The home of successive waves of immigrants, from the Huguenots in the seventeenth century to the Jews in the nineteenth and the Bangla-Deshis today, London’s East End has been the scene of its worst poverty and exploitation, and has inspired its greatest philanthropists, reformers and radicals. The East End is, and always has been, a place where conditions are tough, crime violent and work hard, but in which Cockney optimism and love of life are proverbial. In this evocative book, the area’s turbulent past and continuing traditions are accurately explored in text and pictures. If East End life has a character that transcends period and generation, it is vividly captured and delineated here, in a book which will delight and intrigue alike the citizen, the historian, the general reader and the visitor. Full of B&W historical photos.

Daria Peterson was usually a level-headed teenager. But a dish she won at a local carnival began to shimmer with a life force of its own, and then suddenly, the face of her dead grandmother appeared. No one believed her, of course. Not her best friend Kelly, or her mother, who was her exact opposite. And as her grandmother revealed things about her mother's past, about love and loss, Daria began to see her mother in a different light. And with the knowledge came a growing fear--of the supernatural and her own growing psychic abilities....

One of the "top ten women who write superior crime fiction" (Charles Champlin, mystery reviewer for the "Los Angeles Times), Rochelle Krich propels her exceptional sleuth, LAPD homicide detective Jessie Drake, into a deadly maze of rage, revenge, and moral complexities in what is the award-winning author's most gripping and provocative novel to date. At first glance it appears to be a random multiple murder -- a prominent plastic surgeon and his nurse and receptionist shot dead in their plush Century City office. But to Jessie Drake, the savage nature of Dr. Ronald Bushnell's fatal wounds suggests a crime of intense passion...and bitter retribution.Following her suspicions, the conscience-driven detective takes her investigation to the core of the seemingly harmonious family life of the slain surgeon. On the surface, Bushnell had everything: respect, money, a palatial home, a loving wife and daughter. But there is a joker in the deck, Bushnell's foster son, Ethan Meissner -- a troubled young loner with dark periods in his history. And the boy hasn't been seen since the murders.Ethan's unexplained disappearance suggests that the runaway knows something; he may be a material witness in a triple homicide or a premeditated killer...or another victim. The search for the missing teenager takes Jessie across many volatile borders -- those between nations, between families, and the razor-thin one that separates love from hatred. But the truth lies somewhere in a harrowing past of tainted blood and horrific personal tragedy. The deeper Jessie ventures into this shadow world of cruelty and secrets, the more she is haunted by the echoes of a lost soul's unanswered cry for help...and by the mostheinous crime of all, in which the sins of the guilty are visited on the innocent.

"Friday, October 31, 9:37 p.m., 100 block of South Martel. A vandal threw a pumpkin through the front window of a house and several eggs at the front door." "The police report read like just another Halloween prank - a nasty, petty act. But the attack is one in a recent spate of increasingly violent vandalisms targeting residents who have paid millions of dollars for their dream homes in the ritziest enclaves of Los Angeles." "Residents are already seething, hotly divided about the growing number of Historical Architectural Restoration and Preservation (HARP) boards that prevent homeowners from remodeling their expensive real estate, forcing them to preserve the traditional integrity of neighborhoods where Hollywood legends once lived. So impassioned are pro- and anti-HARP forces that Crime Sheet columnist Molly Blume suspects that members from both sides of the debate may be perpetrating the vandalism that claims new victims almost daily." "But the arson that destroys a house on Fuller Street doesn't fit the pattern. This beautiful property belongs to Margaret Reston and her husband, Hank; and the sick old man who dies when it burns is Margaret's father. Margaret herself has disappeared. She was last seen working in her garden five months ago - and although traces of her blood were found in her car, the police have no idea what has happened to the missing woman." "This intrigue all makes good copy for hard-hitting newshound Molly. Almost in love again with the high-school sweetheart who dumped her and is now a rabbi, Molly can't stop thinking about Margaret and Hank Reston and the old man whose life was tragically, though accidently, cut short. But was it an accident? What has happened to Margaret Reston? Where does malice end and evil begin?"--BOOK JACKET.

One of America's preeminent writers of gay fiction validates his reputation with his third, and sadly, last collection. Here are love stories, both passionate and compassionate; tales of suspense; narratives on the theme of AIDS; even a ghost story. "A standout read".--The Advocate. Hall died of AIDS-related complications in October, 1992.

