-
Vital Signs
Where life begins, terror lurks... Only Robin Cook, acknowledged master of the techno-medical thriller, could have written this supremely chilling novel about the passion to create life—and the power to destroy it. Millions of readers met crusading epidemiologist Marissa Blumenthal in the pages of the bestselling Outbreak. Now Robin Cook brings back his feisty heroine in a gripping new tale, Vital Signs—a roller-coaster ride into the unexpected and the utterly unconscionable. In the eyes of her envious peers, Marissa has it all: a superb professional reputation, a flourishing pediatrics practice, even a fairy-tale marriage with the man of her dreams—Robert Buchanan, an entrepreneur involved in health-care administration and research. But there is one thing Marissa does not have: the child she desperately desires. And when tests confirm that her sealed fallopian tubes have rendered her infertile, her perfect world begins to crumble. Obsessed with becoming pregnant, Marissa barely even notices the disastrous effect her idée fixe is having on her marriage and career. When a little medical sleuthing points to suspicious origins of her infertility, Marissa boldly challenges the law. Along with Wendy, a new friend with a similar infertility problem, she breaks into a fertility clinic, travels to Australia, a center of in-vitro fertilization, then on to Hong Kong. The two women's exploration of the brave new world of reproductive technologies takes a shocking turn when Wendy is violently killed—and Marissa's own life is mysteriously threatened. But personal danger does not deter her, and she allows herself to be drawn into the dark vortex of the baby-making business, where a woman's dearest dream turns slowly, agonizingly to dread... Timely, top-notch suspense that will grip the reader from the very first page, Vital Signs proves once again the unique and compelling genius of Robin Cook.
-
Fatal Cure
Doctors Angela and David Wilson believe that they have found personal and professional bliss when they leave the stresses of urban life for a state-of-the art medical centre in Vermont. Swiftly, their happiness disintegrates as mysterious and unexplained deaths become more than coincidences.
-
Critical
Angela Dawson's chain of hospitals is threatened by a series of mysterious drug-resistant staph infections. Her carefully crafted world begins to crumble and she can only count on herself. New York medical examiners Laurie Montgomery and Jack Stapleton join the investigation, one so critical because Jack's facing surgery at Angels Orthopedic hospital. Laura's investigation leads her into a corporate scheme that can cripple her world forever.
-
Mortal Fear-Death Is Their Glory
Jason Howard used his career as a doctor to escape a private tragedy. Until his own patients started dying from massive heart attacks. When his own colleague becomes the next victim, Jason is finally forced to act. A decision that could cost him his life ... Before his death, Doctor Alvin Hayes had been on the verge of a secret medical breakthrough. What was one more murder to the conspirators who had inherited his crown?
-
Gideon's Spies
Created in 1951, Mossad has been responsible for the most audacious and thrilling feats of espionage, counter terrosrism and assassination ever ventured. Drawing on closed door interviews with Mossad agents, informants and spy masters as well as classified documents and top secret sources Gideon's spies reveals previously unrevealed secrets about a brilliant, ruthless but flawed Israeli intelligence service.
-
Light On Life
The world’s most venerated yoga teacher sheds light on life through the prism of yoga ‘Yoga allows you to achieve a sense of wholeness in your life, where you do not feel like you are constantly trying to fit the broken pieces together. Yoga allows you to find and inner peace that is not ruffled and riled by the endless stresses and struggles of life. Yoga allows you to find a new kind of freedom that you may not have known existed.’ Here, B. K. S. Iyengar, founder of the style of yoga teaching known as Iyengar yoga, invites both those new to yoga and those who are experienced practitioners on an inward journey designed to increase their physical stability, emotional vitality, mental clarity, intellectual wisdom and spiritual bliss. In this warm, witty, lucid and helpful book he addresses the role that yoga postures and breathing techniques play in our search for wholeness, the external and internal obstacles that keep us from progressing along the path, and how yoga can help us life in harmony with the world around us. He uses stories from his own life, humour and examples from modern culture to illustrate that the awareness that yoga offers can improve our lives in many practical and profound ways.
