The Star Trek Encyclopedia: Updated and Expanded Edition (Star Trek: All)- Michael Okuda, Denise Okuda, Debbie Mirek

 

The Star Trek Encyclopedia: Updated and Expanded Edition (Star Trek: All)
by: Michael Okuda, Denise Okuda, Debbie Mirek

This illustrated reference, aimed at "Star Trek" fans, brings together all four TV series: "Original", "The Next Generation", "Deep Space Nine" and "Voyager", plus the nine films. It contains over 5000 entries, including alien races, planets and stars, weapons and tools, as well as inside jokes.

This new version of the Star Trek Encyclopedia is a reissue of the 1997 edition, plus a 128-page supplement of additional material that updates Deep Space Nine to the end of its run and Voyager to midway through season five. It also covers the movie Star Trek: Insurrection. The supplement is as meticulously detailed as the rest of the volume, listing such fascinating trivia as chadre kab (Seven of Nine's first meal), 'Kahless and Lukara' (a Klingon opera), and voraxna (a Cardassian poison), as well as all the new characters and species. Appendices include illustrations of starships, cast and crew listings, a historical timeline, and a bibliography. All photographs and illustrations (except for a few historical shots) are in color. The encyclopedia was devised in part to help production staff on the various Star Trek TV series to keep up with the ever-increasing level of detail generated by over 30 years of creative effort. It is an excellent reference volume and, whether you want to settle an argument or write a novel, this book will answer your questions. But beware: the extensive cross-referencing leads to curious time-distortion effects, in which the unwary reader, dipping in to settle a single query, encounters an irresistible urge to browse further, during which hours of normal time can pass in the wink of an eye. --Elizabeth Sourbut

size: 974.21 MB

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Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

 

Jurassic Park
Michael Crichton

An astonishing technique for recovering and cloning dinosaur DNA has been discovered. Creatures once extinct now roam Jurassic Park, soon-to-be opened as a theme park. Until something goes wrong...and science proves a dangerous toy....
"Wonderful...Powerful."
THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
size: 0.32 MB

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Home for the Holidays - Heather Vogel Frederick

Home for the Holidays
by: Heather Vogel Frederick

This Christmas season, join the girls of the mother-daughter book club for a variety of holiday-themed adventures! But from pranks at the book club's Secret Santa party to unfortunate family vacations, nothing goes quite as planned for any of the girls. On a Christmas cruise with their families, Megan and Becca fight over the dashing son of the ship's captain. Cassidy, her mother, and her sister Courtney fly back to California to check out colleges for Courtney... but when the West Coast causes homesickness for their former life in Laguna Beach, the trio begins to question what state they should call home. And a disastrous sledding accident causes both Emma and Jess to completely change their holiday plans. Between fights, injuries, and blizzards, everything seems to be going wrong. Will the girls be able to find their holiday spirit in time for Christmas?

size: 1.57 MB

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The Secret History of Fantasy - Peter S. Beagle

The Secret History of Fantasy
by: Peter S. Beagle

This ingenious anthology posits that fantasy fiction is on a new path: series novels that chronicle epic adventures have been joined by tales where mythology, fairy tales, and archetypes are fully re-imagined into a new modern literature. Anthologist and author Peter S. Beagle represents both the traditional and the new, having written the introduction to The Lord of the Rings as well as the inventive fantasy novel, The Last Unicorn. In this exciting, canonic volume, Beagle showcases gifted writers who began to rediscover older fantasy classics and to redefine fantasy in their own unique voices. Innovative authors in this anthology include Robert Holdstock, Gregory Maguire, Neal Gaiman, Francesca Lia Block, Steven Millhauser, and others who have lead the way to expanding imaginative frontiers. From the depths of an dangerous English forest to the staircase at the edge of the world, on a caffeinated journey to the empire of ice cream to the maze in the Barnum museum, you'll discover the wonder of favorite childhood tales made modern and fresh once again.

size: 4.45 MB

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The Necromancer - Michael Scott

The Necromancer
by Michael Scott

San Francisco:

After fleeing to Ojai, then Paris, and escaping to London, Josh and Sophie Newman are finally home. And after everything they've seen and learned in the past week, they're both more confused than ever about their future. Neither of them has mastered the magics they'll need to protect themselves from the Dark Elders, they've lost Scatty, and they're still being pursued by Dr. John Dee. Most disturbing of all, however, is that now they must ask themselves, can they trust Nicholas Flamel? Can they trust anyone?

