Circling the Drain

Circling the Drain
Author: Amanda Davis
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2009-02-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0061853526

Enter into the worlds of fifteen young women who, despite their vastly different circumstances, seem to negotiate an eerily similar and unavoidably dangerous emotional terrain. With a visceral bite or a surreal edge, each electrically charged story in Circling the Drain presents women trying to understand the nature of loss--of leaving or being left--and discovering that in the throes of feverish conflict, things are rarely what they seem. By turns dark and lyrical, ferocious and playful, these stories are precise, startling, and undeniably original. Reading them is a cathartic, mesmerizing literary experience.

Running Out

Running Out
Author: Lucas Bessire
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2022-10-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0691216436

Finalist for the National Book Award An intimate reckoning with aquifer depletion in America's heartland The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force. Anthropologist Lucas Bessire journeyed back to western Kansas, where five generations of his family lived as irrigation farmers and ranchers, to try to make sense of this vital resource and its loss. His search for water across the drying High Plains brings the reader face to face with the stark realities of industrial agriculture, eroding democratic norms, and surreal interpretations of a looming disaster. Yet the destination is far from predictable, as the book seeks to move beyond the words and genres through which destruction is often known. Instead, this journey into the morass of eradication offers a series of unexpected discoveries about what it means to inherit the troubled legacies of the past and how we can take responsibility for a more inclusive, sustainable future. An urgent and unsettling meditation on environmental change, Running Out is a revelatory account of family, complicity, loss, and what it means to find your way back home.

NetLingo

NetLingo
Author: Vincent James
Publisher: NetLingo Inc.
Total Pages: 534
Release: 2002
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9780970639677

With emphasis on the personal, business, and technology aspects that make using the Internet so unique, this handy reference presents more than 2,500 computer-related terms and industry-specific jargon for anyone who needs to learn the new language of the Net. Newbies as well as techies will find commonly used shorthand, modern office phrases, and a large collection of emoticons and ASII art. An index sorts the terms into 10 popular categories with a complete list of international country codes and file extensions.

Circling the Drain

Circling the Drain
Author: Amanda Davis
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2009-02-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0061853461

“Mesmerizing . . . compelling . . . This collection, fresh, odd, and frightening, makes Davis a writer to watch.” — Chicago Tribune “A well-guided tour of scarred souls who’ve witnessed terrible things, and surprisingly, found odd bits of beauty in them.” — New York Times Book Review

Force Majeure

Force Majeure
Author: Bruce Wagner
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 486
Release: 2007-11-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1416591397

Bud Wiggins dreamed of achieving fame as a screenwriter. He almost made it. Instead, he finds himself free-falling through a world of hallucinatory absurdity, low comedy, and epic degradation. A Hollywood bottom-feeder who moonlights as a limo driver to pay the bills, both tormented and vicariously aroused by his contact with the industry's elite, Mr. Wiggins bears poignant, paranoid witness to the horror and hysteria that are by-products of "the Business." His phantasmagoric saga, by turns picaresque, pornographic, and poetic, Force Majeure is the first of a projected quartet called "Scriptures" that will chronicle the misadventures and transcendental fall and rise -- comic, tragic, and tragicosmic -- of Bud Wiggins, Quixote of Babylon.

In Shock

In Shock
Author: Rana Awdish
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2017-10-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1250119227

A riveting first-hand account of a physician who's suddenly a dying patient, In Shock "searches for a glimmer of hope in life’s darkest moments, and finds it.” —The Washington Post Dr. Rana Awdish never imagined that an emergency trip to the hospital would result in hemorrhaging nearly all of her blood volume and losing her unborn first child. But after her first visit, Dr. Awdish spent months fighting for her life, enduring consecutive major surgeries and experiencing multiple overlapping organ failures. At each step of the recovery process, Awdish was faced with something even more unexpected: repeated cavalier behavior from her fellow physicians—indifference following human loss, disregard for anguish and suffering, and an exacting emotional distance. Hauntingly perceptive and beautifully written, In Shock allows the reader to transform alongside Awidsh and watch what she discovers in our carefully-cultivated, yet often misguided, standard of care. Awdish comes to understand the fatal flaws in her profession and in her own past actions as a physician while achieving, through unflinching presence, a crystalline vision of a new and better possibility for us all. As Dr. Awdish finds herself up against the same self-protective partitions she was trained to construct as a medical student and physician, she artfully illuminates the dysfunction of disconnection. Shatteringly personal, and yet wholly universal, she offers a brave road map for anyone navigating illness while presenting physicians with a new paradigm and rationale for embracing the emotional bond between doctor and patient.