-
Notebooks Of A Middle-School Princess
The first in a brand-new, funny, heart-warming illustrated Princess Diaries series by Meg Cabot. For twelve years, Olivia Grace has been completely ordinary. Then she discovers she's actually a princess and her life is turned upside down! Brand-new illustrated Princess Diaries for 8 to 12 year-olds. Olivia Grace is completely average. Or so she thinks until her Royal Highness, Princess Mia Thermopolis turns up at her school one day and whisks Olivia away to New York City! In a limo, no less! Where you can eat all the cookies you want and the ceiling lights up pink and purple - like a disco! But discovering that your father is actually the Prince of Genovia is quite a shock. Especially since it means you're a descendant of the Kingdom of Genovia and a princess. Olivia's got a lot to learn about her long-lost family - and everyone got a lot to learn about her! Olivia chronicles her transformation from ordinary girl to princess in her notebook, with illustrations from Meg Cabot, who studied Fine Arts as an undergraduate.
-
A Foreigner Carrying In The Crook Of His Arm A Tin
Perceptive and soulful meditation on the global war on terror and its cultural and human repercussions. Bureaucratic in its convolutions and brutal in its deceptions, the war on terror has had an impact on our lives that we do not yet understand. We sense it. A growing claustrophobia, wariness, suspicion, the stickiness of constant surveillance. But for those who are actually entangled in it, the trap has teeth and they are fierce. Author and teacher Amitava Kumar examines the mangled lives of some of those who tripped - SAR Geelani, Hemant Lakhani and Shahwar Matin Siraj in the US among others. And, he catalog's, with the critics compass and a curators zeal, the fierce renewal in art and literature that has evolved out of the war.Spanning the subcontinents of India and the USA, part reportage, part philosophy, this is a book whose importance cannot be exaggerated.
-
The Spinner's Tale
A racy thriller about two friends whose lives diverge drastically when one of them becomes an infamous jihadi militant. Sheikh Ahmed Uzair Sufi is one of the most feared men in Pakistan, a top Jihadi militant, who believes in nothing save his own limitless scope for violence. But no one suspected this future back in 1994, when he was simple old Ausi and leaves school with his cricket mad best friend Eddy to start a new life. While Eddy goes to college in America, Ausi's life takes dangerous and unexpected turns. The two friends stay in touch even as they pursue vastly different lives, their shared passion for cricket and nostalgia for their school days binding them together. Even as Ausi treads down a darker path, what will happen to their friendship? Omar Shahid Hamid, bestselling author of The Prisoner, takes us on another thrilling, sinister ride, stretching from Karachi to Kashmir to Afghanistan, in The Spinner's Tale.
-
The Haunting Of Sunshine Girl
In that place where you're more asleep than awake any more, I hear something else. A phrase uttered in a child's voice, no more than a whisper-night. Shortly after her sixteenth birthday, Sunshine Griffith and her mother Kat move from sunny Austin, Texas, to the rain-drenched town of Ridgemont, Washington. Though Sunshine is adopted, she and her mother have always been close, sharing a special bond filled with laughter and inside jokes. But from the moment they arrive, Sunshine feels her world darken with an eeriness she cannot place. And even if Kat doesn't recognize it, Sunshine knows that something about their new house is just creepy. In the days that follow, things only get stranger. Sunshine is followed around the house by an icy breeze, phantom wind slams her bedroom door shut and eventually, the laughter Sunshine hears on her first night evolves into sobs. She can hardly believe it, but as the spirits haunting her house become more frightening-and it becomes clear that Kat is in danger-Sunshine must accept what she is, pass the test before her and save her mother from a fate worse than death.
