Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

California

Anxious to Please

#hardcover #yoga #exercise #fitness #wellness #brandnew #newbook

Finding Purpose in Each Pointless Pause

Presenting poses for anyone who spends way too much time waiting!

Waiting is a gift. Be glad when you're stuck in traffic or put on hold. Be grateful when the waiting room is full. Give thanks to the date that never shows up on time. Why? Because now you can turn mindless waiting into moments of mindfulness with stretches and poses to build up your strength, poise, and flexibility.

From ardha chandrasana at the traffic lights to simhasana in a traffic jam, this book introduces you to yoga--in real-life situations. Judith Stoletzky aligns helpful tips and humorous advice with precise instructions. You don't need a yoga studio, fancy yoga pants, or even a yoga mat to practice yoga. All you need is normal, everyday life and a little bad timing. After a while, you'll develop an amazing attitude both inside and out!

Paired with Markus Abele's photography, these 30+ yoga poses will give you something to do with all that extra time spent waiting around. Yoga While You Wait has the ideal pose for every pointless pause--from beginner to experienced and for every body and level of flexibility. You might even find yourself looking forward to the wait!

Yoga While You Wait

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#hardcover #protectivecover #formerlibrarybook 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

A Novel

Set in Pre-Katrina New Orleans, LAST CALL ON DECATUR STREET is an electrifying tale of friendship and betrayal, an exploration of racism and white privilege, and one woman's journey to find herself in the seedy, glamorous world of burlesque.

Despite vowing to never return to New Orleans when she left for college, Rosemary quickly finds herself back in her hometown--kicked out of school, at odds with her best friend, and desperate to lose herself in a bright, kaleidoscopic nightlife of dive bars and burlesque dancing.

This night, though, is different. An unlikely companion, a secret sorrow, and an unexpected visitor force Rosemary to break free. From the burlesque stage in the French Quarter, strip clubs to strangers' beds, a secret garden in Jackson Square, and ending at a raucous masquerade party, this night becomes a journey for Rosemary to come to grips with her past, grieve for those she has lost, and maybe, finally, acknowledge that she too deserves redemption.

With superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Cohen captures the uncertainty and messy edges of early adulthood. A love letter to New Orleans, Last Call on Decatur Street is a story of family and home and the complicated things we inherit from the people and places we love.

Last Call on Decatur Street

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#hardcover #protectivecover #formerlibrarybook #americanpresident #politics #whitehouseveteran #whitehouse 

Inside the West Wing and Beyond

Shrouded in anonymity, protected by executive privilege, but with no legal or constitutional authority of their own, the 5,900 people in 125 offices collectively known as the "White House staff" assist the chief executive by shaping, focusing, and amplifying presidential policy. Why is the staff so large? How is it organized and what do those 125 offices actually do? In this sequel to his critically appraised 1988 book, Ring of Power, Bradley H. Patterson Jr. —a veteran of three presidential administrations —takes us inside the closely guarded turf of the White House. In a straightforward narrative free of partisan or personal agendas, Patterson provides an encyclopedic description of the contemporary White House staff and its operations. He illustrates the gradual shift in power from the cabinet departments to the staff and, for the first time in presidential literature, presents an accounting for the total budget of the modern White House. White House staff members control everything from the monumental to the mundane. They prepare the president for summit conferences, but also specify who sits on Air Force One. They craft the language for the president to use on public occasions —from a State of the Union Address to such "Rose Garden rubbish" as the pre-Thanksgiving pardon for the First Turkey. The author provides an entertaining yet in-depth overview of these responsibilities. Patterson also illuminates the astounding degree to which presidents personally conduct American diplomacy and personally supervise U.S. military actions. The text is punctuated with comments by senior White House aides and by old Washington hands whose careers go back more than half a century. The book provides not only a comprehensive key to the offices and activities that make the White House work, but also the feeling of belonging to that exclusive membership inside the West Wing.

The White House Staff

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#hardcover #protectivecover #formerlibrarybook #kennedy

Personal Essays

After the great success in 1990 ofDarkness Visible, his memoir of depression and recovery, William Styron wrote more frequently in an introspective, autobiographical mode. Havanas in Camelot brings together fourteen of his personal essays, including a reminiscence of his brief friendship with John F. Kennedy; a recollection of the power and ceremony on display at the inauguration of François Mitterr∧ memoirs of Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and Terry Southern; a meditation on Mark Twain; an account of Styron’s daily walks with his dog; and an evocation of his summer home on Martha’s Vineyard. Styron’s essays touch on the great themes of his fiction–racial oppression, slavery, and the Holocaust–but for the most part they address other subjects: bowdlerizations of history, literary lists, childhood moviegoing, the censoring of his own work, and the pursuit of celebrity fetish objects. These essays, which reveal a reflective and humorous side of Styron’s nature, make possible a fuller assessment of this enigmatic man of American letters. From the Hardcover edition.

