Search results for ""Academy Chicago Publishers""

One of the rarest mysteries in the author's Sergeant Beef series, Case with Four Clowns, which has only been published once in the US - more than fifty years ago - is now available in paperback for the first time. It is regarded by critics as one of Leo Bruce's most baffling mysteries. A murder is yet to be committed - that much is certain - but who will be the victim? And who will be the murderer? It is Sgt. Beef's job to discover these facts, if he can, in time to prevent the deed from being done. But when he reaches the small traveling circus where the murder is to take place, he finds that practically everyone there is seething with hatred, each has a motive which might make him a killer; and any one of a dozen people could easily be the victim. The doughty Sgt. Beef has broken some pretty tough cases, and this one - with mystery entagled within mystery - stirs the bulldog within him. The clues are there, but unless the reader is very astute, he or she will overlook them; but Sgt. Beef misses nothing.

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In 1939, Julian Padowicz says, ""I was a Polish Jew-hater. Under different circumstances my story might have been one of denouncing Jews to the Gestapo. As it happened, I was a Jew myself, and I was seven years old.""Julian's mother was a spoiled beauty, a Warsaw socialite who had no talent for child-rearing and no interest in it. She turned her son over completely to his governess, a good Catholic, whom he called Kiki, and whom he loved with all his heart. Kiki was deeply worried about Julian's immortal soul, explaining that he could go to Heaven only if he became a Catholic.When bombs began to fall on Warsaw, Julian's world crumbled. His beloved Kiki returned to her family in Lodz; Julian's stepfather joined the Polish army and the grief-stricken boy was left with the mother whom he hardly knew.Resourceful and determined, his mother did whatever was necessary to provide for herself and her son: she brazenly cut into food lines and befriended Russian officers to get extra rations of food and fuel. But brought up by Kiki to distrust all things Jewish, Julian considered his mother's behavior un-Christian.In the winter of 1940, as conditions worsened, Julian and his mother made a dramatic escape to Hungary on foot through the Carpathian mountains and Julian came to believe that even Jews could go to Heaven.

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Haile was born in Ethiopia in 1965 and lived there until she was eleven years old. When the Emperor was deposed by a military coup, Haile's father was shot while 'resisting arrest'. Barely surviving, he escaped with his family and settled in central Minnesota where they struggled with the cultural and financial strain of their drastically changed circumstances. Haile grew up in America, attended Williams College and went on to graduate from Harvard Law School. In 2001, she was the first member of her family to return to Ethiopia. Rebecca Haile's book brings into focus the challenges and consequences of three decades of political upheaval in Ethiopia.

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The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University convened a high-level task force of voting experts from government, academia and the private sector to systematically analyze vulnerabilities in electronic voting systems used across the US. A crack team of technical experts concentrates on three main types of electronic voting systems: Direct Recording Electronic; Direct Recording Electronic with Voter Verified Paper Trail; and Precinct Count Optical Scan. This book not only systematically identifies 120 potential threats to voting technology, it also offers specific remedies and countermeasures that election officials can employ to make these attacks more difficult to perform.

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This is the story of the Bailey family's escape from the gruelling Corbin Glow mines in 1930 to find a better life in Letcher, Kentucky - 'the prettiest place in the world'. Rhoda Warren's account is three dimensional: with humour and warmth - but without sentimentality. She recounts the lives of these mining people whose religion and 'family values' buttressed and sustained them. Among others, we meet Kin, who saddened his neighbours with songs of the old 'Southland'; Lie Shingles, a man without a home of his own who travelled from neighbour to neighbour as an honoured guest at mealtime; Gideon, a preacher without formal training, who heeded a call from god to come to Letcher and to relieve the people's despair; and Cindy, a 'Doctor Woman' and artist accused of witchcraft by the local minister. As a young girl, Rhoda begins to catch glimpses of the world outside her narrow mountain community through the stories in the ""True Confessions"" magazine and the pictures in the ""Montgomery Ward"" catalogue - to her these things seemed 'visions of a fairy world'. And at school, she is learning newer, better ways to do the things her parents had been doing for years. When Rhoda marries and moves to a small town in New York State, it seems that her dreams of a better life have been realised. Yet scenes of Letcher always 'hovered in the backroads of her memory'. When she revisits her homeland, this time as a 'New Yorker', Rhoda finds that Letcher is no longer the place of her memories.

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In Kings and Queens of Early Britain, Geoffrey Ashe skilfully weaves all the different accounts, legends, literature, historical documents into one continuous narrative that recreates in intriguing detail all the rulers and events, real or mythical, that are part of the rich tapestry of early history in Britain. The result is a fascinating and very readable account starting with the legendary 'founding of Britain' reputedly by Brutus the Trojan somewhere around 1100 BC and ending with Alfred, the greatest of the Saxon kings, in AD 871.

