Banter, chit-chat, gossip, natter, tete-a-tete: these are just a few of the terms for the varied ways in which we interact with one another through conversation. David Crystal explores the factors that motivate so many different kinds of talk and reveals the rules we use unconsciously, even in the most routine exchanges of everyday conversation. We tend to think of conversation as something spontaneous, instinctive, habitual. It has been described...

While playing a total immersion virtual reality game of kings and intrigue, fourteen-year-old Giannine learns that demonstrators have damaged the equipment to which she is connected, and she must win the game quickly or be damaged herself.

Recounts a 1993 firefight in Mogadishu, Somalia, that resulted in the deaths of eighteen Americans and more than five hundred Somalis, examining the rationales behind the disastrous raid. "Already a classic of war reporting and now reissued as a Grove Press paperback, Black Hawk Down is Mark Bowden's brilliant account of the longest sustained firefight involving American troops since the Vietnam War. On October 3, 1993, about a hundred elite U.S....

New York Times bestselling author Hampton Sides returns with a white-knuckle tale of polar exploration and survival in the Gilded Age In the late nineteenth century, people were obsessed by one of the last unmapped areas of the globe: the North Pole. No one knew what existed beyond the fortress of ice rimming the northern oceans, although theories abounded. The foremost cartographer in the world, a German named August Petermann, believed that warm...

There are all kinds of people on earth that you will meet some day… They will be looking for a certain stone. They will be people who do not get tired, but who will keep pushing forward, going, going all the time… These people do not follow the way of our great-grandfather. They follow another way. They will travel everywhere, looking for this stone which our great-grandfather put on the earth in many places. Sweet MedicineOn the morning on January...

"Tumors, injuries, natural malformations -- there is almost no such thing as a non-emergency brain surgery when it comes to kids. For a pediatric neurosurgeon working in the medical minefield of the brain -- in which every millimeter in every direction governs something that makes us essentially human -- every day presents the challenge, the opportunity, to give a new lease on life to a child for whom nothing is yet determined and all possibilities...

"1907. On the eve of her fifth birthday, Poppy Pendleton is tucked safely in her bed, listening to her parents entertain New York's gilded society in their Thousand Islands castle; the next morning, she is gone, and her father is found dead in his smoking room. 1992. Though Chloe Ridell lives in the shadows of Poppy's castle, now in ruins, she has little interest in the mystery that still captivates tourists and locals alike. She is focused on preserving...

"Drawing upon a long-suppressed episode in American history, when thousands of German immigrants were rounded up and interned following the attack on Pearl Harbor, In Our Midst tells the story of one family's fight to cling to the ideals of freedom and opportunity that brought them to America. Nina and Otto Aust, along with their teenage sons, feel the foundation of their American lives crumbling when, in the middle of the annual St. Nikolas Day celebration...

From the Dust Jacket: The trial of Angela Yvonne Davis in connection with the prisoner revolt by three black prisoners on August 7, 1970 at the Marin County Courthouse will be remembered as one of America's most historic political trials, and no one can tell the story better than Miss Davis herself. This book is also perhaps the most comprehensive and thorough analysis of that increasingly important symbol-the political prisoner. Of her trial, Miss...

Consider the culture of the twenty-first century: Each morning, you hear a half-dozen ads on the radio before your feet touch the floor. By the end of the day, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of marketing messages have targeted you. And yet little is understood about how marketing affects our lives and society. Enter the two authors of this book, the ad men behind The Age of Persuasion, the popular radio show broadcast on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation...