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  A Garden of Marvels - How We...

  Ruth Kassinger

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  In the tradition of The Botany of Desire and Wicked Plants, a witty and engaging history of the first botanists interwoven with stories of today’s extraordinary plants found in the garden and the lab.In Paradise Under Glass, Ruth Kassinger recounted with grace and humor her journey from brown thumb to green, sharing lessons she learned from building a home conservatory in the wake of a devastating personal crisis.In A Garden of Marvels, she extends the story. Frustrated by plants that fail to thrive, she sets out to understand the basics of botany in order to become a better gardener. She retraces the progress of the first botanists who banished myths and misunderstandings and discovered that flowers have sex, leaves eat air, roots choose their food, and hormones make morning glories climb fence posts. She also visits modern gardens, farms, and labs to discover the science behind extraordinary plants like one-ton pumpkins, a truly black petunia, a biofuel grass that grows twelve feet tall, and the world's only photosynthesizing animal. Transferring her insights to her own garden, she nurtures a "cocktail" tree that bears five kinds of fruit, cures a Buddha's Hand plant with beneficial fungi, and gets a tree to text her when it's thirsty.Intertwining personal anecdote, accessible science, and untold history, the ever-engaging author takes us on an eye-opening journey into her garden—and yours.

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  The Grove Book of Hollywood

  Christopher Silvester

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  A “treasure trove” of insider accounts of the movie business from its earliest beginnings to the present day—“exceedingly savvy . . . astute and entertaining” (Variety).  The Grove Book of Hollywood is a richly entertaining anthology of anecdotes and reminiscences from the people who helped make the City of Angels the storied place we know today. Movie moguls, embittered screenwriters, bemused outsiders such as P. G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh, and others all have their say. Organized chronologically, the pieces form a history of Hollywood as only generations of insiders could tell it.   We encounter the first people to move to Hollywood, when it was a dusty village on the outskirts of Los Angeles, as well as the key players during the heyday of the studio system in the 1930s. We hear from victims of the blacklist and from contemporary players in an industry dominated by agents. Coming from a wide variety of sources, the personal recollections range from the affectionate to the scathing, from the cynical to the grandiose.   Here is John Huston on his drunken fistfight with Errol Flynn; Cecil B. DeMille on the challenges of filming The Ten Commandments; Frank Capra on working for the great comedic producer Mark Sennett; William Goldman on the strange behavior of Hollywood executives in meetings; and much more. “A masterly, magnificent anthology,” The Grove Book of Hollywood is a must for anyone fascinated by Hollywood and the film industry (Literary Review, London).

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  Tolkien For Beginners

  Louis Markos

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  Tolkien For Beginners will introduce the reader to the multilayered depth and breadth of Tolkien’s tales of Middle-earth, what critics, following Tolkien’s lead, refer to collectively as his legendarium. J.R.R. Tolkien sweeps us away to a distant time and place that is at the same time, our own time and place. He takes us to a world where difficult choices must be made and are made, where character is defined by those choices, and where redemption is possible though not always embraced. The Lord of the Rings taps a deep root in the human psyche. There is much death, destruction, and defeat in Tolkien’s world, but there is even more friendship, courage, and hope. What one remembers when one finishes reading The Lord of the Rings is not the vice of the villains, as strong and as well drawn as it is, but the virtue that empowers the heroes to resist it, even at the cost of their own lives.  It will be the goal of Tolkien For Beginners to introduce the reader to the multilayered depth and breadth of Tolkien’s tales of Middle-earth. To do justice to the full dimensions of that legendarium, author Louis Markos will speak in two voices: that of the storyteller who loves the stories he tells and that of the critic who seeks to identify and explicate key themes from those stories. In his telling and analysis, he will treat the legendarium both as a collection of secondary-world myths with their own integrity and as a reflection of Tolkien’s Catholic worldview.

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  WHAT DOES THE SECOND CYCLE OF...

  Parshwika Bhandari

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  What does the female menstrual cycle look like based on a normal female, I am not a medical expert in this area everything that I am sharing in this book is based on my own experience and knowledge, and also this book is meant for all menstruating females and to actually cherishes her cycle instead of feeling bad about it and also sharing my own menstrual cycle and also considering how to improve it well, female your cycle is a good thing that happened to you, it's a precious gift which we need to enjoy instead of feeling weird about it, it's ideal for all menstruating females

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  Touched by the Sun - My...

  Carly Simon

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  A chance encounter at a summer party on Martha’s Vineyard blossomed into an improbable but enduring friendship. Carly Simon and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis made an unlikely pair — Carly, a free and artistic spirit still reeling from her recent divorce, searching for meaning, new love, and an anchor; and Jackie, one of the most celebrated, meticulous, unknowable women in American history. Nonetheless, over the next decade their lives merged in inextricable and complex ways, and they forged a connection deeper than either could ever have foreseen. The time they spent together — lingering lunches and creative collaborations, nights out on the town and mundane movie dates — brought a welcome lightness and comfort to their days, but their conversations often veered into more profound territory as they helped each other navigate the shifting waters of life lived, publicly, in the wake of great love and great loss.An intimate, vulnerable, and insightful portrait of the bond that grew between two iconic and starkly different American women, Carly Simon’s Touched by the Sun is a chronicle, in loving detail, of the late friendship she and Jackie shared. It is a meditation on the ways someone can unexpectedly enter our lives and change its course as well as a celebration of kinship in all its many forms.

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  J Robert Oppenheimer: The Life...

  Charles River Editors

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  Tens of millions died during World War II as the warring powers raced to create the best fighter planes, tanks, and guns, and eventually that race extended to bombs which carried enough power to destroy civilization itself. While the war raged in Europe and the Pacific, a dream team of Nobel Laureates was working on the Manhattan Project in America, a program kept so secret that Vice President Harry Truman didn’t know about it until he took the presidency after FDR’s death in April 1945.  
  The pursuit of nuclear weapons moved the scientist nearer to the role of combatant, placing special responsibilities on the scientific community to make critical moral decisions. However, as they developed atomic weapons, they could at the same time only warn military powers of their use. Advocates for nuclear power as a civilian energy resource but expressing misgivings about nuclear war put them at odds with uninformed branches of the military. The American government and the population at large, who possessed little understanding of the perilous science behind the technology, brought about charges of unpatriotic behavior for such misgivings. Scientists, meanwhile, were caught between the excitement of creating a new paradigm, and the dread of their eventual use.  
  The American war effort against the Japanese and Germans also included denying either one the use of a practical nuclear weapon. Physics was in its highest stage of advancement in Europe during this time, while J. Robert Oppenheimer emerged as an extraordinary scientific mind in the United States. Despite requiring the work of thousands of scientists and assistants in fashioning the weapon that eventually came to pass, Oppenheimer alone has been become renowned as the “father of the atomic bomb” due to his leadership of the Manhattan Project.

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