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New Orleans, mon amour: twenty years of writings from the city

Codrescu, Andrei
For two decades Npr commentator Andrei Codrescu has been living in and writing about his adopted city, where, as he puts it, the official language is dreams. How apt that a refugee born in Transylvania found his home in a place where vampires roam the streets and voodoo queens live around the corner; where cemeteries are the most popular picnic spots, the ghosts of poets, prostitutes, and pirates are palpable, and in the French Quarter, no one ever sleeps. Codrescu's essays have been called "satirical gems," "subversive," "sardonic and stunning," "funny," "gonzo," "wittily poignant," and "perverse"-here is a writer who perfectly mirrors the wild, voluptuous, bohemian character of New Orleans itself. This retrospective follows him from newcomer to near native: first seduced by the lush banana trees in his backyard and the sensual aroma of coffee at the café down the block, Codrescu soon becomes a Window Gang regular at the infamous bar Molly's on Decatur, does a stint as King of Krewe de Vieux Carré at Mardi Gras, befriends artists, musicians, and eccentrics, and exposes the city's underbelly of corruption, warning presciently about the lack of planning for floods in a city high on its own insouciance. Alas, as we all now know, Paradise is lost.New Orleans, Mon Amour is an epic love song, a clear-eyed elegy, a cultural celebration, and a thank-you note to New Orleans in its Golden Age.
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2006 273 pages

While Canada slept: how we lost our place in the world

Cohen, Andrew
Canada emerged from World War II with the world's fourth-largest military and the infrastructure to build nuclear weapons if it wanted. Today, its military is a shadow of its once-glorious self, and Canada's diplomatic influence in the world is in decline, according to Andrew Cohen, a journalism professor at Ottawa's Carleton University. In his book While Canada Slept, Cohen laments the "aimlessness" of Canada's foreign policy and the "lethargy" of its politicians at a time of world turmoil. He admits he isn't the first to make the argument. His innovation is to survey Canada's once-great influence and its woeful present through the eyes of three pioneers of its foreign-affairs establishment: Hume Wrong, a legendary senior external affairs official; Norman Robertson, a clerk of the Privy Council; and Lester Pearson, the prime minister. The three men gave Canada a reputation for "punching above its weight" and contributed to Canada's towering diplomatic role of the 1950s and 1960s. ?Cohen writes that the three would be saddened by what has become of their country. Canadians are a people "without memory," he suggests, citing a survey that found 88 percent of those aged 18 to 34 could not identify Pearson's role in defusing the Suez crisis in 1956. "We are no longer as strong a soldier, as generous a donor and as effective a diplomat, and it has diminished us as a people," he writes. While Cohen claims not to be partisan, he is especially critical of Jean Chrétien's government for cutting funds from the military, foreign aid, and diplomatic service. Some of Cohen's arguments have indeed been made before, and they fall flat at times. He doesn't explain, for example, why Canada should spend as much on the military as during the Korean War, when it devoured 7.3 percent of GDP. The book could also use an index. But generally it is a decent effort to enliven the dry issue of Canada's foreign policy and is most interesting as a survey of the country's diplomatic heyday.
McClelland & Stewart 2004 220 pages

Elders Interviews with Andrew Denton

Andrew Denton,Fiona Harari
Based on Andrew Denton's television series of the same name, ELDERS is an exploration of the successes and failures, opportunities and formative experiences that are learned over a lifetime. For his ABC television series ELDERS, Andrew Denton interviewed twelve diverse but well-known people over the age of 65, with the express aim of discovering what lessons they have learned in their lives and what values they have come to cherish most. the conversations were surprising, illuminating, humorous, thoughtful and candid. It was compelling television, and it makes inspiring and riveting reading. All the interviews from both series feature in this book, which also includes material that never made it to air. Featuring: Alan Alda, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, Muhammad Yunus, Bob Hawke, Sir David Attenborough, Isabel Allende, Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, Clive James, Father Des Reid, Helen thomas, Richard Dawkins and Helen Bamber
ABC Books 2010 270 pages

Sharia versus freedom: the legacy of Islamic totalitarianism

Bostom, Andrew G.
Author Andrew G. Bostom expands upon his two previous groundbreaking compendia, The Legacy of Jihad and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism , with this collection of his own recent essays on Sharia - Islamic law. The book elucidates, unapologetically, Sharia's defining Islamic religious principles and the consequences of its application across space and time, focusing upon contemporary illustrations. A wealth of unambiguous evidence is marshaled, distilled, and analyzed, including: objective, erudite studies of Sharia by leading scholars of Islam; the acknowledgment of Sharia's global "resurgence," even by contemporary academic apologists for Islam; an abundance of recent polling data from Muslim nations and Muslim immigrant communities in the West confirming the ongoing, widespread adherence to Sharia's tenets; the plaintive warnings and admonitions of contemporary Muslim intellectuals - freethinkers and believers, alike - about the incompatibility of Sharia with modern, Western-derived conceptions of universal human rights; and the overt promulgation by authoritative, mainstream international and North American Islamic religious and political organizations of traditional, Sharia-based Muslim legal systems as an integrated whole (i.e., extending well beyond mere "family-law aspects" of Sharia). Johannes J. G. Jansen, Professor for Contemporary Islamic Thought Emeritus at Utrecht University, says this book "will prove sobering to even staunch optimists."
Prometheus Books 2015-12 735 pages

