Peter Berkrot
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What defended the U.S. after the attack on Pearl Harbor, defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and is an essential tool in the fight against terror? Aircraft Carriers. For seventy years, these ships remained a little understood cornerstone of American power. In his latest book, On Wave and Wing, Barrett Tillman sheds light on the history of these floating leviathans and offers a nuanced analysis of the largest man-made vessel in the history of...
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Sweet natured and as dumb as a bag of hammers, Sepp Gregory parlayed his six-pack abs and broken heart into overnight success on the insanely popular "reality-based" television show Sex Cribs. Now, People magazine's "sexiest man alive" is touring the country with his bestselling debut novel, a barely fictionalized memoir he neither wrote nor read. He's signing books shirtless, so no one cares-aside from struggling novelist and bastion of intellectualism,...
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A few months ago, Winslow Houndstooth put together the damnedest crew of outlaws, assassins, cons, and saboteurs on either side of the Harriet for a history-changing caper. Together they conspired to blow the dam that choked the Mississippi and funnel the hordes of feral hippos contained within downriver, to finally give America back its greatest waterway. Songs are sung of their exploits, many with a haunting refrain: "And not a soul escaped alive."...
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In the early twentieth century, the United States government concocted a plan to import hippopotamuses into the marshlands of Louisiana to be bred and slaughtered as an alternative meat source. This is true. Other true things about hippos: they are savage, they are fast, and their jaws can snap a man in two. This was a terrible plan. Contained within this volume is an 1890s America that might have been: a bayou overrun by feral hippos and mercenary...
5) Rock of Ages
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Junior Bender, Los Angeles burglar and off-the-books detective to the felonious, is reminded that rock and roll will never die (no matter how fervently he wishes some of it would) when Hollywood's most dangerous geriatric mobster, Irwin Dressler, retains Junior's investigative services to solve a rather unharmonious problem.
Four of Dressler's old gangster colleagues have put together a national tour of once-popular rock bands they own a piece of:...
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This hilarious, sometimes horrifying, collection spans four decades and chronicles the craziest, druggiest, and most embarrassing concert moments in music history-direct from the artists who survived them.
From wardrobe malfunctions to equipment failures, from bad decisions to even worse choices, this is a riveting look into what happens when things go wrong onstage and off.
No Encore! is an unflinchingly honest account of the shows that tested...
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A gonzo ride through war-torn Yemen as only Chas Smith, the award-winning author of Welcome to Paradise, Now Go to Hell and Cocaine + Surfing: A Sordid History of Surfing's Greatest Love Affair, could provide. Follow Smith and his misfit band of merrymakers as they search for the true origins of Al Qaeda and endeavor to ride the unsurfed waves of Yemen all while exploring the slim opportunities for fun in the margins of our global war on terror and...
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When the children of Glenwood begin vanishing one by one, baffling local and federal authorities alike, the idyllic New England suburb becomes anything but a utopia. Built upon the ruins of a lost colony, Glenwood harbors a long-forgotten secret, and when three strangers are lured into the midnight woods by the phantom of a Puritan boy, they discover the truth of the town's dark past and must face a vision of its bloody future. Together, this unlikely...
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Six-year-old Rocky worships his older brother Paul--sixteen and full of rebel cool, smoking cigarettes, driving around in his Nova blasting Neil Young--until the day Paul, in an ill-advised act of vengeance against their father, picks Rocky up from school and nearly leaves him for dead in the woods. Paul then runs off with his beautiful, fragile girlfriend, never to be heard from again. Eight years later Rocky is a teenager himself. Although he's...
10) Shiloh: A Novel
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This fictional re-creation of the battle of Shiloh in April 1862 is a stunning work of imaginative history, from Shelby Foote, beloved historian of the Civil War. Shiloh conveys not only the bloody choreography of Union and Confederate troops through the woods near Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, but the inner movements of the combatants' hearts and minds. Through the eyes of officers and illiterate foot soldiers, heroes, and cowards, Shiloh creates...
