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  Solacers

  Arion Golmakani

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  Solacers tells the touching story of a boy's search for family life and safety following the divorce of his parents in Iran during the 1960s. The first child of a heartless father and a discarded mother is left to fend for himself on the streets of Mashhad, seeking food and shelter wherever he can. His lonely early years are an unbelievable tale of cruelty and betrayal on the part of nearly everyone who might be expected to help, save for one aunt who does her best to keep him from starving.But living a harsh and solitary existence has one advantage for this little boy: other than forcing him to be self-reliant, no one attempts to indoctrinate him on rural Iranian society's archaic cultural values and religious beliefs. And so he never accepts his wretched state as fate, choosing instead to dream big dreams about getting an education, having his own family, and starting a new life—possibly in the faraway land called America. He makes a plan and by the age of seventeen he boards a plane to the land of possibilities, where his dreams eventually also take flight.

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  Overcoming Dyslexia - The...

  Terry M. Robertson

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  Have you asked yourself what is dyslexia? Learn about the signs of dyslexia in children as well as dyslexia treatment options.
   
  Dyslexia affects 10 to 15 percent of the population, and it is the most common learning disability. Individuals with this medical condition have difficulty in the areas of language processing. This condition makes it hard to learn to read and learn. It happens when there is a problem with the way the brain processes graphic symbols.
   
  Here is a preview of what you'll learn:
   
  What is adult dyslexia?
   
  What strengths do dyslexic people have?
   
  How do I know that I'm dyslexic?
   
  Stories from others with dyslexia
   
  Tips to help with adult dyslexia
   
  Tips and help in remembering numbers
   
  Confusing "B" and "D"
   
  Spelling and grammar tips
   
  Using color while dyslexic
   
  Tips at work or school
   
  And basically everything you need to know to start understanding this condition

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  Egyptian Oedipus - Athanasius...

  Daniel Stolzenberg

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  An examination of the unique, baroque-era, German Jesuit scholar, Egyptologist, polymath, and prolific author and his studies. 
   
  A contemporary of Descartes and Newton, Athanasius Kircher, S. J. (1601/2–80), was one of Europe’s most inventive and versatile scholars in the baroque era. He published more than thirty works in fields as diverse as astronomy, magnetism, cryptology, numerology, geology, and music. But Kircher is most famous—or infamous—for his quixotic attempt to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs and reconstruct the ancient traditions they encoded. In 1655, after more than two decades of toil, Kircher published his solution to the hieroglyphs, Oedipus Aegyptiacus, a work that has been called “one of the most learned monstrosities of all times.” Here Daniel Stolzenberg presents a new interpretation of Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies, placing them in the context of seventeenth-century scholarship on paganism and Oriental languages. 
   
  Situating Kircher in the social world of baroque Rome, with its scholars, artists, patrons, and censors, Stolzenberg shows how Kircher’s study of ancient paganism depended on the circulation of texts, artifacts, and people between Christian and Islamic civilizations. Along with other participants in the rise of Oriental studies, Kircher aimed to revolutionize the study of the past by mastering Near Eastern languages and recovering ancient manuscripts hidden away in the legendary libraries of Cairo and Damascus. The spectacular flaws of his scholarship have fostered an image of Kircher as an eccentric anachronism, a throwback to the Renaissance hermetic tradition. Stolzenberg argues against this view, showing how Kircher embodied essential tensions of a pivotal phase in European intellectual history, when pre-Enlightenment scholars pioneered modern empirical methods of studying the past while still working within traditional frameworks, such as biblical history and beliefs about magic and esoteric wisdom. 
   
  Praise for Egyptian Oedipus 
   
  “Stolzenberg not only provides the first serious study of Athanasius Kircher’s investigations into the history and culture of ancient Egypt, but he also furnishes a perceptive critical evaluation of Kircher’s scholarship and persona, warts and all. Stolzenberg goes beyond Kircher’s programmatic statements to unveil his actual scholarly practices. In doing so, Stolzenberg has produced an exemplary case study of a polymath at work and has provided us with a more nuanced understanding of Kircher’s influence.” —Mordechai Feingold, California Institute of Technology 
   
  “If you don’t already know about Athanasius Kircher, you should take a long trip through his extraordinary and weird fields of research: a Jesuit priest who tinkered with everything from early cinematic projectors to talking statues, and wrote about impossibly tall skyscrapers inspired by the Tower of Babel and developed his own unique twist on a volcanic theory of a Hollow Earth. . . . Stolzenberg’s book is an excellent biography of the man and his ideas.” —Gizmodo, Notable Books of 2013

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  The London Bendy Bus - The Bus...

  Matthew Wharmby

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  Between 2002 and 2006 six of Londons bus companies put into service 390 articulated bendy buses on twelve routes for transport in London.rnrnDuring what turned out to be a foreshortened nine years in service, the Mercedes-Benz Citaro G buses familiar on the continent and worldwide earned an unenviable reputation in London; according to who you read and who you believed, they caught fire at the drop of a hat, they maimed cyclists, they drained revenue from the system due to their susceptibility to fare evasion, they transported already long-suffering passengers in standing crush loads like cattle and they contributed to the extinction of the Routemaster from frontline service. In short, it was often referred to as the bus we hated.rnrnThis account is an attempt by a long-time detractor of the bendy buses to set the vehicles in their proper context  not quite to rehabilitate them, but to be as fair as is possible towards a mode of transport which felt about as un-British as could be.

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  Churchill's Empire - The World...

  Richard Toye

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  A charmer and a bully, Winston Churchill was driven by a belief that the English were a superior race whose goals went beyond individual interests to offer an enduring good to the entire world. No better example exists than Churchill's resolve to stand alone against a more powerful Hitler in 1940 while the world's democracies fell to their knees. But there is also the Churchill who frequently inveighed against human rights, nationalism, and constitutional progress-the imperialist who could celebrate racism and believed India was unsuited to democracy. Drawing on newly released documents and an uncanny ability to separate the facts from the overblown reputation (by mid-career Churchill had become a global brand), Richard Toye provides the first comprehensive analysis of Churchill's relationship with the empire. Instead of locating Churchill's position on a simple left/right spectrum, Toye demonstrates how the statesman evolved and challenges the listener to understand his need to reconcile the demands of conscience with those of political conformity.

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  All the Rage - A Quest

  Martin Moran

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  Why aren't you angry? people often asked Martin Moran after he told his story of forgiving the man who sexually abused him. At first, the question pissed him off. Then, it haunted him. Why didn't he have more anger? Was he frightened of his own hidden fury? What exactly is rage, anyway? Moran did the only thing he could to reconcile these seemingly irreconcilable questions. He set it all down. With humility, humor, and masterful storytelling, he takes us on a journey jumping from dream to memory to fact. He finds himself confronting his fuming stepmother, translating details of an asylum seeker's torture, in an S&M dungeon with sex therapists, and lost in Africa with a guide who can't read maps. Based on a one-man play the New Yorker called brilliant, funny, and touching, All the Rage is a quest to find where rage meets compassion, and justice meets mercy.

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