Agnes Mallory

Klavan, Andrew
When Harry begins to receive tormented letters from his childhood friend Agnes, a struggling sculptress, it reawakens his past. Harry begins to seek out Agnes, believing he can help her. After all he was the only one closest to understanding the mysterious source of her art. Ten years after her death, faced with a young, soulful girl reminiscent of Agnes, Harry feels trapped, threatened and chastened. Agnes' story encompasses his own youth, the horrors of the Holocaust, and the breadth of the American dream.
Abacus 1997 248 pages

Dynamite Road

Andrew Klavan
Jim Bishop is a hard man, as cold as the wind off the water and tough to the point of brutality. Scott Weiss is Bishop's boss, a world-weary ex-cop who runs a private detective agency out of a concrete tower in the heart of San Francisco. In this powerfully original series debut by award-winning and bestselling author Andrew Klavan, Weiss sends Bishop to investigate corruption at a Northern California airport-and so sets events in motion that will lead both men on a desperate hunt for a master assassin. Bishop's assignment is to investigate the airport and report back to Weiss. But Bishop prefers to make up the rules as he goes along. He's willing to beat any man into the ground and draw any woman into his bed in order to get the answers he's after. A pilot himself, he takes to the air to check out the illegal flights of a thug names Chris Wannamaker. Then he coolly seduces Wannamaker's lonely wife in order to find out more. Back in the city, as Weiss struggles to rein Bishop in, he begins a connected investigation of his own. A death in a mansion in Presidio Heights, a seemingly random murder South of Market, an apparent suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge, all seem to bear the mark of Weiss' old nemesis, an expert gun-for-hire who goes by the name of the Shadowman. It's a trail of blood, and each step of it seems to bring Weiss closer to Julie Wyant, a mysterious beauty who captures the imagination of every man she meets. Soon Bishop has found his way into the center of a massive criminal conspiracy, a plan set to climax with an act of audacious violence and a murder that would be impossible for any killer but one. And with his operative's wife in danger, Weiss begins a race against time to outsmart the murderer who stalks his nightmares and to rescue the woman who haunts his dream. If you like your tough guys really tough, your femme fatale and your action explosive-welcome to Dynamite Road.
Macmillan 2004-08 317 pages

Shotgun Alley

Andrew Klavan
Honey is the vivacious, seventeen-year-old daughter of a politician running for state senate and eventually (he hopes) the presidency. But his sweet little girl has a penchant for drug dealers, mad-dog bikers, booze, sex, crank, and guns. She’s run off with Cobra, the leader of a band of motorcycle-gang outcasts who have dubbed themselves the Outriders since they are too hotheaded and reckless for other rival gangs. Honey is on a fast track to taking her father’s career down--along with her hell-bent soul. Enter Scott Weiss and Jim Bishop. Weiss is a former cop, an accomplished detective with a lot of connections. Bishop is a savvy, strong-willed tough guy and ladies’ man who does the legwork for Weiss’s agency. Bishop’s assignment: infiltrate the Outriders and seduce Honey away. But Cobra is as brilliant as he is bad--an oddly intellectual biker who is one step ahead of everyone on his trail. And Honey is not only young, rich, and beautiful, she is hotter than the hinges of hell, irresistibly alluring, a black widow who draws the hardest, toughest, sharpest hustlers into her lethal web, where she consumes them whole. Have Weiss and Bishop finally met their match? Is Honey too hot to handle?
Macmillan 2005-10 304 pages

Footnote to history

Laszlo, Andrew
Memoirs of a Jew who was born in 1926 in the village of Bikoly and grew up in the town of Pápa, west of Budapest. Pp. 99-221 deal with the Holocaust period. At first, Hungary's anti-Jewish policies did not affect the family much, but the situation changed drastically with the German occupation in March 1944. A ghetto was established in Pápa, and in June 1944 Laszlo was drafted into a military labor service unit. While he was working at Kőszeg, his parents were deported. After his labor unit was destroyed by the Soviets in Jibou, northwestern Romania, Laszlo fled to Budapest, then under the control of the Arrow Cross. In October 1944 Laszlo was deported to Bergen-Belsen, and then to Theresienstadt. There he met his father, who died shortly after the liberation; the rest of his family had perished earlier. After the war he settled in the USA.
University Press of America 2002 334 pages

Algebraic and geometric surgery

Ranicki, Andrew
This book is an introduction to surgery theory: the standard classification method for high-dimensional manifolds. It is aimed at graduate students who have already had a basic topology course, and would now like to understand the topology of high-dimensional manifolds. This text contains entry-level accounts of the various prerequisites of both algebra and topology, including basic homotopy and homology, Poincare duality, bundles, cobordism, embeddings, immersions, Whitehead torsion, Poincare complexes, spherical fibrations and quadratic forms and formations. While concentrating on the basic mechanics of surgery, this book includes many worked examples, useful drawings for illustration of the algebra and references for further reading.
Clarendon Press 2002 373 pages