E. R. Braithwaite, the acclaimed author of To Sir, With Love, poignantly recounts his time as a social worker dedicated to London's abandoned minority childrenDespite his Cambridge education and a sterling record with the British Royal Air Force during World War II, E. R. Braithwaite, a black man, was unable to find employment as an engineer in post-war London. Instead he accepted a position as a teacher in a tough East End school and wrote of his experiences in his classic bestseller To Sir, With Love. Nine years later, Braithwaite once again found himself assuming an unfamiliar professional role as a social worker charged with finding homes for London's orphaned, abused, or abandoned "coloured" children. While he lacked formal training, Braithwaite possessed qualities essential for the job: compassion, determination, and a deep, abiding understanding and love for the helpless, lost, and disregarded.In Paid Servant, E. R. Braithwaite...

The inimitable Nancy Mitford's account of Voltaire's sixteen-year affair with the comely Marquise du Châtelet--in her own right a renowned mathematician and original expositor of Newtonian ideas--is a spirited romp in the company of two extraordinary individuals as well as an erudite and gossipy guide to French high society during the Enlightenment. The lusty and algebra-obsessed marquise, it so happens, was also in love with another mathematician, Maupertuis, and devoted to gambling besides. She had a rival for Voltaire's affections in the future Frederick the Great of Prussia, and later in the scampish philosophe's own niece. There was, at least, no jealous husband to contend with; the Marquis du Châtelet, the author assures us, always behaved perfectly. It was in fact the couple's Parisian contemporaries who reacted the worst, not so much with sexual jealously as at the thought of their brilliant conversation wasted on the windswept hills of Champagne,...

West is a high school senior who has everything going for him until an accident leaves him paralyzed. Strapped down in his hospital bed, slipping in and out of consciousness, West is terrified and alone. Until he meets Olivia. *She's the girl next door-sort of. A patient in the room next to his, only Olivia can tell what West is thinking, and only Olivia seems to know that the terrible dreams he's been having are not just a result of his medication. Yet as West comes to rely on Olivia-to love her, even-certain questions pull at him: Why has Olivia been in the hospital for so long? And what does it mean that she is at the center of his nightmares? But the biggest question of all comes when West begins to recover and learns that the mysterious girl he's fallen in love with has a secret he could never have seen coming.*About the AuthorCYLIN BUSBY is the author of several teen books and non-fiction articles as well as the acclaimed young adult memoir, The Year We Disappeared. A former editor with Teen magazine, she now lives in Los Angeles with her family. *www.cylinbusby.com*

William Manchester met Winston Churchill on January 24, 1953. Their encounter on the Queen Mary sparked an intense curiosity in Manchester that would eventually result in his classic three-volume magnum opus The Last Lion. In this, the first volume, we follow Churchill from his birth to 1932, when he began to warn against the remilitarization of Germany. Born of a lovely, wanton American mother and a gifted but unstable son of a duke, his childhood was one of wretched neglect. He sought glory on the battlefields of Cuba, Sudan, India, South Africa and the trenches of France. In Parliament he was the prime force behind the creation of Iraq and Jordan, laid the groundwork for the birth of Israel, and negotiated the independence of the Irish Free State. Yet, as Chancellor of the Exchequer he plunged England into economic crisis, and his fruitless attempt to suppress Gandhi's quest for Indian independence brought political chaos to...

From the winner of the Edgar Award and the Samuel Johnson Prize, a cultural history of “everyday madness”The Book of Phobias and Manias is a thrilling compendium of 99 obsessions that have shaped us all, the rare and the familiar, from ablutophobia (a horror of washing) to syllogomania (a compulsion to hoard) to zoophobia (a fear of animals). Phobias and manias are deeply personal experiences, and among the most common anxiety disorders of our time, but they are also clues to our shared past. The award-winning author Kate Summerscale uses rich and riveting case studies to trace the origins of our obsessions, unearthing a history of human strangeness, from the middle ages to the present day, and a wealth of explanations for some of our most powerful aversions and desires.

This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

I had been dreading this day for more than a year. Everyone's favorite Idiot Girl, Laurie Notaro, is very close to wearing out her welcome in her hometown of Eugene, Oregon. Just a year ago, she was eighty-sixed from the local satellite post office for buying too many two-cent stamps ("The post office lady looked at me like I had just asked her if she wanted to buy my sex tape"). Now Notaro, needing to send an important care package to her nephew, returns to the scene of the non-crime--which is located inside a drugstore that is stocked with everything from Hello Kitty trinkets to fake poo to "the largest collection of aging candy on the West Coast." Will the post office lady who banned her the first time around kick her to the curb, or will Laurie use her Idiot Girl wiles to work her way back into the Mean Lady's good graces? In this hilarious story, New York Times bestselling author Laurie Notaro's signature pluck and...

Amazon.com ReviewMultiple time-lines and alternate branching destinies are more often associated with science fiction than horror, but in this first novel by an African-American woman, a man who has cheated death finds that his ability to walk through doorways in time brings dark forces into his life. Due employs a lucid, almost stately, prose style to evoke an escalating sense of menace toward a middle-class American family with connections to Ghana. Dreams? Madness? Ghosts? A racist killer? What is happening to these people? From Publishers WeeklyAlthough set largely in the black and Hispanic communities of Florida's Dade County, Due's first novel, a skillful blend of horror and the supernatural, poses questions about life and identity that transcend racial boundaries. Thirty years after he was saved from drowning by the beloved grandmother who died in his place, Hilton James has built a secure middle-class life for his African American family and saved a few lives himself through his social work in Miami's inner city. His comfortable existence is shattered when his wife, a judge, begins receiving racist death threats and he starts having nightmares of alternate life experiences so authentic that they begin to loosen his grip on reality. Is Hilton a latent schizophrenic, as his therapist thinks? Or are the dreams and death threats both signs of a cosmic scheme in which Hilton is meant to accept the death that he eluded before? The mystical explanation Due posits for Hilton's predicament, involving "travelers," or persons who unconsciously use dreams as "doorways" to elude fate and live in "the between" world, is not nearly as disturbing as her depiction of Hilton's gradual decline from caring husband and father to a man who lashes out in frustration against those he loves. Her sympathetic and credible portrait of Hilton as a man discomposed by his encounter with the unknown compensates for the novel's underdeveloped supporting cast. Due also subtly suggests the horrifying thought that pervades the story but is left tactfully unspoken: if each of us creates our own reality, then ultimately we are all alone in the world. $25,000 ad/ promo; author tour. U.K. and translation rights, HarperCollins; other rights, Marie Brown Associates. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.