Happiness is within everyone's grasp and is only a matter of making the right choices. Taking destiny into one's own hands and having the creative audacity to strive, seek, and meet challenges is the essence of life's drama and exaltation. Life per se has no meaning; it only presents opportunity to be seized and acted upon, thus paving the way for personal achievement and the full life.Paul Kurtz, in Exuberance, shows his readers how to banish drudgery from life and how to find happiness in the active life. Drawing upon his personal experience, knowledge, and success, Kurtz explains his philosophy of life, discussing learning and work, pleasure, eroticism and sexuality, morality, the need for love and friendship, and participation in contemporary issues. He suggests that self-power, resourcefulness, daring, creativity, and intelligence help guide and control one's life in spite of the many obstacles along the way. Only the individual can initiate his own success and therefore can take pride in accomplishing what he sets out to do.Exuberance also shows the reader how to cope with an ambiguous world. Life is charged with unexpected events and bizarre happenings. It is filled with richly diverse and idiosyncratic characters. Constant effort and exertion is needed in making a living, meeting new friends, falling in love, raising children, seeing projects through, and coming to terms with old age and death. Dealing with these problems directly rather than fleeing from life's risks reinforces a person and leads him towards an exuberant, rich, zestful life.According to Dr. Kurtz, the fulfillment of one's own purpose is in creating one's own ends and expending the power and energy to attain them. Thus, life's great sin, he suggests, is being lazy and noncreative.

Written in the tradition of the classic American noir of Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, In Praise of Lies is a brilliantly clever, fiendishly funny crime novel about a woman who raises poisonous snakes and the man who loves her enough to attempt murder.... Jose Guber is in love with a deadly woman. While writing his next crime novel, he is in search of a unique murder weapon, which is how he meets Melissa, a serologist who specializes in venomous snakes. Melissa becomes rather too interested in Jose's dastardly plots--unashamedly plagiarized from the classics: Chesterton, Poe, Dostoevsky, his editor none the wiser--and she especially likes the ones where diabolical women seduce and corrupt weak men. Melissa makes it clear that she would like to adapt one of the plots to dispose of her present husband, enabling Jose and Melissa to be together. But the course of true love and homicide does not always run smoothly, certainly not when the accomplice rattlesnake gets depressed and everything that can go wrong does go hilariously haywire. With sharp wit and impressive agility, Patricia Melo leads the reader into a teasing world of deviousness. Literary puzzles and comic swipes at book publishing trends are added pleasures in what is, above all, a glorious page-turner.

Revisits moments of the author's past to produce a spare yet moving reflection on the destructive underside of love, the dreams and follies of youth, the vagaries of memory, and the melancholy of loss. Writing from the perspective of an older man, the narrator relives a key period in his life through his relationships with several enigmatic women--Geneviève, Martine, Madeleine, a certain Madame Huberson--in the process unearthing his troubled relationship with his parents, his unorthodox childhood, and the unsettled years of his youth that helped form the celebrated writer he would become.

You don't have to be Jewish to enjoy the 800 healthy home-style recipes in MealLeaniYumm! (pronounced meal.leani.yumm, almost like millennium). This quick and easy cookbook focuses on low-fat, nutritious cuisine, using everyday ingredients. It's an excellent resource for people withhealth and weight concerns, part-time vegetarians, diabetics, weight-watchers-or those who couldn't care less, but just love to eat good food! This information-packed book is perfect for today's time-challenged cook. You'll find step-by-step directions for nutritious, satisfying dishes that are sure to please. Packed with tips for today's kosher (or not!) kitchen, MealLeaniYumm! is the smart "weigh" to cook delicious dishes for every day, holidays and special occasions. Each recipe has a nutritional analysis, plus there are hundreds of healthful hints about fat, fibre, cholesterol, calories, calcium and mmm-more! Ship-shape shopping lists will guide you on stocking your pantry, fridge and freezer. There is a substitution chart for low-fat baking. Alternative ingredients and variations are suggested in many recipes, plus do-ahead directions, freezing tips and up-to-date nutritional information, plus 20 pages of full-color photographs. Tasting is believing! You'll love Cajun Chicken Breasts (163 Calories, 4.9 g fat), Fudgy-Wudgy Brownies (72 calories, 1.4 g fat).

America's comic mastermind has updated his classic comedy The Odd Couple, bringing the trials and tribulations of Felix Unger and Oscar Madison to the present day. Those who love the original version will laugh all over again at the classic characters in an all-new setting.

