When this book was published in 1851, reading for pleasure was still a fairly new idea. There were no televisions, no movies, no mp3 players, no internet and no cell phones. If you bought a book to read for pleasure there'd better be a lot in it for your Yankee dollar. Melville knew his audience and so this book was written for the average reader of the mid-19th century. If he were publishing this book today he would have written the book for us 21st century people and wouldn't have included a 3000 word essay on "The Whiteness of The Whale" plopped down into the middle of a great and gripping...

This novel finished in the top 100 of the 2008 Amazon Breakout Novel Contest and won 1st place in the 2010 OWFI Conference Mystery Division It is 1935 and Joe Bennett is a straight-arrow town sheriff who must investigate the death of a man everyone is happy to be rid of. A wandering minstrel (who in 1935 was called a hobo) has a magical ruby ring and an even more magical harmonica. This story also has lying friends, secretive townspeople, a woman of negotiable virtue and her criminal boyfriend, a beautiful angel in a cold white box and a dead man who really, really deserved it.

Lady Margaret's quest to bring a killer to justice leads her out of her art studio to a seedy all-night cafe, a Depression-era tenement, the waterfront, and eventually to the dark underbelly of Chinatown. Inspector Monahan, the blunt-talking son of Irish immigrants has no love for the English nobility. He takes a dim view of interfering amateur sleuths and doesn't like being strong-armed, even by a gorgeous dame. Together they pursue the Mandarin, a shadowy Chinese gangster who may have the answers to blackmail, smuggling, and the whereabouts of a heartless killer. Cherie Jung reviewing for...

A friendly, cozy, easy to read introduction to Buddhism.

Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons for you are crunchy and good with ketchup...(source unknown) In the South China Sea is an island protected by nine dragons. Angie Tanaka has made one of them really, really angry. Angie says: Thievery isn't actually my vocation. It's really more of a pursuit. It's only my day job. I'm really an actress ... just kidding.

What is evolution? Is it scientific? What, exactly, did Charles Darwin give to the world? It would take more than a human lifetime to examine in detail all the evidence supporting the Theory of Evolution. This book covers some of the main ideas of the theory in an easy, reader-friendly way and gives pointers and references to find out more.