-
The Good Luck Of Right Now
From the author of the silver linings playbook, a funny and tender story about family, friendship, grief, love and Richard Gere. Bartholomew Neil is thirty-nine and lost. After the death of his beloved mum he has no idea how to be on his own and he knows it's about time he found his flock. But how does a man whose whole life has been grounded learn how to fly? And what can Richard Gere, a beautiful librarian, a struggling priest and a foul-mouthed and troubled young man teach Bartholomew about finding love and happiness? Whatever it is, Bartholomew is in for a lot more than he bargained for. The Good Luck of Right Now is original, compelling and uplifting. His writing is shot through with wit and humanity Graeme Simsion, author of The Rosie Project.
-
Moone Boy- The Blunder Years
The first book in a very funny new illustrated-fiction series from the award-winning Bridesmaids and The IT Crowd actor Chris O'Dowd and his long-term friend and Moone Boy TV - scriptwriting collaborator Nick Vincent Murphy. For fans ofWimpy Kid and David Walliams. Successful film and TV star, Chris O' Dowd, collaborates with friend and screenwriter Nick Vincent Murphy in Moone Boy - The Blunder Years, the first in this hilarious, illustrated series. Martin Moone is eleven and completely fed up with being the only boy in a family of girls. He's desperate for a decent wingman to help him navigate his idiotic life. So when best mate Padraic suggests Martin get an imaginary friend - or 'IF' for short - he decides to give it a go. His first attempt is Loopy Lou, a hyperactive goofball who loves writing rubbish rap songs. But Martin soon gets fed up with Lou's loopiness and decides to trade in his IF for someone a little less wacky. Enter Sean 'Caution' Murphy, an imaginary office clerk in a bad suit with a passion for laziness and a head full of dodgy jokes. Sean is full of tips and tricks to guide Martin through the perils of the playground, from dealing with his sisters' pranks to beating the bullying Bonner boys. But getting rid of Lou is not that easy and having two imaginary friends is a recipe for trouble!
-
The Eye Of The Tiger
Harry Fletcher, a man with a chequered past, now makes an honest living as a charter skipper fishing in the magnificent Indian Ocean. Until suddenly men from a world he has put behind him plunge once more into a deadly game. And he must play -- for an unknown prize against undeclared odds -- by the rules of violence and death which he once practiced as an art. For of one thing he is certain: to fail is to die...
-
Mindbend-The Soul Of Evil
Utterly chilling. Frighteningly plausible. A classic of medical horror that could come only from Robin Cook. When young dancer Jennifer Schonberg becomes pregnant by accident, her feelings are mixed—but her husband, Adam, is far more ambivalent. For Adam, a third-year medical student already in financial straits, the loss of Jennifer's income and the cost of the coming child mean he must drop out of medical school—on the eve of becoming a doctor. Against the advice of his teachers, his colleagues, and his wife most of all, Adam takes a job as a salesman for the vastly powerful drug company Arolen Pharmaceuticals, whose influence is known to penetrate deep into the physician's world. But just how awesome Arolen's control is over the medical profession Adam is yet to discover. It will become all too clear in a series of increasingly terrifying revelations: corruption old as greed itself; bizarre brutality searing as a futuristic vision of hell; the preservation of life turned to a deadly purpose. And awaiting him at the end of his violent odyssey is a confrontation grave beyond imagining, in which the survival of Jennifer's unborn child hangs in the balance as Adam fights to save his family—and the soul of medicine—from the overwhelming evil that is Mindbend. Moving from gleaming hospital corridors that shelter dark secrets to luxurious cruise ships that are not what they seem, from action-packed chases to scenes of spell-binding scientific terror, Mindbend will draw all those who read so much as a page into its web of irresistible suspense—and hold them fast.
-
The Angels Weep
'They came at a run, side by side, seeming to wade through the thick swamp of mortar smoke and dust, and they appeared monstrous and inhuman in the stark light of the star shells. One of them was a huge Matabele. He had lost his helmet and his head was round and black as a cannon ball, his open mouth was a pink cave lined with ivory teeth, and his bull bellow rose above even that storm of gunfire. The other was a white man, the top of his battledress torn half off his body, exposing the pale flesh of his chest and shoulders, but his face was daubed with fiendish streaks of dark green and brown paint.' At the dawn of a new century, the pioneers of Rhodesia have staked their claims and stocked their farms in the land they have carved as their own. But in the hills, the Matabele indunas are preparing for the bloody rebellion which will scar the opponents for ever - and etch for them the same tragic legacy for generations to come...
