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Daedalus Books
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William Shakespeare grew up in a small town in England during the Elizabethan era. As a young man his father's business suffered financial difficulties, and Shakespeare was unable to continue his Latin studies and was forced to help his father support his brother and sister. After he married and had three children he worked hard to support his extended family. Feeling unfulfilled, he decided to seek his fortune in London. In this beautifully illustrated book, learn how Shakespeare persevered through plagues, limited education, and family tragedy to become one of the most revered playwrights and poets in history, whose works continue to entertain audiences more than 400 years after his birth. |
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By overwhelming popular demand, Stoo Hample's 1961 classic now features a reissue of the recording that inspired a generation of gigglers. I am silly, You are silly, All of us are silly, Willy. And everything in THE SILLY BOOK and THE SILLY RECORD is the silly-willynilliest! There are songy sills (oops!) — silly songs, silly stories, silly poems, silly secrets, silly things to do, a silly good-night, and even silly nothings. Anyone who reads this book — and hears this CD — will laugh like anything, or else turn into a bathtub. First published almost fifty years ago, when it became an uproariously silly success, THE SILLY BOOK and its companion, THE SILLY RECORD, are guaranteed to cause children (and nostalgic adults) to giggle like gigglecopters, roll on the floor, and cheer Boodleheimer, Boodleheimer (CLAP! CLAP! CLAP!). |
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These seventeen stories first published in book form stunningly present the Celtic legends and myths of the Arthurian quest for the Grail. |
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Splish Splash Dog Bash! follows the exploits of a pack of neighborhood dogs, who throw a pool party on the first day the children go back to school. As the children look on forlornly from an amazing 3-D school bus, the dogs send out invitations, purchase pool party gear at the local dog mall, and finally launch their party. The designs and pop-ups provide humor and unexpected surprises that will delight pop-up book fans of all ages. Splish Splash, Dog Bash! is the 2008 Moonbeam Silver Medal Winner for Best Pop-up Book of the Year! |
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The compelling story of a young Muslim boy coming to terms with both his growing manhood and his need to feel a part of a larger family than his own, which is fatherless. It leads him into contact with Islamic extremists. |
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As a young boy he re-enacted historic battles with toy soldiers, as a soldier he saw action on three continents and as the Prime Minister only a direct edict from King George VI could keep him from joining the troops on D-Day. CHURCHILL'S WAR LAB will reveal how Churchill's passion for military history, his unique leadership style and his patronization of radical new ideas would lead to new technology and new tactics that would save lives and enable an Allied victory. No war generated more incredible theories, more technical advances, more scientific leaps or more pioneering work that lay the foundation for the post-war computer revolution. And it was Churchill's dogged determination and enthusiasm for revolutionary ideas that fuelled this extraordinary outpouring of British genius. From the co-author of COLD WAR comes an exciting new take on Churchill's war leadership and the story of a complex, powerful and inventive war leader. |
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Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin tales are widely acknowledged to be the greatest series of historical novels ever written. Now these evocative stories are being re-issued in paperback by Harper Perennial with stunning new jackets. It is still the War of 1812. Patrick O'Brian takes his hero Jack Aubrey and his tetchy, sardonic friend Stephen Maturin on a voyage as fascinating as anything he has ever written. They set course across the South Atlantic to intercept a powerful American frigate outward bound to play havoc with the British whaling trade. If they do not come up with her before she rounds the Horn, they must follow her into the Great South Sea and as far across the Pacific as she may lead them. It is a commission after Jack's own heart. Maturin has fish of his own to fry in the world of secret intelligence. Aubrey has to cope with a succession of disasters — men overboard, castaways, encounters with savages, storms, typhoons, groundings, shipwrecks, to say nothing of murder and criminal insanity. That the enemy is in fact faithfully dealt with, no one who has the honour of Captain Aubrey's acquaintance can take leave to doubt. |