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While he is probably best known as a novelist and short-story writer, Lawrence Block has produced a rich trove of nonfiction over the course of a sixty-year career.
The title piece, originally published in American Heritage, recounts the ongoing adventure Block and his wife undertook, crisscrossing the United States and parts of Canada in their quixotic and exotic quest to find every village, hamlet, and wide place in the road named Buffalo.
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O. Henry, the pseudonym of the American writer William Sydney Porter (1862-1910), is best known for writing stories full of wit, wordplay, and warm characterizations, and particularly for their clever twist endings. This volume contains twenty of O. Henry's best and best-loved stories. They are marked by coincidence and surprise endings as well as the compassion and high humor that have made O. Henry's stories popular for the last century.The stories...
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The Unnatural World chronicles a disparate band of unlikely heroes: an effervescent mad scientist who would fertilize the seas; a pigeon obsessive bent on bringing back the extinct; a low-level government functionary in China doing his best to clean up his city, and more. These scientists, billionaires, and ordinary people are all working toward saving the best home humanity is ever likely to have. What is the threat? It is us. In a time when a species...
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The story behind the elite scientists, technologists, SF enthusiasts, and billionaires who believe that humanity's destiny is to populate the stars...
Does humanity have a destiny "in the stars?" Should a species triggering massive extinctions on its own planet instead stay put? This new book traces the waxing and waning of interest in space settlement through the decades, and offers a journalistic tour through the influential subculture attempting...
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In Retirement Fail, top financial advisor Greg Sullivan shares the insights he has gained over his thirty-five-year career in wealth management to help you identify potential pitfalls and learn how to safeguard your hard-earned retirement assets. Because, contrary to what most people think, it is not poor portfolio performance that usually busts your retirement accounts. Rather, it's the emotional decisions you make that can cause major problems....
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Stewart "Hoagy" Hoag is thrilled after a meeting with his editor, Norma, where she predicts his new book is sure to establish him as the next great American author. But his happiness is short-lived when at his next meeting with Norma she asks for his help in discovering who is behind a series of increasingly threatening letters sent to her attention.
Norma herself is not overly concerned about the letters but her boyfriend, Detective Lieutenant Romaine...
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When the Tuckers' next-door neighbor mentions someone rang their doorbell late the previous night, Sarah and Kenny Tucker check their home's security camera and discover something shocking: the doorbell ringer also visited their house and it wasn't a teenager playing a prank, but instead a terrified young woman with a shackle hanging from her right wrist. She anxiously pressed the doorbell again and again, glancing over her shoulder as if someone...
18) The Village
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Few American battles have been so extended, savage, and personal. A handful of Americans volunteered to live among six thousand Vietnamese, training farmers to defend their village. Such "Combined Action Platoons" (CAPs) are not a lost footnote about how the war could have been fought; only the villagers remain to bear witness. This is the story of fifteen resolute young Americans matched against two hundred Viet Cong; how a CAP lived, fought, and...
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November 1941: War is coming to the Pacific.
In Europe, the Nazis are triumphant. England is under siege by air and sea. France has fallen to the Nazi Wehrmacht, which in turn fell on Soviet Russia. The Red Army is in full retreat, with the Nazis at the gates of Moscow.
In the Pacific, Japan has been at war with China since 1937. Her war industries depend upon imports of scrap metal and oil from the Allied nations. When an embargo is placed on imports...
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Though only eight years old, little Horton "Horty" Bluett has known a lifetime of sadness. Tormented and abused by his adoptive family, he's had enough - and with a beloved broken toy he calls "Junky" as his sole companion, the desperate little boy runs away to join a carnival. There, among the fortune tellers, fire-eaters, sideshow freaks, and assorted "strange people," Horty hopes to find acceptance and, at long last, a real home. But disgraced...