It's the morning of the SAT. Will Westfield's mother finds his bed empty and still made, his muddy sneakers on the floor. Did this sardonic, seemingly well-adjusted teen run away with his disturbed ex-girlfriend, get in trouble with their drug-dealing neighbor, or flee from the pressure to succeed? His parents search frantically for answers, but the only way to understand Will's disappearance is to retrace the events and decisions that led him to this dangerous moment. Michael Laser's third novel for adults (following Old Buddy Old Pal and Dark & Light: A Love Story) suspensefully records one family's disaster, and the parents' desperate struggle to bring Will back home.

An “exquisite . . . spot on” ( The Hudson Review ) collection of poems from one of our best-loved and best-selling poets that is both personal, with poetry about love, nature and reflections on the stages of life, and political, ranging from the war in Iraq and Katrina to concerns such as women’s rights and the poet’s childhood in Detroit.

"Another winning collection from one of our most read and enjoyed poets: a bountiful group of poems that reflect on language, nature, old age, young love, Judaism, and our current politics--all in her usual direct and mind-tingling fashion. "Words are my business," Marge Piercy begins her twentieth collection of poetry, a glance back at a lifetime of learning, loving, grieving, and fighting for the disenfranchised; and a look forward at what the future holds for herself, her family and friends, and her embattled country. In the opening pages, Piercy tells of her childhood in Detroit, with its vacant lots and scrappy children, the bike that gave her wings, her ambition at fourteen to "gobble" down all knowledge, a too early marriage ("I put on my first marriage / like a girdle my skinny body / didn't need.") We then leap into the Twilight Zone "after the knee has been replaced," where she is "learning to be quiet," learning to give praise despite it all. There are funny poems about medicine ads with their dire warnings, and some possible plusses about being dead: "I will never have to do another load of laundry . . ." There is "comfort in old bodies coming together," in a partner's warmth--"You're always warm: warm hands / smooth back sleek as a Burmese cat./ Sunny weather outside and in." Piercy has long been known for her political poems and her love of cats, and here there are plenty of both. Illegal immigrants, dying languages, fraught landscapes, abortion, President-speak. She examines her nonbeliever's need for religious holidays and spiritual depth, and the natural world is appreciated throughout. On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light is yet more proof of Piercy's love and mastery of language--it is moving, stimulating, funny, and full of the stuff of life"--

Writing a Jewish Life chronicles novelist Lev Raphael's struggle to claim both his religious and sexual identities, and the happiness he subsequently found. Until he reached his mid-20s, the author felt alienated from other Jews, ambivalent about his homosexuality; or as he puts it, "twice strange ... in each [community], different, lesser, ashamed." A son of Holocaust survivors, Raphael grew up in an unmistakably Jewish but nonreligious home. However, as an adult he initiated his own affiliations with Judaism: He had a bar mitzvah at age 30, went to Israel twice, and fell in love with a Jewish man. It was "coming out as a Jew,' he writes, that "ultimately made it possible for me to come out as a gay man and then work at uniting the two identities." Attesting to his journey is the contrast between his confused childhood and the joyful domestic life he now shares with his lover, Gersh, and their two sons.

Kayla and Mishalla, two genetically engineered enslaved non-human (GENs), fall in love with higher-status boys, discover deep secrets about the creation of GENs, and in the process find out what it means to be human. Enslaved by their genetics. Oppressed by their creators. Fighting for their humanity. On rugged planet Loka, life for best friends Kayla and Mishalla is arduous at best. They are GENs, Genetically Engineered Non-humans, and in their strict caste system, GENs are at the bottom rung of society. GENs are gestated in a tank and sent to work as slaves as soon as they reach age fifteen. When Kayla is Assigned to care for Zul Manel, the patriarch of a trueborn family, she finds secrets and surprises--not least of which is her budding friendship with Zul's handsome great-grandson. Meanwhile, the children that Mishalla is Assigned to care for are being stolen in the middle of the night, and a strange lowborn boy is hanging around nearby. After weeks of toiling in their Assignments, mystifying circumstances enable Kayla and Mishalla to reunite. Together with the boys, they hatch a plan to save the disappearing children. Yet can GENs really trust humans? Both girls must put their lives and hearts at risk to crack open a sinister conspiracy, revealing secrets no one is ready to face. The first in a trilogy, Tankborn is a page-turning sci-fi thriller that will leave readers scrambling for the sequel! Check out the other titles in this series: TANKBORN * AWAKENING * REBELLION

The book is a contribution to the study of values, as they affect both our personal and our public life. It defends the view that values are necessarily universal, on the ground that that is a condition of their intelligibility. It does, however, reject most common conceptions of universality, like those embodied in the writings on human rights. It aims to reconcile the universality of value with (a) the social dependence of value and (b) the centrality to our life of deep attachments to people and countries alike. Building from there, the book explores personal love, the value of life, and the fundamental duty of respect for people.