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At forty, Hank has decided he's through with baseball—a routine pop-up fell on his head and he got the message. Trouble is, baseball is the one thing that's given any meaning to his life. This is the painfully funny story of a man who decides to get a life, but isn't sure how. It's about fathers and sons, heroes and whiners, the wheel of fortune (and Vanna White), baseball and the decline of Western civilization—and why Nellie Fox always spat in his glove.

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Long considered the definitive biography of the great Tudor Queen, this scholarly and immensely readable book won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography and has been translated into nine languages.

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Once again murder and other dark doings strike the small city of Fort York, Canada, during World War II and Inspector Albert V. Trethewaynow Regional Officer, Air Raid Precautionis the one man who can solve the mystery. It all begins on January 13th, 1943 when Fort York is in the midst of its most complete wartime blackout. Suddenly there are reports of an eerie flumelike light in the marsh outside the town. Tretheway finds evidence of weird practices that his friend Cynthia Moon identifies as the work of a coven of witches. This is a fitting sequelat once hilarious and bloodchillingto the first Tretheway mystery, "A Good Year for Murder."

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This work includes an introduction by Robert Welsch. On each of his three voyages, Cook kept a log and his reputation rose steadily with each voyage largely because Europeans were fascinated with the romance of discovery as well as reports of sexual licence in Tahiti and other Polynesian islands.

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Walking on the sand before breakfast, Carolus Deen's cousin Fay, who was staying on the Suffolk coast, has come upon the head of Lilliane Bomberger, the celebrated and universally detested novelist. The body was buried in the sand with only the head protruding; at least one tide had washed over it. Before this frustrating case ends, three murders are committed. This is vintage Bruce, mixing thrills and chills with unique humour.

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In 1941 as the Nazi hordes swept eastward into the Soviet Union, the desperate call went out for women to join the Russian air force. Women responded and flew incessant bombing runs; the Germans, who came to dread them, called them 'night witches'.

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Elizabeth Barrett was inspired by a flash of true genius when she rushed into the drawing-room and said that here, where we live and work, is the true place for the poet. With her passionate interest in social questions, her conflict as artist and woman, her longing for knowledge and freedom (Aurora Leigh) is the true daughter of her age. -- Gardner Taplin, from the Introduction.

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Introduction by Anita Miller. This novel about the divergent lives of two sisters which spans the Victorian and Edwardian periods is a 20th-century classic. Recently included in the list of the greatest 20th-century novels.

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Carolyn Heilbrun, in Writing a Woman’s Life, states that books about the real lives of women aren’t written often enough. Women of Privilege is an attempt to fill that gap. The book describes three generations of women at Grasmere - a country estate in Rhinebeck, New York - who suffered because of the patriarchal attitudes of the men in their lives. On the surface, everything seemed enviable; below the surface were mental illness, alcoholism, the yearning for divorce, and questions about sexual identity. The book traces the decline of a once privileged Hudson River Valley family where the neighbors were Vanderbilts, Delanos, and Roosevelts. Based on diaries and journals, and written by a family descendant, it combines biography and memoir with social history. Written by the great-great granddaughter of Sarah Minerva Schieffelin, the book is part biography, part memoir, and part social history. Based on journals and diaries that span more than a hundred years, Women of Privilege reveals how easy it is to create a family myth, when there is money to keep up appearances. Written with skill and grace, this is an insightful exploration of how the absence of human warmth can harm a child, and of how little inherited money matters in the end.

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The amazing tale of “County” is the story of one of America’s oldest and most unusual urban hospitals. From its inception as a “poor house” dispensing free medical care to indigents, Chicago’s Cook County Hospital has been renowned as a teaching hospital and the healthcare provider of last resort for the city’s uninsured. Ansell covers more than thirty years of its history, beginning in the late 1970s when the author began his internship, to the “Final Rounds” when the enormous iconic Victorian hospital building was replaced. Ansell writes of the hundreds of doctors who underwent rigorous training with him. He writes of politics, from contentious union strikes to battles against “patient dumping,” and public health, depicting the AIDS crisis and the Out of Printening of County’s HIV/AIDS clinic, the first in the city. And finally it is a coming-of-age story for a young doctor set against a backdrOut of Print of race, segregation, and poverty. This is a riveting account.

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Lizzy McCann is a feisty 12 year old who lives with her mother and father in a fleabag hotel. A divorce leads to mother and daughter moving to upstate New York where living with her grandmother is a mixed blessing . This young girl's coming of age in the 1960s is notable for its sharp and quick-witted tone. It is brisk and good-natured and demonstrates how to survive loss, puberty and first love, all with a powerful and lively story.

