Our mainstream information landslide is infested with wild expectations of excess. We are constantly told to have all of our dreams come true. How about becoming moderately successful? Why don’t we start with three dreams and see how that goes? We are all told to give 110%. How about 70%? Our narrow perception of succeeding consistently points to the top three billionaires, even though the seven hundredth richest person in the country is quite comfortable. The airwaves and bookstores are c...

Lake Michigan, winding creeks, sprawling swamps, and one of the world’s great rivers--Illinois’s variety of aquatic habitats makes the Prairie State home to a diverse array of fishes. The first book of its kind in over forty years, An Atlas of Illinois Fishes is a combination of nature guide and natural history. It provides readers with an authoritative resource based on the extensive biological data collected by scientists since the mid-1850s. Each of the entries on Illinois’s 21...

This fine collection of intelligent, unabridged short stories about intriguing, interesting and sometimes inspirational men is an audio treat for young and old, male or female. A carefully compiled anthology featuring timeless tales from classic authors including Charles Dickens, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Anton Chekhov, read by a cast of acclaimed and respected actors, including Stephen Fry, Martin Jarvis and Kerry Shale; this compilation will be enjoyed by the whole family.Mr. C...

The Drowning Man is the story of Frank, unwilling resident of "another city, on another map". Following the discovery of his proscribed relationship with a man, he was forced to denounce his partner and move to the city to work for the totalitarian Party. Now, after several years, his ex has reappeared, and with him a spiralling set of circumstances that will draw Frank and the Party into an apocalyptic reckoning.As if Brazil had been directed by Wong Kar-Wai, or ...

Few now remember that the guitar was popular in England during the age of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare, and yet it was played everywhere from the royal court to the common tavern. This groundbreaking book, the first entirely devoted to the renaissance guitar in England, deploys new literary and archival material, together with depictions in contemporary art, to explore the social and musical world of the four-course guitar among courtiers, government servants and gentlemen. Christopher ...

In 1893 Clara Lindow sang the ballad Dreamtide to her own guitar accompaniment in the Cumbrian hamlet of Lowick. A writer for the local newspaper not only admired her 'marked skill and ability' but also considered the concert to be a sign of 'the onward march of light and learning in our time'. Amateurs like Miss Lindow were at the heart of a Victorian revival of guitar playing, especially for accompanying the voice, which has never been fully acknowledged and has often been denied. This b...

This is the first history of the guitar during the reign of the Stuarts, a time of great political and social upheaval in England. In this engaging and original volume, Christopher Page gathers a rich array of portraits, literary works and other, previously unpublished, archival materials in order to create a comprehensive picture of the guitar from its early appearances in Jacobean records, through its heyday at the Restoration court in Whitehall, to its decline in the first decades of th...

Holden Hollister had everything a man could dream for, a beautiful home, a loving family, and a career as a best-selling author, but how much of it really belongs to him?After leaving the scene of a fatal car crash in 1992, which has Holden's best friend and writing partner serving a life sentence for manslaughter, he tries to forget his past and enjoy life to its fullest. Despite needing massive doses of pain to make it through each day only to be visited by his past in his dreams,...

Ever since GA Ratcliff High School closed in the eighties amidst the George Ross Scandal, local residents have been drawn back to the place, but not everyone who visits gets to leave. Urban explorers continue to roam its halls, some for sport while others seek the truth. Amateur ghost-hunters and television personalities go in looking for answers, but what they find lurking within is deadlier than any of them could have imagined.

If not for the death of his wife and his career as a Hollywood screenwriter riding on the line, Steven Keller never would have returned to his childhood home, located far from civilization in the small town of Eldora. Accompanied by his rebellious teen aged daughter, he revisits the place of his birth while simultaneously attempting to salvage their future, oblivious to the forces working against them.Though the house may be vacant, they are not alone.On the same property, se...

Ferns gives the reader an introduction to the reasons for the variety of ferns in the British Isles, as well as the history of their development within this landscape and their use by man. This edition is exclusive to newnaturalists.comFerns, horsetails and clubmosses, or to use their technical term the Pteridophyta, are a fascinating area of the British flora that ranged from the prehistoric-looking horsetails to the delicate beauty of the Aspleniaceae family (otherwise known as t...

The arborescent gymnosperms are the most prevalent trees in one-third of the world's forests, and have dominated the Earth's forest ecosystems through much of evolutionary time. They encompass over 70 living genera and nearly 700 species of evergreen conifers and related trees, and include the largest and longest-lived organisms on this planet. This two-volume treatise provides detailed descriptions of each genus based on first-hand surveys of their structure, adaption, ecology, function a...