The lotus is the world`s most iconic flower. Galvanised by receiving seeds from a three-thous&-year-old lotus, which flowered without difficulty in an English summer, Mark Griffiths set out to track the path of this sublime plant to its home in the Lotus-Lands of Japan. The Lotus Quest unveils a stunning vision of Japan`s feudal era, as Griffiths visits shrines, ruins, gardens & wild landscapes, & meets priests & archaeologists, philosophers & anthropologists, gardeners & botanists, poets & artists, & even dines on the lotus in a Tokyo cafe. Beautifully illustrated, intensely atmospheric & full of suspense, The Lotus Quest shows how the deep crimson of the lotus runs like a tracer dye, tracking the spread, fusion & fission of the world`s great civilizations. ...

This is a renowned historian`s fascinating account of how the United States doubled its size. In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territory from France for $15 million. The purchase, which included over 600 million acres, extended the boundaries of the United States from the Mississippi River to the Rockies, ending French colonial ambitions in North America, adding lands that would become the better part of thirteen states, & fueling the idea of Westward expansion & Manifest Destiny. Now, historian Thomas Fleming takes a fresh look at this decisive moment in American history & brings to life the diplomatic maneuvering & political battles that led to the purchase. We encounter a cavalcade of striking personalities: Jefferson, the enigmatic, mercurial ideologue; James Madison, the shrewd, eminently realistic secretary of state; Robert Livingston, the Hudson River grandee who was ambassador to France; Alexander Hamilton, who energized New England opposition to the ”unconstitutional” purchase; Talleyr&, the supremely corrupt foreign minister of France; & Napoleon Bonaparte, the man of destiny himself. Brimming with vivid details, forgotten facts, & astute insights, ” The Louisiana Purchase” is a treat for history readers everywhere. Thomas Fleming (New York, NY), a well known historian, is the author of more than forty books of fiction & nonfiction, including ” Duel: Alexander Hamilton”, ” Aaron Burr”, & the ” Future of America”, & ” Liberty!: The American Revolution”, & ” The New Dealers War: FDR & the War within World War II”. A Fellow of the Society of American Historians & the former Chairman of the American Revolution Round Table, he writes regularly for ” American Heritage” & appears frequently on NPR, PBS, the History Channel, & the Today show. ...

The Paris 3D Expanding City Skyline
- Pocket Pop up Book by Walker Books features twelve of Paris’ most famous sites accompanied
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Luciano Hernando Valdez is his Latin American nation's most celebrated novelist & he's suffering from writer's block. So far his latest great work comprises the words ' The scrawny yellow cat crossed the road'. He's tried all his usual tricks to get back on track
- he's had a few debates with his trusty colleagues at the university, he's had an affair with the banker's wife, nothing will work. Until he meets Caterina. Beautiful, young & one of his biggest fans, she has idolised him since she was a child & he has inspired her to write. Convinced that falling in love with her, spending every minute he can alongside her, moulding her to his world, will unlock something & enable him to write, he pursues her & soon enough, he falls headlong into her arms. But it's only a matter of time before he murders her.
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Read by Richard Burton in a manner that truly does justice to the virtuosity to the love poems of England`s most outstanding Metaphysical poet, bending both meaning & sound to the service of the Metaphysical conceit. Donne`s poetry embraces a wide range of secular & religious subjects. He wrote cynical verse about inconstancy, poems about true love, Neoplatonic lyrics on the mystical union of lovers` souls & bodies & brilliant satires & hymns depicting his own spiritual struggles. Whatever the subject, Donne`s poems reveal the same characteristics that typified the work of the metaphysical poets: dazzling wordplay, often explicitly sexual; paradox; subtle argumentation; surprising contrasts; intricate psychological analysis; & striking imagery selected from nontraditional areas such as law, physiology, scholastic philosophy, & mathematics. Expertly recited by Richard Burton, John Donne`s love poetry stands alone as one of England`s greatest ever love poets. ...