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In July, 2005, Representative John Conyers, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, commissioned this report after President Bush failed to answer a letter from 122 members of Congress and a half million Americans about the truth of the Downing Street Memos. This book is replete with evidence that the run-up to the Iraq War was laced with Administration lies and distortions, to make it appear that the US was threatened. As the Downing Street Memos say: ""...the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy""...This unique compilation also includes information about torture in Abu Ghraib, Guantanomo and other detention centres in direct violation of the Geneva Convention, as well as information about unauthorised domestic spying by the National Security Agency. Ambassador Joseph C Wilson - author of the ""New York Times"" best-seller ""The Politics of Truth"" - was sent to Niger by the CIA to investigate the Bush Administration charge that Saddam Hussein had bought 'yellow cake' for his alleged nuclear weapons program. Mr. Wilson ascertained that there was no truth to the charge. His wife, Valerie Plame, a career undercover operative for the CIA, was later outed by members of the White House staff in apparent retaliation for Ambassador Wilson's finding. Readers of this crucial report will understand at last that the erosion of Americans' rights as to war, privacy, and freedom of speech, presents a threat to our security and our liberty.

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These days, hardly anyone remembers Augustus John Cuthbert Hare (1834-1903). But in his prime, the late Victorian age, his name was on the lips of anyone who mattered. He was a travel writer, a story teller and memoirist of the first order, and his work is a fascinating record of a lost way of life amongst the strangest upper classes of English society. Hare's 6-volume autobiography was published between 1899-1903 in England; and this is a 1-volume condensation of this remarkable work.

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SADIKA'S WAY has been chosen as a 2005 Kiriyama Prize Notable Book. The Kiriyama Prize was established in 1996 to recognise outstanding books about the Pacific Rim and South Asia that encourage greater mutual understanding of and among the peoples and nations of this vast and culturally diverse region. The clock had started ticking for Sadika from the day she was born into her traditional Pakistani village family. She must be married off to somebody while she is still a teenager or she will be considered a hopeless failure. Carefully planned marriages are a long tradition in Pakistan, as they are throughout the Middle East, where women have little social status and fewer individual rights and much of their value is measured by how good a marriage can be arranged for them. Sadika must be married off first because she is the eldest of three daughters. It would be a disgrace an indelible stigma - if a younger daughter was married first. The enormous tension that accompanies this ancient ritual makes 'Sadika's Way' at once a very funny and instructive work of fiction: we watch as mothers vie with each other on their daughters' behalf for the affections of the most eligible males. We see them in their homes and listen to their conversations as they boast to each other about their daughters' qualities - real and imagined. The infighting gets intense, even downright nasty, all fed by the desperation that grows quite naturally out of a system that literally holds the fate of women in its hands. Sadika's coming of age and final journey to a new life involve culture clashes and family characters worthy of a modern Middle Eastern Jane Austen. This is a social comedy with serious undertones and a rare novel of manners which spans the world in both time and space.

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A sober analysis of a case, now little more than a historical footnote, that came to be known as the Averbuch Affair.

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Belle Appleman is back on the trail of evil-doers in Boston. Belle has left her job at the Classic Clothing Company to work in the neighborhood drugstore. When a young girl staggers into the drugstore, collapses and dies, Belle suspects foul play. She teams up with her friend, Irish cop Jim Connors, and soon finds herself embroiled in homicide and danger. She is certain that one of the Beacon Hill doctors who come into the drug store is the guilty party. But which one? In the meantime, Belle finds romance with a Gary Cooper look-alike; but neither this nor her constant endearing interest in food can distract Belle from her search for a killer.

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Anne, beautiful and intelligent, stands in the dock accused of adultery. Utterly humiliated by hearing the evidence against her, she is determined to put the record straight. But the prosecution does not play the game she had been expecting and she is forced to change her approach. This duel between a brilliant barrister and a very determined and astute young woman has an unexpected twist that keeps you guessing right to the end.

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The Lost World is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic tale of fantasy. Two scientists, a big game hunter and a journalist set off to the wilds of South America and the Amazon in search of prehistoric beasts. There, high atop an Amazonian plateau they find an amazing land of strange and dangerous ancient creatures. The Lost World is a classic tale of science-fiction adventure that has inspired many successive works and is considered by many fans of the genre as one of the greatest sciencefiction stories ever written.

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Though best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was also an accomplished writer of the most chilling horror stories of the 20th century. Written during the same period as the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, these horror stories share the darkness of Doyle's more well-known works, if not always their logical conclusions. Together they paint quite a different picture of Doyle than do his detective pieces, illuminating a writer as fascinated by the supernatural and the unsolveable as by the science of modern detection.

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