For Joe Lennox, successful young writer, Vienna provides a refuge from the tragedy of his brother¿s death, until he starts up a friendship with the eccentric India Tate and her magician husband Paul. Gradually Joe falls in love with India, but Paul finds out ¿ before he suddenly drops dread. And now Joe has two deaths on his conscience and another voice calling from beyond the grave . . .

"The Crow's Dinner" is master novelist Jonathan Carroll's debut essay collection, and that is very good news. Gathering together hundreds of entries that initially appeared on the website Medium, "The Crow's Dinner" is at once a wide-ranging spiritual autobiography and an annotated guide to what Carroll calls "The Map of Me." Beginning with an appreciation of "The Invisibles," those insignificant moments we overlook at our peril, "The Crow's Dinner" encompasses an extraordinary range of incidents, ideas, and images that cumulatively illuminate the inner and outer weather of a major American artist. This generous volume contains fragments of autobiography, reflections on the nature of creativity, vivid recreations of chance encounters, and provocative meditations on the complexityand unpredictabilityof human relationships. It is a book filled with colorful vignettes, unexpected bursts of whimsy, and observations filtered through an utterly unique sensibility. Witty, compassionate, open at all times to the "momentary magic" of existence, it is a work of singular beauty that is unlike anything you have ever read. Since the publication of his first novel, "The Land of Laughs," in 1980, Jonathan Carroll has repeatedly offered us new and startling ways of looking at our familiar world. With "The Crow's Dinner," he speaks to us in direct, unmediated fashion about the things that matter most: love, lust, books, dogs, food, friendshipand the transforming power of the imagination. The result is an intimate, one-of-a kind tour of a lively, unfettered mind. Like the best of Carroll's fiction, "The Crow's Dinner" is a book that matters.

Alfred is pleased to release the album-matching folio for Jim Brickman's 2006 CD, Escape. Jim Brickman is one of the most popular musicians in the pop/new age genre. Escape is the 12th release from this classically trained pianist and singer/songwriter. This book provides the lyrics along with piano and chord arrangements for all the songs on the record. Titles are: Waterfall * Timeless * Escape * Goodnight My Angel * Awakening * Never Alone * Winter Waltz * Big Sky * When It Snows * Barcelona * First Light * Paradise * To Hear You Say You Love Me.

A love story, a mystery, and a memory guide, Past Forgetting shows a writer's determination to re-create her life.Jill Robinson, novelist and author of Bed/Time/Story, wakes from a coma to discover she's lost her memory and just about any sense of who she was.And is. She likes the look of the man standing next to her bed, but doesn't recognize that he's her husband, Stuart. What matters is that she feels safe around him. As she searches the house for her children, she is reminded that her son and daughter are both grown with families of their own--how well did she ever know them? Can You make up for a past you don't really remember? It is Stuart who begins to fill in the details for Jill, including the fact that she's a well-known writer, although when she meets with her doctors, they say she may never write again. Against all odds, Jill Robinson retrieved her unique writing voice, and in this engaging memoir shows how she does it. She takes us with her on her exploration of'tlie connections between memory and creativity, celebrity and anonymity, and loss and discovery. From her first tentative steps outside her house on Wimpole Street to London's sleek West End. From a trip to Oxford to discuss memory with a professor to her amazing voyage to Los Angeles on an assignment for Vanity fair which takes her back to the sixties world of Hockney, Polanski, and Hopper, Jill forges new paths to memory. In Past Forgetting, Jill Robinson rediscovers friendships she doesn't know she had: Robert Redford tells her stories about her childhood; at John Lahr's London literary teas, she's reintroduced to the writer's world, and Cary Grant offers her memories of her father, Dore Schary. And being with Barbra Streisand reminds her of a time she doesn't quite remember: when her father was running MGM. In her urgent voyage to redefine herself, Jill asks all the questions you've ever asked on the nature of memory. Is recollection shadowed by emotion? Is memory an act of reinvention? Do people reinvent rather than recollect? In Past Forgetting you'll find the answers and you'll meet a writer you won't want to forget.