This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

Michael Tomatoes, artist, sculptor and manic-depressive, is a man at pains to discover the nature of self, even if that means being someone else. A tool of fate, he sticks his fingers in the electric socket of life and wonders about suffering and loss, flirting dangerously with melancholy. Is his obsession with numbers the result of a robotic condition, metal under the skin, or a paranoic attempt to decipher the intricacies of a more mundane and human predicament? That is: breathing, sucking in and blowing out all those other selves that compose a reality at once familiar and strange.

With added jokes.

Michael Tomatoes, artist, sculptor and manic-depressive, is a man at pains to discover the nature of self, even if that means being someone else. A tool of fate, he sticks his fingers in the electric socket of life and wonders about suffering and loss, flirting dangerously with melancholy. Is his obsession with numbers the result of a robotic condition, metal under the skin, or a paranoic attempt to decipher the intricacies of a more mundane and human predicament? That is: breathing, sucking in and blowing out all those other selves that compose a reality at once familiar and strange.

With added jokes.

This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

Another enduring work by the brilliant historian Maurice Collis. First published in 1946 and long out of print, Foreign Mud is a marvelous historical reconstruction of the events surrounding the illegal trade of opium in Canton during the 1830s and the Opium Wars between Britain and China that followed. Based largely on voluminous documents written by British doctors, missionaries, merchants, and government officials, Collis's tale, far from being a dry assemblage of dates and facts, is a fascinating example of twentieth-century Orientalist literature: "...you must picture the broad river puckered with little waves, the green sweep of the rice, on the horizon blue hills; you must conjure the many sorts of passing craft, the Mandarin house-boats, dainty and lacquered, the streamers and lanterns of passenger boats, the high tilted junks with demon-painted sterns; and you must plunge these images into a light more intense than we know in these countries, into a warmer wind and an air, purer and more scented than we can sniff except in dreams." Collis describes, in all its complexities, a moment in time when China is forced, after more than two thousand years of self-contained sufficiency, to open its doors to the culture, commerce, and evangelization of the West—the casus belli, foreign mud: the opium the British grew and shipped from India. Interspersed with various maps, plans, and illustrations, Foreign Mud is a historical narrative the reader will find more entertaining than any Spielberg film.

A guide to borderline personality disorder, which is a very complex, serious, and widespread psychiatric illness. A painful and often intractable illness, it involves pervasive instability of emotions, behaviour, relationships and self-image. This is a full introduction to the disorder, which brings together the current thinking and research of experts in the field. It explains what this illness is, what causes it, and what can be done about it. The illness is presented from various psychoanalytical, biological, historical, social and feminist perspectives, while noting the current focus on the trauma histories of many borderline patients.

'I was so captivated I didn't want to put it down.'

What a buzz I got when I read that lead to a 5 star review.  Here's more from that reviewer:

'Ms Woods has the rare gift of painting vivid, action-packed pictures with her words. I was there with the characters, smelling the ocean, feeling the sun, hearing the waves ... '

So, what's the story about?  Here's a taste:

Noel Valentine--what's in her past that impels her to save a stranger's life knowing that it could endanger hers?
In hot tropical Australia she pulls a stranger from a burning car but can't save his passenger.
When the stranger shows up back in her home town of Sydney and asks for a place to stay, why does she agree? Especially given he could have been an assassin hired to kill his passenger. Especially given that she's pitching to win as a client the medical technology company that seems to be central to whatever is going on. A company that both assassin and victim had connections with. A company with questionable markets and equally questionable front men.

"Military coup d’état is an immoral and illegal means to ascend to power. In Africa, the West directly or indirectly sponsors coups. France and the U.S. use this modus vivendi to establish territorial control and economical supremacy in Africa. As such, their actions contribute to the destabilization of Africa, and threaten international peace and world security.
 
Indeed, ambiguity and unreasonableness are evident on this matter; while the West presses Africa with good governance, democracy, and respect of law, it also sabotages the establishment of such principles and values through support of coups and rebellions.
 
Worst, the replacement of a legitimate and democratic regime with a military is a license to massive violations of human rights. Undeniably, a military regime is likely to foster international terrorism."

"Military coup d’état is an immoral and illegal means to ascend to power. In Africa, the West directly or indirectly sponsors coups. France and the U.S. use this modus vivendi to establish territorial control and economical supremacy in Africa. As such, their actions contribute to the destabilization of Africa, and threaten international peace and world security.
 
Indeed, ambiguity and unreasonableness are evident on this matter; while the West presses Africa with good governance, democracy, and respect of law, it also sabotages the establishment of such principles and values through support of coups and rebellions.
 
Worst, the replacement of a legitimate and democratic regime with a military is a license to massive violations of human rights. Undeniably, a military regime is likely to foster international terrorism."

From its attention-grabbing opening scene of a body found in an elevator in the Hotel Bristol in Vienna to its surprise ending at Interpol headquarters in Lyon, the Interpol Imbroglio will hold your interest. When delegates at a General Assembly of Interpol, the international police organization start dropping dead, fear sets in that the law enforcement community itself--or perhaps the entire city of Vienna--may be the target. The plot involves organizational politics, bio-chemical cocktails, a shady deal at a cyber-café, fugitive flight and extradition issues, and an unexpected romance between an Iraqi colonel and a German policewoman as war with Saddam Hussein looms. As a new fiction writer on an untapped subject, the author calls on her years of experience living in Vienna as a student when her father was stationed there with the U.S. Army and later as an attorney in the Office of International Affairs at the United States Department of Justice to provide both the inspiration and the expertise for this fast-paced story of intrigue and murder at the highest levels of the international police community.