Havanas in Camelot

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#hardcover #prayer #gospels #god #jesus #reflection

Daily Readings and Meditations

Prayer is the language we use to listen and talk to God. Author Eugene H. Peterson, translator of The Message Bible, believes that the only way we can develop this intimate, personal communication is by spending time every day with Jesus. Through these 365 inspiring days of reading and reflection, you will be encouraged to deepen your relationship with God as you learn to converse with Him daily and make prayer a refreshing way of life.

A Year with Jesus

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#hardcover #fiction #johngrisham #suspensethrillers #ovaloffice #cia #suspense 

John Grisham, delivers another legal thriller of unparalled suspense. With fourteen years left on a twenty-year sentence, notorious Washington power broker, Joel Blackman, receives a surprise pardon from a lame-duck president. He is smuggled out of the co

The Broker

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A Life of Eugene O'Neill

Eugene O'Neill is the acknowledged father of modern American theatre, the man who paved the way for the likes of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and a host of others. By Women Possessed is the last volume in an epic biography of O'Neill, following him through his great successes, the failures he was able to shrug off and the long eclipse: a twelve-year period in which, despite the Nobel, nothing he wrote was produced. A fascinating and necessary work from acclaimed authors and critics Arthur and Barbara Gelb.

By Women Possessed

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James Patterson

Andrew Gross

New York

Successfully arresting Dominic "The Electrician" Cavello, an influential mafia boss, in an operation that leaves two fellow agents dead, senior FBI agent Nick Pellisante struggles with internal corruption that could prevent the man's conviction, teaming up with a juror, single mother Andie Echeverra, to take justice into their own hands. 1,500,000 first printing.

Judge and Jury

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#hardcover #military #militarysniper #thriller #militarythriller #action

A Sniper Novel

A top Russian intelligence agent has defected to the West and the only man with whom he will speak is Kyle Swanson, who busted him out of the U.S. Marine Corps Scout/Sniper School years ago. The defector proves to be an Edward Snowden-type gold mine of amazing secrets about the When, Where and How of President Vladimir Pushkin's next grab for lost Soviet territory. But Swanson, now a special contractor with the CIA, soon begins to believe that it is all fool's gold being sprinkled by Moscow to ignite an open military fight with NATO and the United States. Using his own deadly methods, the sniper sets out to find the truth, but to slow him down, the Russians kidnap Swanson's beautiful friend Calico, the CIA station chief in Estonia. From Italy to the Arctic Circle, Kyle Swanson is on the hunt, convinced that the defector actually is running a complex plot to hand Russia a kingdom in the north. But Swanson seems always to be a step behind because there is a traitor within his own chain of command. To stop the madness, Swanson must deliver a kill shot a hundred miles away from a border bridge in Estonia, where a Russian Army waits on the far shore as a government official crosses over with an invitation to invade.

Long Shot

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#hardcover #protectivecover #formerlibrarybook #smokefreehome 

For more than fifty years, legendary author Herman Wouk has dreamed of writing a novel about the life of Moses. Finally, at age ninety-seven, he has found an ingeniously witty way to tell the tale in The Lawgiver, a romantic and suspenseful epistolary novel about a group of people trying to make a movie about Moses in the present day. The story emerges from letters, memos, e-mails, journals, news articles, recorded talk, Skype transcripts, and text messages.

At the center of The Lawgiver is Margo Solovei, a brilliant young writer-director who has rejected her rabbinical father's strict Jewish upbringing to pursue a career in the arts. When an Australian multibillionaire promises to finance a movie about Moses if the script meets certain standards, Margo does everything she can to land the job, including a reunion with her estranged first love, an influential lawyer with whom she still has unfinished business.

Two other key characters in the novel are Herman Wouk himself and his wife of more than sixty years, Betty Sarah, who, almost against their will, find themselves entangled in the Moses movie when the Australian billionaire insists on Wouk's stamp of approval.

As Wouk and his characters contend with Moses and marriage, and the force of tradition, rebellion, and reunion, The Lawgiver reflects the wisdom of a lifetime. Inspired by the great nineteenth-century novelists, one of America's most beloved twentieth-century authors has now written a remarkable twenty-first-century work of fiction.