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This fascinating collection provides hundreds of simple mnemonics to help you remember awkward spellings, grammatical rules and useful facts and figures. It also wanders through the weird and wonderful byways of English idioms, where nothing means what it says. If you want a little traditional wisdom or some cracking new insults, this book offers a treasure trove of curious, witty and downright obscure English idioms. Do you know why Big Elephants Are Useful To Indians For Unloading Logs? Because it's a BEAUTIFUL way to get a tricky spelling right. Have you ever lost an argument? Or was it an argument? If you can just remember 'I lost an 'e' in an argument', then you'll never get it wrong again. Would you be upset if someone said you were 'a sandwich short of a picnic'? Or could you be described as someone who 'fell asleep in a greenhouse'? |
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He should have seen it coming. His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one. Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular and disappointed BBC worker, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they've never quite lost touch with each other — or with their former teacher, Libor Sevick, a Czechoslovakian always more concerned with the wider world than with exam results. Now, both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor's grand, central London apartment. It's a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better, perhaps, to go through life without knowing happiness at all because that way you had less to mourn? Treslove finds he has tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his friends' losses. And it's that very evening, at exactly 11:30pm, as Treslove hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country as he walks home, that he is attacked. After this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change. The Finkler Question is a scorching story of exclusion and belonging, justice and love, aging, wisdom and humanity. Funny, furious, unflinching, this extraordinary novel shows one of our finest writers at his brilliant best. |
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In the shadow of King Vaslav's Palace was a marvelous garden, and in the middle of that garden stood a tree that grew apples of solid gold, each one as dazzling as the sun. Someone is stealing the king's famous golden apples, and the culprit must be found. The palace gardener spots the luminous Firebird snatching the apples in the night. The king's two oldest sons are sent to capture it but fail. So Ivan, the youngest son, must go on the dangerous quest, befriending a gray wolf, winning both the Firebird and the heart of the beautiful Princess Helen. Saviour Pirotta's powerful retelling of this classic folktale plumbs the heart of human fears, courage, and love. |
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Summer, 1545. England is at war, and Matthew Shardlake is about to encounter the most politically dangerous case of his career. While a massive French fleet prepares to attack, every able-bodied man is being pressed into military service. Meanwhile, an old servant of Queen Catherine Parr asks Shardlake to investigate claims of monstrous wrongs committed against a young ward of the court. Shardlake's inquiries take him and his loyal assistant, Jack Barak, to Hoyland Priory and Portsmouth, where the English fleet is gathering. There they uncover a startling link between the ward and a woman incarcerated in Bedlam. With a fantastic backdrop of wartime intrigue and a dramatic finale onboard one of Henry VIII's great warships, Heartstone is certain to catapult this internationally bestselling series to greater prominence. |
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Berlin 1934. The Nazis have been in power for just eighteen months but already Germany has seen some unpleasant changes. As the city prepares to host the 1936 Olympics, Jews are being expelled from all German sporting organisations — a blatant example of discrimination. Forced to resign as a homicide detective with Berlin's Criminal Police, Bernie is now house detective at the famous Adlon Hotel. The discovery of two bodies — one a businessman and the other a Jewish boxer — involves Bernie in the lives of two hotel guests. One is a beautiful left-wing journalist intent on persuading America to boycott the Berlin Olympiad; the other is a German-Jewish gangster who plans to use the Olympics to enrich himself and the Chicago mob. As events unfold, Bernie uncovers a vast labour and construction racket designed to take advantage of the huge sums the Nazis are prepared to spend to showcase the new Germany to the world. It is a plot that finds its conclusion twenty years later in pre-revolution Cuba, the country to which Bernie flees from Argentina at the end of A Quiet Flame. |
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For language buffs and lexicographers, copy editors and proofreaders, and anyone who appreciates the connection between language and culture — the illuminating story of proper English. In its long history, the English language has had many lawmakers — those who have tried to regulate, or otherwise organize, the way we speak. The Lexicographer's Dilemma offers the first narrative history of these endeavors, showing clearly that what we now regard as the only correct way to speak emerged out of specific historical and social conditions over the course of centuries. As literary historian Jack Lynch has discovered, every rule has a human history, and the characters peopling his narrative are as interesting for their obsession as for their erudition. The struggle between prescriptivists, who