the NYPD Major Case Squad, investigate an L.A.-based business scam that extends up and down the coast of California --







Ebony


Book Description

EBONY is the flagship magazine of Johnson Publishing. Founded in 1945 by John H. Johnson, it still maintains the highest global circulation of any African American-focused magazine.




Zapped


Book Description

It's a hot, humid July night in New York City. Where were you when the lights went out? As Zapped begins, the Reillys return home from a summer weekend to the loft in Tribeca they are in the agonizing process of renovating and expanding. They are looking forward to a quiet supper on their newly acquired rooftop terrace. But it's not meant to be. While Jack goes to pick up Chinese food, Regan enters their apartment, unaware that a nervous thief, who preceded her by minutes, is hiding in the front closet. A thief who knows about a hidden safe that Regan and Jack have yet to discover. Minutes later, the blackout strikes, and both Reillys are called into action. A new gallery in SoHo, featuring treasured glass sculptures from all over the world, has been burglarized. As head of the NYPD Major Case Squad, Jack oversees several departments. Art theft is one of them. PI Regan hears from her best friend, Kit, who is in Manhattan on business. She's been abandoned at a comedy club by a colleague from an insurance convention, Georgina Mathieson, who ran out for a cigarette moments before the blackout struck and never came back. Kit gets a call that Georgina is disturbed and dangerous. Fueled by her rage at a college boyfriend who dumped her, Georgina seeks revenge on unsuspecting young blond men. She was last seen getting into a cab outside the club—with a tall blond. Regan heads the search for Georgina and her potential victim. Meanwhile, Lorraine Lily, an almost famous actress, returns to New York City the night of the blackout, after spending three months in England doing a play, and is informed by her estranged husband, Conrad Spreckles, that he'd sold his loft to their next-door neighbors, the Reillys. Lorraine had never told him about the hidden safe she'd had installed in the closet. If she doesn't get back what's in there, she's sure her budding career will be ruined. In Zapped, Clark takes readers on a tour of the city they won't forget and introduces them to a wonderful cast of colorful, eccentric characters whose stories intersect in precarious and often humorous ways during one very dark and hot summer night.




Breaking the Exclusion Cycle


Book Description

Social exclusion of minority groups is an intractable problem in many diverse nations. For some minority groups this means going to segregated schools, for others not having access to gainful employment or quality healthcare. But why does social exclusion persist, and what can one do to stop it? This book proposes a theory of how individual behavior contributes to social exclusion, a novel method for measuring that behavior, and solutions to ending it. Based on original fieldwork among Central and Eastern European Roma, the largest ethnic minority in Europe (yet still very understudied), and non-Roma, Ana Bracic develops a theory she calls the exclusion cycle, through which anti-minority culture gives rise to discrimination by members of the majority, and minority members develop survival strategies. Members of the majority resent these strategies, assuming that they are endemic to the minority group rather than an outcome of their own discriminatory behavior. To illustrate her theory, Bracic includes an analysis of a video game she created that simulates interactions between Roma and non-Roma participants, which members of these groups played through avatars (thereby avoiding contentious face-to-face interactions). The results demonstrate that majority members discriminate against minority members even when minority group members behave in ways identical to the majority. It also shows the way in which minority members develop survival mechanisms. Bracic draws on the results of the simulation to offer evidence that this cycle can be broken through NGO-promoted discussion and interaction between groups. She also draws on extant scholarship on interactions between Muslim women in France, African Americans, the Batwa in Uganda, and their respective majority communities.