-
The Roadside MBA
A one-stop toolkit for entrepreneurs and small businesses, from three leading MBA teachers. Three top MBA Professors - one big road trip Full of powerful insights about product differentiation, pricing, brand management and tactics for battling the 'Big Boys', The Roadside MBA takes the blue-chip knowledge and tactics of wall street and brings them to the high street. Paul Oyer, Michael Mazzeo and Scott Schaefer have taught thousands of MBAs at some of the world's leading business schools. While traveling back from an economics conference together they dropped into a shoe store in Maine and chatted to the staff - and quickly realized that the strategic problems faced by small businesses are just as rich and compelling as anything challenging Microsoft or General Electric. These three wise men decided to go in search of real-world case studies that illustrate the key lessons of an MBA. The result is a rollicking American road trip that is both a great introduction for business owners who haven't done an MBA and an entertaining refresher for those who have.
-
The Good Sleeper
Cry it out or co-sleep? Bassinet or swing? White noise machine or Bach? How many hours anyway? For something so important, there's too much conflicting information about how best to get your baby to sleep through the night and nap successfully during the day. This book is a straightforward, no-nonsense answer to one of the biggest challenges new parents face when they welcome a brand new baby home. This book is written for exhausted parents, giving them immediate access to the information they need. Reassuring and easy to understand, Dr. Kennedy addresses head-on the fears and misinformation about the long-term effects of crying and takes a bold stand on controversial issues such as co-sleeping and attachment parenting. With polarizing figures and techniques dominating the marketplace-and spawning misinformation across the internet - Dr. Kennedy's methods and practices create an extensively researched and parent-tested approach to sleep training that takes both babies and parents needs into account to deliver good nights and days of sleep and no small dose of peace of mind. The Good Sleeper is a practical, empowering-and even entertaining-guide to help parents understand infant sleep. This research-based book will teach parents the basics of sleep science, determine how and when to intervene and provide tools to solve even the most seemingly impossible sleep problems.
-
Our Final Invention- Artificial Intelligence And T
Artificial Intelligence helps choose what books you buy, what movies you see and even who you date. It puts the 'smart' in your smartphone and soon it will drive your car. It makes most of the trades on Wall Street and controls vital energy, water and transportation infrastructure. But Artificial Intelligence can also threaten our existence. In as little as a decade, AI could match and then surpass human intelligence. Corporations and government agencies are pouring billions into achieving AI's Holy Grail-human-level intelligence. Once AI has attained it, scientists argue, it will have survival drives much like our own. We may be forced to compete with a rival more cunning, more powerful and more alien than we can imagine. Through profiles of tech visionaries, industry watchdogs and groundbreaking AI systems, our final invention explores the perils of the heedless pursuit of advanced AI. Until now, human intelligence has had no rival. Can we coexist with beings whose intelligence dwarfs our own? And will they allow us to?
-
A Giant Cow-Tipping By Savages
Modern mergers and acquisitions, or M&A as it's more commonly known, is a new phenomenon. The buying and selling, the breaking up and combining of companies--the essence of M&A--has been a part of commerce throughout history, but only in our era has M&A itself become a business. In 2007, it was a $4.4 trillion global enterprise. And yet, it remains largely unexplored. Discrete stories have been pulled from the annals of M&A, both true and fictionalized, that have become touchstones for wealth and excess. Who can forget Gordon Gekko and his "Greed is Good" speech? But while there have been a few iconic characters and tales to emerge, no one has told the rich history of M&A, until now. John Weir Close provides a look into that world and the people who created it. "A Giant Cow-Tipping by Savages" reads like "Dallas" meets "Wall Street," told through an intriguing narrative that not only brings to light in gritty detail all of the back room drama of such powerful players as Carl Icahn, Joe Flom, Marty Lipton, and Bruce Wasserstein, but also reveals how the new generation, including activist whirlwind Bill Ackman and iconoclastic new Delaware judge Leo Strine, will dominate the next tsunamic, and imminent, M&A boom.