The Lawgiver

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#hardcover #protectivecover #formerlibrarybook #americanhistory #oregon #rightwing #constitution

Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff

Los Angeles Times Bestseller

An "epic exploration" of the 2016 right-wing Oregon Occupation--"an excellent microcosm by which we might better understand our difficult national history and distressing political moment" (Maggie Nelson).

In 2016, a group of armed, divinely inspired right-wing protestors led by Ammon Bundy occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in the high desert of eastern Oregon. Encamped in the shadowlands of the republic, insisting that the Federal government had no right to own public land, the occupiers were seen by a divided country as either dangerous extremists dressed up as cowboys, or as heroes insisting on restoring the rule of the Constitution. From the Occupation's beginnings, to the trials of the occupiers in federal court in downtown Portland and their tumultuous aftermaths,Shadowlandsis the resonant, multifaceted story of one of the most dramatic flashpoints in the year that gave us Donald Trump.

Sharing the expansive stage with the occupiers are a host of others--Native American tribal leaders, public-lands ranchers, militia members, environmentalists, federal defense attorneys, and Black Lives Matter activists--each contending in their different ways with the meaning of the American promise of Liberty. Gathering into its vortex the realities of social media technology, history, religion, race, and the environment--this piercing work by Anthony McCann offers us a combination of beautiful writing and high-stakes analysis of our current cultural and political moment.Shadowlandsis a clarifying, exhilarating story of a nation facing an uncertain future and a murky past in a time of great collective reckoning.

Shadowlands

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#hardcover #fiction #protectivecover #formerlibrarybook #dramaticaction #humorous #sweet

In this hilarious follow-up to GONE WITH A HANDSOMER MAN, Charleston pastry chef Teeny Templeton witnesses a murder and discovers that her laywer-boyfriend, Coop O'Malley, has been keeping secrets.

It's not every day that I bake a dozen Red Velvet cakes, learn my boyfriend may have a love child, and I witness a murder.

After Charleston pastry chef, Teeny Templeton, witnesses a murder, she discovers that her lawyer-boyfriend, Coop O'Malley, has been keeping secrets: the victim's ten-year-old daughter may be his child. As more lies explode, Teeny finds herself trapped in Bonaventure, Georgia, a zany"little Savannah," where she must deal with her commitment phobia, gather DNA from a ten-year old child genius, outwit a stalker, decode an encrypted diary, and fend off advances of an ex-beau, a handsome plastic surgeon who's crazy-in-love with her. Teeny's life gets maddeningly complicated by a series of not-so-teeny troubles: an uneasy love triangle, a gossip-mongering tarantula breeder, an wise-cracking Southern Belle with early Alzheimer's, Coop's loveable Chihuahua-toting granny, and clues that point to the illegal trafficking of human organs. But when a suspect is arrested, the bodies keep piling up and Teeny doesn't know who to trust. As the murderers close in, Teeny unearths a revelation that becomes a game-changer and flips her world upside-down.

A Teeny Bit of Trouble

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#hardcover #protectivecover #formerlibrarybook #romance #mystery #romanticmystery #london

An Atlas Catesby Mystery

When a nobleman's mistress is gunned down on the steps of the Covent Garden opera house, brilliant adventurer Atlas Catesby discovers a sinister family connection that compels him to investigate.

London, 1815. Amateur sleuth Atlas Catesby is about to discover the dark side of the bright lights. His long-awaited night at the opera with Lady Lilliana ends abruptly when a notorious courtesan is shot to death in Covent Garden.

The infamous victim was the mistress of the powerful Marquess of Vessey. Atlas believes that the marquess--his former brother in law--is responsible for the long-ago death of Atlas's sister, Phoebe. Atlas seizes the opportunity to potentially avenge his sister's death. But his inquiry is complicated when Phoebe's grown son implores Atlas to help prove Vessey's innocence.

Plunging into the cutthroat backstage life of the theatre community, the adventurer and the noblewoman soon discover that ruthless professional rivalries can escalate into violence, setting the stage for death in Murder at the Opera, D. M. Quincy's third riveting Atlas Catesby mystery set in Regency England.

Murder at the Opera

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A David Slaton Novel

USA Todaybestselling author Ward Larsen's celebrated protagonist, assassin David Slaton, returns for another breathless adventure inAssassin's Silence

Every so often, a great assassin novel comes along: Brad Meltzer'sThe Fifth Assassin, David Baldacci'sThe Hit, Daniel Silva'sThe Kill Artist. Now Ward Larsen brings usAssassin's Silence, featuring David Slaton, hero of Larsen'sAssassin's Gameand the award-winningThe Perfect Assassin.