A River Runs through It and Other Stories


Book Description

The New York Times–bestselling classic set amid the mountains and streams of early twentieth-century Montana, “as beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway” (Chicago Tribune). When Norman Maclean sent the manuscript of A River Runs Through It and Other Stories to New York publishers, he received a slew of rejections. One editor, so the story goes, replied, “it has trees in it.” Today, the title novella is recognized as one of the great American tales of the twentieth century, and Maclean as one of the most beloved writers of our time. The finely distilled product of a long life of often surprising rapture—for fly-fishing, for the woods, for the interlocked beauty of life and art—A River Runs Through It has established itself as a classic of the American West filled with beautiful prose and understated emotional insights. Based on Maclean’s own experiences as a young man, the book’s two novellas and short story are set in the small towns and mountains of western Montana. It is a world populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, but also one rich in the pleasures of fly-fishing, logging, cribbage, and family. By turns raunchy and elegiac, these superb tales express, in Maclean’s own words, “a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by.” “Maclean’s book—acerbic, laconic, deadpan—rings out of a rich American tradition that includes Mark Twain, Kin Hubbard, Richard Bissell, Jean Shepherd, and Nelson Algren.” —New York Times Book Review Includes a new foreword by Robert Redford, director of the Academy Award–winning film adaptation




Before Anyone Else


Book Description

As a designer of upscale restaurants, 30-year-old Bailey Ann Edgeworth can go into an empty space and immediately see what it would take to transform it into a beautiful and memorable spot. She learns transforming her own life is another proposition entirely. It can get messy, and it doesn’t always go according to a neat blueprint. Bailey’s brother, Henry, and his best friend Griffin are stars in the restaurant field. They are known as the “Color Wheel Boys” because of their renowned Buckhead restaurants Vert, Blanc, and Noir. Bailey is determined to chart her own course; to not be forever known as Hank’s daughter, Henry’s sister, or “whatever” she is to Griffin. Bailey’s dreams propel her to New York, where her vision garners accolades and fame. After a perceived rejection by Griffin, she rushes into an impetuous marriage with an enigmatic English chef. Their combined charisma and desire lift them to the top of the culinary world. Just when she seems on the verge of having it all, a shocking betrayal throws Bailey's world into chaos. She begins a spectacular downfall, complete with secretive drug use, shady associates, and her career in turmoil. Just what are the secret ingredients to transforming food, a dilapidated building, and one’s own life into something extraordinary? Before Anyone Else examines the complicated relationship between love and ambition and explores how our earliest relationships and experience shape us into who we ultimately become.




Foreskin's Lament


Book Description

A New York Times Notable Book, and a “chaotic, laugh riot” (San Francisco Chronicle) of a memoir. Shalom Auslander was raised with a terrified respect for God. Even as he grew up and was estranged from his community, his religion and its traditions, he could not find the path to a life where he didn’t struggle daily with the fear of God’s formidable wrath. Foreskin’s Lament reveals Auslander’s “painfully, cripplingly, incurably, miserably religious” youth in a strict, socially isolated Orthodox Jewish community, and recounts his rebellion and efforts to make a new life apart from it. His combination of unrelenting humor and anger renders a rich and fascinating portrait of a man grappling with his faith and family.




Herman Heijermans and His Dramas


Book Description

During the last two decades of the nineteenth century the Dutch drama, which had lapsed into astate of somnolence since the glorious days of VondeI, suddenly awoke to vigorous life. Not only did gifted dramatists appear, but talented directors, actors, and actresses brought new splendor to the theatre. Yet this brilliant flame did not burst forth in a vacuum, and to appre ciate the quality of its light, it must be viewed against the back ground of its origins in the European drama. After the middle of the century the emphasis in literary creation had shifted from a subjective, emotional point of view to a more objective and rationalistic attitude. If this seems only a roundabout way of saying that Romanticism yielded its dominance to Realism and Naturalism, the conc1usion is justified, but we should not yield too readily to the pseudo-scientific mania which urges us to force literature into a genus and species type of c1assification. It is customary to say that in the eighties and nineties, Nat uralism won a decisive victory over Romanticism and drove the partisans of the older movement from the field. At first glance this does, indeed, appear to be true. Hugo yields to Zola, Pushkin to Tolstoi, Tieck to Hauptmann. It is all quite simple.




Hearings


Book Description