prescribe a correct approach, and descriptivists, who analyze how language works, is at the heart of Lynch's story. From the sharp-tongued satirist Jonathan Swift, who called for a government sponsored academy to issue rulings on the language, and the polymath Samuel Johnson, who put dictionaries on a new footing, to John Horne Tooke, the crackpot linguist whose bizarre theories continue to baffle scholars; Joseph Priestley, whose political radicalism prompted riots; and the ever-crotchety Noah Webster, whose goal was to Americanize the English language — Lynch brings to life a varied cast as illuminating as it is entertaining. Grammatical rules or laws are not like the law of gravity, or laws against theft or murder — they're more like rules of etiquette, made by fallible people and subject to change. Charting the evolution of English, Jack Lynch puts today's debates — whether about Ebonics in the schools or split infinitives in the New York Times -in a rich historical context, and makes us appreciate anew the hard-won standards we now enjoy. |
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The Little Princess doesn't want to go to the hospital, and she does everything she can to avoid it. But when she is finally forced to go, she finds that she really rather likes it. Why? Because they treat her like a princess there! |
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Its not Christmas or even her birthday, but the Little Princess wants a party! She sets out to organize the best party ever, with invitations, cake, games, and goodie bags. But when she forgets one little detail, it has big consequences. |
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The Little Princess wants to have two birthdays, just like the Queen, which means twice as many presents every year! When she realizes how much fun two birthdays are, she decides she wants three, then four. But the more birthdays she has, the less special they are. Perhaps having one birthday a year isn't so boring after all. |
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Every kid knows that pirates talk funny, swing a big sword, and seek buried treasure — don’t they? What do we really know about Blackbeard, Madame Cheng, Sir Francis Drake, and other men and women of pirate history? What drove them to sail the high seas? What were their bad habits, favorite foods, and silly quirks? And did they actually talk like that? A lively style, lots of surprises, and solid research have made the Lives of... series of collective biographies popular with both kids and adults. Now the series returns, spanning the globe with profiles of the nineteen most notorious pirates in history. |
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Timothy Brights doesn't exactly live up to his name. Brought up to regard copious flows of money as his birthright, he can't understand why the funds have been cut off, nor why friends he recruited as Lloyds' Names no longer want to talk to him. When gambling fails, Timothy turns to embezzlement, but it's the lesser offence of helping himself to some strangely aromatic tobacco that propels him up the motorway and into bed with the Chief Constable's wife. The Chief Constable has just survived charges of bribery and perjury and is not too concerned that his efforts to dispose of Timothy involve false imprisonment, breaking and entering, and a spot of GBH. It is only when the Chief tries to frame his old adversary, the upright Miss Midden, hat things begin to go seriously wrong as his underhand ploy opens up the way to spectacular mayhem. |
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Guy Browning's Christmas bestseller is finally available in paperback. Just imagine how much easier life would be if you knew what you were doing. Wouldn't it be great to have clear, precise instructions for all those things you normally mess up? Here, for the first time in a perfectly portable paperback, are the essential rules for handling life's unavoidable little problems — handy, practical tips such as: what to do with your arm when you've failed to hail a taxi; how to share a romantic bath while avoiding the taps; how to give clear directions to a place you've never heard of; and the politest place to look in a full-length mirror. Never Push When It Says Pull will help eliminate minor social embarrassment, ease social intercourse, and prevent night sweats. |
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If ever there was a book to make you switch off your television set, The Dangerous Book for Boys was it. And now, from the same authors, after the success of Things to Do and Things to Know, comes The Pocket Dangerous Book for Boy: Facts, Figures and Fun. 'The Dangerous Book for Boys' was the book of the year in 2006 and 2007, inspiring a newfound passion for adventure, fun and all things 'dangerous'. Now the authors have brought together all their facts: fun and frivolous, entertaining and useful, into a 'Pocket Dangerous Book for Boys: Facts, Figures and Fun. Ever wanted to know what the best ever scientific discoveries were? Or the most gruesome deaths of all time? How namy great men were assassinated? What were the pivotal moments of the last century? Facts, Figures and Fun is crammed with odd, interesting, facts which every boy should know. |
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