When it comes to disappearing, David Slaton has few equals. Police in three countries have written off trying to find him. His old employer, Mossad, keeps no forwarding address. Even his wife and son are convinced he is dead. So when an assault team strikes, Slaton is taken by surprise. He kills one man and manages to escape.

Half a world away, in the baleful heat of the Amazon, an obscure air cargo company purchases a derelict airliner. Teams of mechanics work feverishly to make the craft airworthy. On the first flight, the jet plunges toward the ocean.

The CIA assesses the two spectacles: a practiced killer leaving a trail of bodies across Europe, and a large airplane disappearing without a trace. The two affairs are increasingly seen to be intertwined. Langley realizes the killer is a man long thought to be dead, and the lost airliner has been highly modified into a tool of unimaginable terror.

When their worst fears are realized, Langley must trust the one man who can save them: David Slaton, the perfect assassin.

Assassin's Silence

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#hardcover #protectivecover #formerlibrarybook #gripping #psychologicaldrama #drama

Selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2016

From the author of Apple Tree Yard comes a masterful thriller about espionage, love, and redemption.

John Harper is in hiding in a remote hut on a tropical island. As he lies awake at night, listening to the rain on the roof, he believes his life may be in danger. But he is less afraid of what is going to happen than of what he's already done.

In a nearby town, he meets Rita, a woman with her own tragic history. They begin an affair, but can they offer each other redemption? Or do the ghosts of the past always catch up with us in the end?

Flashing back from late 1990s Indonesia to Cold War Europe, Harper's childhood in civil rights-era California, and Indonesia during the massacres of 1965 and the subsequent military dictatorship, Black Water explores some of the darkest events of recent history through the story of one troubled man.

In this gripping follow-up to Apple Tree Yard, Louise Doughty writes with the intelligence, vivid characterization, and moral ambiguity that make her fiction resonate in the reader's mind long after the final page.

Black Water

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His Loving Plan for You in the End Times

A leading scholar of biblical prophecy reinterprets ancient scriptural passages to reveal the plan of a merciful God for a new heaven and a new Earth, as well as His plan for each individual in the new millennium.

The Merciful God of Prophecy

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#protectivecover #formerlibrarybook #hardcover 

One School, How Experts Tried to Fail It, and the Students and Teachers Who Made It Triumph

"This book is a godsend ... a moving portrait for anyone wanting to go beyond the simplified labels and metrics and really understand an urban high school, and its highly individual, resilient, eager and brilliant students and educators." --Dave Eggers, co-founder, 826 National and ScholarMatch

Darrell is a reflective, brilliant young man, who never thought of himself as a good student. He always struggled with his reading and writing skills. Darrell's father, a single parent, couldn't afford private tutors. By the end of middle school, Darrell's grades and his confidence were at an all time low. Then everything changed.

When education journalist Kristina Rizga first met Darrell at Mission High School, he was taking AP calculus class, writing a ten-page research paper, and had received several college acceptance letters. And Darrell was not an exception. More than 80 percent of Mission High seniors go to college every year, even though the school teaches large numbers of English learners and students from poor families.

So, why has the federal government been threatening to close Mission High--and schools like it across the country?

The United States has been on a century long road toward increased standardization in our public schools, which resulted in a system that reduces the quality of education to primarily one metric: standardized test scores. According to this number, Mission High is a "low-performing" school even though its college enrollment, graduation, attendance rates and student surveys are some of the best in the country.

The qualities that matter the most in learning--skills like critical thinking, intellectual engagement, resilience, empathy, self-management, and cultural flexibility--can't be measured by multiple-choice questions designed by distant testing companies, Rizga argues, but they can be detected by skilled teachers in effective, personalized and humane classrooms that work for all students, not just the most motivated ones.

Based on four years of reporting with unprecedented access, the unforgettable, intimate stories in these pages throw open the doors to America's most talked about--and arguably least understood--public school classrooms where the largely invisible voices of our smart, resilient students and their committed educators can offer a clear and hopeful blueprint for what it takes to help all students succeed.

Mission High

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#hardcover #weightloss #betterhealth #protectivecover #formerlibrarybook

Thin-Flu-ence (noun) the Powerful and Surprising Effect Friends, Family, Work, and Environment Have on Weight

Tackling a weight problem is often viewed as a personal responsibility that requires making healthier choices. The latest research, however, shows that external factors--from family and friendships to advertising and the workplace environment--make an equal, if not greater, contribution. Just look at the stats: A person's chance of becoming obese increases by 57 percent if a close friend is obese, 40 percent if a sibling is obese, and 37 percent if a spouse is obese.