Hell's Detective

Hell's Detective
Author: Michael Logan
Publisher: Crooked Lane Books
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2017-06-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1683311736

Kat Murphy is a private detective tortured by demons. Real ones. She is serving a death sentence in Lost Angeles, the dark and depraved city in Hell where a beast known as a Torment forces her to relive, night after night, the moment she killed her lover and put a bullet in her own skull. Kat longs to make amends for her sins. So when the city's Chief Administrator hires her to retrieve a stolen box with a mysterious power, offering to call off her Torment in return, she gets the chance to do just that. But if Kat has learned one thing, it's that every case has a wrinkle. As she trawls drug dens, casinos, and fighting pits in search of the thief, she discovers that both box and city contain secrets darker than she could ever have imagined. And with time running out, Kat must choose between her own desire for peace and the fate of the world above in Hell's Detective, the electrifying new mystery from award-winning author Michael Logan.

Murder Bay

Murder Bay
Author: David R. Horwitz
Publisher: Top Five Books LLC
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2010-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0978927060

No one noticed anything suspicious about the death of a wounded soldier at the height of the Civil War—not, that is, until almost a hundred years later. In 1957, young Washington, D.C., police sergeant Ben Carey heads up a team of officers in a dilapidated house three blocks from the Capitol. Though Carey’s career is on the rise, his marriage is circling the drain, and as he spends more time at the office, he discovers there is something not quite right about this decaying old home. It harbors some dark secrets—connecting him to the long-dead soldier and others in ways he can't understand. With his personal life in shambles, and forces from within the house vying for his attention, Carey casts reason aside and begins an investigation to uncover the truth about what happened in this haunted place. As he peels back the layers of history, he finds courage and love, but also deception, greed, jealousy, and murder. Twisting through time—between an America torn by Civil War and the prosperous 1950s—Murder Bay is a mystery that spans eras and the gulf dividing what can and cannot be explained. “The impressive first in a historical series, which effortlessly alternates between Washington, D.C., in 1862 and the same city 95 years later...this debut shows definite promise.” —Publishers Weekly “Very nicely done....Recommended.” —Library Journal “An involving, period-perfect story. The action is fast-paced and convincing...the characters are expertly drawn.” —ForeWord

The Collapse of the Common Good

The Collapse of the Common Good
Author: Philip K. Howard
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2007-12-18
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0307416984

In pursuit of fairness at any cost, we have created a society paralyzed by legal fear: Doctors are paranoid and principals powerless. Little league coaches, scared of liability, stop volunteering. Schools and hospitals start to crumble. The common good fades, replaced by a cacophony of people claiming their “individual rights.” By turns funny and infuriating, this startling book dissects the dogmas of fairness that allow self-interested individuals to bully the rest of society. Philip K. Howard explains how, trying to honor individual rights, we removed the authority needed to maintain a free society. Teachers don’t even have authority to maintain order in the classroom. With no one in charge, the safe course is to avoid any possible risk. Seesaws and diving boards are removed. Ridiculous warning labels litter the American landscape: “Caution: Contents Are Hot.” Striving to protect “individual rights,” we ended up losing much of our freedom. When almost any decision that someone disagrees with is a possible lawsuit, no one knows where he stands. A huge monument to the unknown plaintiff looms high above America, casting a dark shadow across our daily choices. Today, in the land of free speech, you’d have to be a fool to say what you really think. This provocative book not only attacks the sacred cows of political correctness, but takes a breathtakingly bold stand on how to reinvigorate our common good. Only by restoring personal authority can schools begin to work again. Only by judges and legislatures taking back the authority to decide who can sue for what can doctors feel comfortable using their best judgment and American be liberated to say and do what they know is right. Lucid, honest, and hard hitting, The Collapse of the Common Good shows how Americans can bring back freedom and common sense to a society disabled by lawyers and legal fear.