-
Finding Zero
The story of how we got our numbers-told through one mathematician's journey to find zero. The invention of numerals is perhaps the greatest abstraction the human mind has ever created. Virtually everything in our lives is digital, numerical or quantified. The story of how and where we got these numerals, which we so depend on, has for thousands of years been shrouded in mystery. Finding Zero is an adventure filled saga of Amir Aczel's lifelong obsession-to find the original sources of our numerals. Aczel has doggedly crisscrossed the ancient world, scouring dusty, moldy texts, cross examining so-called scholars who offered wildly differing sets of facts and ultimately penetrating deep into a Cambodian jungle to find a definitive proof. Here, he takes the reader along for the ride. The history begins with the early Babylonian cuneiform numbers, followed by the later Greek and Roman letter numerals. Then Aczel asks the key question-where do the numbers we use today, the so-called Hindu - Arabic numerals, come from? It is this search that leads him to explore uncharted territory, to go on a grand quest into India, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and ultimately into the wilds of Cambodia. There he is blown away to find the earliest zero-the keystone of our entire system of numbers-on a crumbling, vine-covered wall of a seventh-century temple adorned with eaten-away erotic sculptures. While on this odyssey, Aczel meets a host of fascinating characters-academics in search of truth, jungle trekkers looking for adventure, surprisingly honest politicians, shameless smugglers and treacherous archaeological thieves-who finally reveal where our numbers come from.
-
The Risk Factor
Our most revered business icons of the last few decades are the bold risktakers, such as Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and Steve Jobs. Yet in today's stock market-driven economy, companies are playing it safe, with too many leaders focused on short-term gains, rather than value creation. The result is a static business culture that generates forgettable results--even as the world demands big solutions. So how do we get back in the risk-taking game? In "The Risk Factor," Deborah Perry Piscione takes the most comprehensive look at this crucial, undervalued leadership behavior, and outlines how companies must support risk-taking across the enterprise. Exploring the heroes of risk, including entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and technologists, and the role risk-taking and failure tolerance play in their success, she makes a compelling case not only for big, flashy mergers or acquisitions, but also for unorthodox choices in everything from leadership to corporate social responsibility. Drawing on case studies from a wide range of now-famous giants (Netflix, Salesforce) and successful start-ups (Tesla, NetApp), she distills lessons for both new entrepreneurs and established companies whose longtime risk aversion has cost them more than they realize.
-
Dead Companies Walking
Hedge fund manager Scott Fearon explains why failure in business is not only common, but necessary-and how spotting it early can pay off. Unlike most investors, who live in fear of failure, Scott Fearon actively seeks it out. He has earned millions of dollars over the past thirty years shorting the stocks of businesses he believed were on their way to bankruptcy. In Dead Companies Walking, Fearon describes his foolproof formula for spotting these doomed businesses and how they can be-extremely profitable investments. In his experience, corporate managers routinely commit six common mistakes that can derail even the most promising companies-they learn from only the recent past, they rely too heavily on a formula for success, they misunderstand their target customers, they fall victim to the magical storytelling of a mania, they fail to adapt to tectonic shifts in their industry and they are physically or emotionally removed from their companies operations. Fearon has personally interviewed thousands of executives who were headed, unknowingly, for bankruptcy-from the Texas oil barons of the 80s to the tech wunderkinds of the late 90s to the flush real estate developers of the mid - 2000s. Here, he explores recent examples like J. C. Penney, Herbalife and Blockbuster Entertainment to help investors better predict the next booms and busts-and come out on top.