Alcatraz:

Dr. Dee underestimated Perenelle Flamel's power. Alcatraz could not hold her, Nereus was no match for her, and she was able to align herself with the most unlikely of allies. But she wasn't the only one being held on the island. Behind the prison's bars and protective sigils were a menagerie of monsters-an army for Dee to use in the final battle. And now Machiavelli has come to Alcatraz to loose those monsters on San Francisco.

Perenelle might be powerful, but each day she weakens, and even with Nicholas back at her side, a battle of this size could be too much for her. Nicholas and Perenelle must fight to protect the city, but the effort will probably kill them both.

London:

Having been unable to regain the two final pages of the Codex, Dee has failed his Elder and is now an outlaw-and the new prey of all the creatures formerly sent to hunt down Flamel.

But Dee has a plan. With the Codex and the creatures on Alcatraz, he can control the world. All he needs is the help of the Archons. But for his plan to work, he must raise the Mother of the Gods from the dead. For that, he'll have to train a necromancer. And the twins of legend will make the perfect pupils. . .

The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

size: 1.18 MB

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Critical Approaches to French-language Comic Strip - Ann Miller

Reading Bande Dessinee: Critical Approaches to French-language Comic Strip
By: Ann Miller

Bande dessine, or French comic strip, has always provoked controversy labeled a danger to literacy and moral standards by its detractors, this polarizing art form has at the same time been deemed worthy of prestigious national centers in France and Belgium. Reading Bande Dessin, the first English-language overview and critical study of this intriguing medium, traces the history and examines the cultural implications of French comics.

Ann Miller groundbreaking book not only parses bande dessine as visual narrative art, but it shows readers how to study it, as she places these comic strips in the context of debates surrounding the form legitimization, approaches it from a cultural studies perspective, and examines bande dessine in its relationship to subjectivity in the body. Miller here illuminates such disparate concepts as Astérix and the mythologizing of Frenchness, historical memory and the Algerian war, and characterizations of the new managerial bourgeoisie in the context of Francophone comic strips. Reading Bande Dessin will help lay a scholarly foundation for the growing interest in this captivating art form in the Anglophone world. analysis ranges from psychoanalytic to Marxist interpretations and is a terrific introduction to this neglected aspect of the comic world.bRoger Sabin, ObserverThe characteristics of Ann Millers writing for me abound in this latest work; concise prose, beautifully crafted sentences, complex analysis illustrated with crystal clear exemplification. This is a work for a wide readership. It is a work for enriching subject knowledge for teachers and students of French and/or the visual arts at advanced levels.Ann Swarbrick, Language Learning Journal

size: 1.82 MB

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Who Wrote the Book of Love?

Who Wrote the Book of Love?
by: Lee Siegel

Who Wrote the Book of Love? is acclaimed novelist Lee Siegel's comedic chronicle of the sexual life of an American boy in Southern California in the 1950s. Starting at the beginning of the decade, in the year that Stalin announced that the Soviet Union had developed an atomic bomb, the book opens with a child's first memory of himself. Closing at the end of the decade, when Pat Boone's guide to dating, 'Twixt Twelve and Twenty, topped the bestseller list, the book culminates just moments before the boy experiences for the first time what he had learned from a book read to him by his mother was called "coitus or sexual intercourse or sometimes, less formally, just making love." Between the initial overwhelmingly erotic recollection and the final climactic moment, all is sex—beguiling and intractable, naughty and sweet. Who Wrote the Book of Love? is about the subversive sexual imaginations of children. And, as such, it is about the origins of love.

Vignettes from the author's childhood provide the material for the construction of what is at once comic fiction, imaginative historical reportage, and an ironically nostalgic confession. The book evokes the tone and tempo of a decade during which America was blatantly happy, wholesome, and confident, and yet, at the same time, deeply fearful of communism and nuclear holocaust. Siegel recounts both the cheer and the paranoia of the period and the ways in which those sentiments informed wondering about sex and falling in love.

"Part of my plan," Mark Twain wrote in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, "has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked." With the same motive, Lee Siegel has written what Twain might have composed had he been Jewish, raised in Beverly Hills in the 1950s, and joyously obsessed with sex and love.

size: 1.36 MB

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