' The nightly routine of sirens, barrage, the probing raider, the unmistakable engine (Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?), the bomb-bursts moving nearer & then moving away, hold one like a love-charm' Graham Greene When the first bombs fell on London in August 1940, the city was transformed overnight into a battlefront. For most Londoners, the sirens, guns, planes & bombs heralded gruelling nights of sleeplessness, fear & loss. But for Graham Greene & some of his contemporaries, this was a bizarrely euphoric time when London became the setting for intense love affairs & surreal beauty. At the height of the Blitz, Greene described the bomb-bursts as holding one 'like a love-charm'. As the sky whistled & the ground shook, nerves were tested, loyalties examined & infidelities begun. The Love-charm of Bombs is a powerful wartime chronicle told through the eyes of five prominent writers: Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay, Hilde Spiel & Henry Yorke (writing as Henry Green). Volunteering as ambulance drivers, fire-fighters & ARP wardens, these were the successors to the soldier poets of the First World War & their story has never been told. Now, opening with a meticulous evocation of a single night in September 1940, Lara Feigel brilliantly & beautifully interweaves letters, diaries & fiction with official civil defence records to chart the history of a burning world in wartime London & post-war Vienna & Berlin. She reveals the haunting, ecstatic, often wrenching stories that triumphed amid the mess of a war-torn world. ...

When the first bombs fell on London in August 1940, the city was transformed overnight into a battlefront. For most Londoners, the sirens, guns, planes & bombs heralded gruelling nights of sleeplessness, fear & loss. But for Graham Greene & some of his contemporaries, this was a bizarrely euphoric time when London became the setting for intense love affairs & surreal beauty. At the height of the Blitz, Greene described the bomb-bursts as holding one `like a love-charm`. As the sky whistled & the ground shook, nerves were tested, loyalties examined & infidelities begun. The Love-charm of Bombs is a powerful wartime chronicle told through the eyes of five prominent writers: Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay, Hilde Spiel & Henry Yorke (writing as Henry Green). Volunteering as ambulance drivers, fire-fighters & ARP wardens, these were the successors to the soldier poets of the First World War & their story has never been told. Now, opening with a meticulous evocation of a single night in September 1940, Lara Feigel brilliantly & beautifully interweaves letters, diaries & fiction with official civil defence records to chart the history of a burning world in wartime London & post-war Vienna & Berlin. She reveals the haunting, ecstatic, often wrenching stories that triumphed amid the mess of a war-torn world. ...

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, & my father talked to him once about fertilizer. This is Susie Salmon. Watching from heaven, Susie sees her happy, suburban family devastated by her death, isolated even from one another as they each try to cope with their terrible loss alone. Over the years, her friends & siblings grow up, fall in love, do all the things she never had the chance to do herself. But life is not quite finished with Susie yet. The Lovely Bones is a luminous & astonishing novel about life & death, forgiveness & vengeance, memory & forgetting
- but, above all, about finding light in the darkest of places.
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Marguerite Duras was one of the leading intellectuals & novelist of post-war France, but her wartime writings were not published in full until after her death. The Wartime Notebooks trace Duras`s formative experiences
- including her difficult childhood in Indochina & her harrowing wait for her husband`s return from Nazi internment
- revealing the personal history behind her bestselling novels. The Lover is the best known of these; set in pre-war Indochina, its haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl & her wealthy Chinese lover is based on her own life. In spare & luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins in the waning days of France`s colonial empire, & the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts. Practicalities is a collection of small & intensely personal pieces Duras dictated near the end of her life. These deceptively simple meditations on motherhood, domesticity, sex, love, alcohol, writing, & more are witty, earthy, outspoken & surprisingly fresh & relevant to the same issues today.

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Yvonne is newly widowed, her children grown up. & so, hoping to revisit memories of a happier time, she travels to Turkey. Despite the sand & sea, memories of Yvonne`s past are overwhelming & she clings to a newfound friendship with Ahmet, a local boy who makes his living as a shell collector. With Ahmet as her guide, Yvonne finally begins to enjoy the shimmering waters & relaxed pace of the Turkish coast. But when a devastating accident suddenly upends her hard-won peace, she finds her life thrown into chaos & with it her fragile sense of belonging. ...