For readers who find the world just a little too normal...Welcome to Really Odd Short Stories – seventeen absurdly funny tales from the wonderfully warped imagination of Alan Crawford.Inspired by the legendary weirdness of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, these darkly humorous short stories offer a uniquely Australian blend of sarcasm, cynicism, and pure, unfiltered absurdity.Inside this collection, you'll discover:Bureaucrats who become something far wors...

Much has been written about Thomas Jefferson, with good reason: His life was a great American drama—one of the greatest—played out in compelling acts. He was the architect of our democracy, a visionary chief executive who expanded this nation's physical boundaries to unimagined lengths. But Twilight at Monticello is something entirely new: an unprecedented and engrossing personal look at the intimate Jefferson in his final years that will change the way audiences think about this ...

Does humanitarian military intervention save lives as intended? Or does it perversely embolden rebels and ignite the spiral of violence that it seeks to prevent?Such questions lie at the heart of a new and lively controversy in international politics. "Gambling on Humanitarian Intervention" explores whether the emerging norm of intervention backfires in conflicts such as Kosovo, exacerbating the ethnic cleansing and killing of innocent civilians. Leading academics investigate this ...

Shortlisted for International Affairs Book of the Year in the Paddy Power Political Book Awards 2014Angela Merkel was already unique when she became German chancellor: the first female leader of Europe’s biggest economy, the first from former communist East Germany and the first born after World War II. Since 2010, the debt crisis that spread from Greece to the euro region and the world economy has propelled her to center-stage, making Merkel the dominant ...

The audience is growing. The stories are getting weirder.Welcome back to More Stories to Tell – the second volume in the wonderfully warped Stories to Tell Collection from Australian author Alan Crawford.From his perch in an aged care complex, our favourite grumpy narrator returns with two brand new tales for his ever-growing audience. Growing in numbers, of course, not in individual size.Inside you'll discover:"Goings on in Space": A very strange and messy ...

For readers who enjoy their humour with no sugar and no cream...Welcome to A Story or Two to Tell – a wildly entertaining collection that kicks off the Stories to Tell Collection from Australian author Alan Crawford.Meet a retired Environmental Health Officer with a healthy dose of grumpiness and a razor-sharp tongue. From the confines of an aged care complex, he spins interconnected tales of bureaucratic absurdity, personal mishaps, and the kind of chaos that only comes fr...

On a small assembly line in Neckarsulm, Germany, no more than twenty exotic Audi R8 sports cars are built daily. The entire process is overseen by small teams of specialists that oversee every step of production. Every single part is inspected carefully, and nothing goes unchecked. It is a level of hand-built quality one might expect to find in a Ferrari Enzo or the Vector W8A of the 1980s, but almost unheard of from a manufacturer the size of Audi AG. The Turbo Quattro Coupe (or Urquattro...

For readers who find the world just a little too normal...Welcome to Very Odd Short Stories – seventeen gloriously absurd tales from the wonderfully warped imagination of Australian author Alan Crawford.Inspired by the legendary weirdness of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, these darkly humorous short stories offer a uniquely Australian blend of sarcasm, cynicism, and pure, unfiltered absurdity.Inside this collection, you'll discover:Stories that make you ...

**A Wealthmanagement.com Best Business Book of 2017An uproarious account of Mark Twain’s endless attempts to strike it rich, all of which served only to empty his pockets**Mark Twain’s lifetime spans America’s era of greatest economic growth. And Twain was an active, even giddy, participant in all the great booms and busts of his time, launching himself into one harebrained get-rich scheme after another. But far from striking it rich, the man who coined the term “Gilded Age...

WINNER OF THE AMERICAN BATTLEFIELD TRUST PRIZE FOR HISTORY • A groundbreaking, important recovery of history; the overlooked story—fully explored—of the critical aspect of America’s Revolutionary War that was fought in the South, showing that the British surrender at Yorktown was the direct result of the southern campaign, and that the battles that emerged south of the Mason-Dixon line between loyalists to the Crown and patriots who fought for independence were, in fact, America’s ...

WINNER OF THE AMERICAN BATTLEFIELD TRUST PRIZE FOR HISTORY • A groundbreaking, important recovery of history; the overlooked story—fully explored—of the critical aspect of America’s Revolutionary War that was fought in the South, showing that the British surrender at Yorktown was the direct result of the southern campaign, and that the battles that emerged south of the Mason-Dixon line between loyalists to the Crown and patriots who fought for independence were, in fact, America’s ...

Mark Twain's lifetime spans America's era of greatest economic growth. And Twain was an active, even giddy, participant in all the great booms and busts of his time, launching himself into one harebrained get-rich-quick scheme after another. But far from striking it rich, the man who coined the term "Gilded Age" failed with comical regularity to join the ranks of plutocrats who made this period in America notorious for its wealth and excess.Instead, Twain's mining firm failed, desp...