That's where Thinfluence comes in. Through a research-based examination of various social, environmental, and policy-based issues, renowned Harvard researchers Dr. Walter Willett and Dr. Malissa Wood examine how relationships, workplace, media, and other factors are affecting readers' weights. Thinfluence doesn't tell readers to ditch their friends and family, change jobs, or move to another state. It offers a clear three-step action plan--analyze, act, influence--for readers to identify hidden factors affecting weight, develop a personal toolbox to combat external effects, and become positive influences on others around them.

Thinfluence

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#hardcover #protectivecover #formerlibrarybook #history #timbuktu #savethepast #thrilling #unforgettable

The Quest for Timbuktu and the Fantastic Mission to Save Its Past

Timbuktu has long been seen as a paradise to Westerners who had, for centuries, led perilous and mostly failed 'discovery' expeditions to the city. It's also legendarily known as the home of thousands of ancient manuscripts so when Al Qaeda surged across Mali in 2012, the eyes of the outside world were once again upon the fabled, now threatened city. A team of librarians and archivists began an unprecedented smuggling operation to save the history of an entire civilisation. English expertly interweaves these two suspenseful strands - the race to Timbuktu and the riveting undercover mission.

The Storied City

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#hardcover #protectivecover #formerlibrarybook #smokefreehome #military

When an unidentified corpse washes ashore at Slapton Sands, the home to 'Operation Tiger' and rehearsal for the D-Day invasion, US Army captain and his partner 'Kaz' are assigned to investigate. Just when Billy and Kaz begin to wrap up their case, they find themselves with not one soggy corpse on their hands but hundreds, following a terrible tragedy during the D-Day rehearsal. Then one of their own men meets a sudden demise too. Was it a heart attack? Or something more sinister?

The Rest Is Silence

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#hardcover #protectivecover #formerlibrarybook #love

Twenty-three years after the publication of his acclaimed novel Mason's Retreat and six years after The Right-Hand Shore, Christopher Tilghman returns to the saga of the Mason and Bayly families in Thomas and Beal in the Midi.Thomas Bayly and his wife, Beal, have run away to France, escaping the laws and prejudices of post-Reconstruction America. The drama in this richly textured novel proceeds in two settings: first in Paris, and then in the Languedoc, where Thomas and Beal begin a new life as winemakers. Beal, indelible, beautiful, and poised, enchants everyone she meets in this strange new land, including a gaggle of artists in the Latin Quarter when they first arrive in Paris. Later, when they've moved to the beautiful and rugged Languedoc, she is torn between the freedoms she experienced in Paris and the return to the farm life she thought she had left behind in America. A moving and delicate portrait of a highly unusual marriage, Thomas and Beal in the Midi is a radiant work of deep insight and peerless imagination about the central dilemma of American history--the legacy of slavery and the Civil War--that explores the many ways that the past has an enduring hold over the present.

Thomas and Beal in the Midi

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#hardcover #fiction #lorriemoore #shortstories #protectivecover #formerlibrarybook

Stories

A collection of eight short stories includes "Debarking," in which a recently divorced man struggles to hold himself together as the United States prepares to invade Iraq; and "Foes," in which a political argument at a Georgetown fundraiser goes awry.

Bark

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#hardcover #protectivecover #formerlibrarybook #captivating

After her mother dies, 16-year-old Kate Quinn meets the father she did not know she had, joins his presidential campaign and falls for a rebellious boy, but when what she truly believes flies in the face of the campaign's talking points, Kate must decide what is best for her. Simultaneous eBook.

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James Rapson & Craig English

Anxious to Please

Judith Stoletzky

Yoga While You Wait

Iris Martin Cohen

Last Call on Decatur Street

Bradley H. Patterson

The White House Staff

William Styron

Havanas in Camelot

Eugene H. Peterson

A Year with Jesus

John Grisham

The Broker

Arthur Gelb; Barbara Gelb

By Women Possessed

James Patterson; Andrew Gross

Judge and Jury

Jack Coughlin; Donald A. Davis

Long Shot

Herman Wouk

The Lawgiver

Anthony McCann

Shadowlands

Michael Lee West

A Teeny Bit of Trouble

D. M. Quincy

Murder at the Opera

Ward Larsen

Assassin's Silence

Louise Doughty

Black Water

Tim Lahaye

The Merciful God of Prophecy

Kristina Rizga

Mission High

Walter Willett; Malissa Wood; Dan Childs

Thinfluence

Charlie English

The Storied City

James R. Benn

The Rest Is Silence

Christopher Tilghman

Thomas and Beal in the Midi

Lorrie Moore

Bark

Jenn Marie Thorne

The Wrong Side of Right