What Every Successful Lawyer Needs to Know about Accounting (Corporate Law and Practice Course Handbook Series)

$The Insider\'s Guide to Household Staffing$
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The Insider\'s Guide to Household Staffing
David M. Gonzalez
Manufacturer: Trafford Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1553696034
Release Date: 2006-07-06

Book Description

A reference guide for Private Service Professionals and Household Employers.

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Virtual ChemLab: General Chemistry Laboratories - Version 2.5 (Instructor's Manual)

ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0131734687

Product Description

Publisher: Edition: second

Book Description

Provides a synopsis of the latest advances and developments at international laser research facilities including Gekko XII, the US National Ignition Facility and the leading European Centres, such as the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. This volume includes invited reviews, research reports and results on theoretical and experimental aspects of work carried out to date. It identifies future areas for research activity, in particular in the need for higher gain from the developing laser systems. Coverage ranges from short pulse laser interaction with solid and gas targets, through radiative transfer, coronal interactions, hydrodynamic instabilities, and inertial confinement fusion to the latest advances in high power laser technology. It will be a necessary reference for researchers in plasma, optical, atomic, molecular, and condensed matter physics, who need to be aware of laser technology in their field of application.

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Yann Martel's imaginative and unforgettable Life of Pi is a magical reading experience, an endless blue expanse of storytelling about adventure, survival, and ultimately, faith. The precocious son of a zookeeper, 16-year-old Pi Patel is raised in Pondicherry, India, where he tries on various faiths for size, attracting "religions the way a dog attracts fleas." Planning a move to Canada, his father packs up the family and their menagerie and they hitch a ride on an enormous freighter. After a harrowing shipwreck, Pi finds himself adrift in the Pacific Ocean, trapped on a 26-foot lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a spotted hyena, a seasick orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker ("His head was the size and color of the lifebuoy, with teeth"). It sounds like a colorful setup, but these wild beasts don't burst into song as if co-starring in an anthropomorphized Disney feature. After much gore and infighting, Pi and Richard Parker remain the boat's sole passengers, drifting for 227 days through shark-infested waters while fighting hunger, the elements, and an overactive imagination. In rich, hallucinatory passages, Pi recounts the harrowing journey as the days blur together, elegantly cataloging the endless passage of time and his struggles to survive: "It is pointless to say that this or that night was the worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I've made none the champion."

An award winner in Canada (and winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize), Life of Pi, Yann Martel's second novel, should prove to be a breakout book in the U.S. At one point in his journey, Pi recounts, "My greatest wish--other than salvation--was to have a book. A long book with a never-ending story. One that I could read again and again, with new eyes and fresh understanding each time." It's safe to say that the fabulous, fablelike Life of Pi is such a book. --Brad Thomas Parsons

Book Description

The son of a zookeeper, Pi Patel has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior and a fervent love of stories. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes.

The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with Richard Parker for 227 days while lost at sea. When they finally reach the coast of Mexico, Richard Parker flees to the jungle, never to be seen again. The Japanese authorities who interrogate Pi refuse to believe his story and press him to tell them "the truth." After hours of coercion, Pi tells a second story, a story much less fantastical, much more conventional--but is it more true?

Customer Reviews:

yeah, I'd recommend it.......2007-10-10

I kinda would like to rate this book a 4, because there are a few things I didn't like. I didn't like everything getting 'over-explained' in the end. That wasn't necessary. It was like the author didn't think the reader was smart enough to keep track of what was going on. That did a real disservice to the book.

And I didn't like all the start - I mean, too much opinion that seemed like an rookie blog.

But, I did recommend the book, and I wanted my Mom to read it and talk to her about it. So, what does that say? I don't do that too often. So, I gotta give it a five.

Read it and tell me what you think. :)

Fiction, Fable, Fantasy.......2007-10-10

Yann Martel's Life of Pi is at the least, a first rate adventure yarn. Even the simplest reader needs just to suspend a small amount of disbelief to join in the fun. There is enough texture to the writing-detail of place and experience-that the book is almost cinematic. You could imagine this being filmed as a simple 'survival in a lifeboat' story.
What makes this such a wonderful tale is that each little piece-the man-eating island, the orangutan, Pi's wonderful real name, is jolting and provocative. It's hard to hear the stories without connecting them to some other fantasy or alternative reality.
At the end, Pi's rescue and redemption are really nothing more than the technique of fantasy applied to the story itself. I'm sorry for the folks who were disappointed that this wasn't one kind of book and I hope they get a chance to experience the pleasure of it being a very good fable, fiction and fantasy.

----Lynn Hoffman, author of New Short Course in Wine,The and the slightly fabulous bang BANG: A Novel

What a fantastic ride!.......2007-10-07

A great book should not only answer questions, but lead us to ask questions about the very nature of our lives: our perceptions and beliefs. This book delivers all of that and more. Life of Pi is an amazing literary journey that carries the reader through the life of a young boy as he experiences life and becomes a man, a postmodern bildungsroman. It's all here: relationships with parents, God, nature, humanity, love, adventure, a quest for meaning, and a survival story. This is the stuff life is made of!

Martel is an apt storyteller, and this tale drips with allegory, symbolism, and skillful description. I didn't want it to end. I felt so connected to the story and characters, unlike any story I've read recently. I'm so grateful for the journey. Wow.

From interest to anger.......2007-10-05

This book plays on the reader's gullibility. I was willing to believe up to the man eating island. Then I just got upset. Is this book supposed to help me find God or is it supposed to prove that I am gullible enough to believe in a "better" story? Where do you find 16 year old boys who spend pages philosophizing on tigers while their own life is in great danger? The Boy Scout in my enjoyed the survival story of Pi, but the amazement of survival becomes overshadowed by things that don't add up. It made me lose sight of the meaning of the story. Then part 3 comes along and I am more confused about which of two unbelievable stories I am supposed to believe. It reminds me of Jesus' parables where even his direct reports couldn't understand. It leaves me asking "Why?". Why don't you just give me a story that clearly supports your point?

An Entertaining and Unique Piece of Art.......2007-10-05

I literally just finished reading this book a few minutes ago, and the first thing I did was come to this site to see what others said about it. I think this is going to be one of those pieces that grows on me the further away I get from it, like how I felt about the movie American Beauty, which by the way turned out to be one of my favorite movies after all.

My first feeling after I was done with it was of shock, but the longer I sit here, thinking about it and reading the negative "1 star" reviews, the more I find myself defending and liking it. All the people that said it was "unbelievable" in their reviews need to seriously get a grip. This is a work of FICTION, and an interesting and entertaining one at that! When did we start berating artists for creating works that are unbelievable? So should we bad mouth the movie ET for depicting a boy flying around on his bike with an alien, or the Harry Potter series for assuming that there can actually be wizards and witches living amongst us in secret? Come on, those are some of the most beloved works in pop culture history, and they, like Life of Pi, are FICTON. Isn't that why we read and watch fiction? To be entertained with a good story and take our minds off of our mundane lives? Besides, that's exactly what Pi was trying to tell the Japanese men at the end....sometimes we all just need a good story to make us forget all the bad stuff that we have to endure in the real world. At least that's why I enjoy it.

With that being said, I thought the Life of Pi was a very entertaining read. Yann Martel does a great job of infusing his own brand of philosophical musings about God, country and family into a straight good old fashioned piece of adventure themed story telling. If you're squeamish or have a hard time dealing with violence and extreme situations, then you probably won't be able to get too into this book. I found myself grimacing a few times actually, but it's not worse than most of what you find on the Discovery Channel on any given afternoon. Also, if you don't enjoy a fluid, sometimes digressive, often ambling narrative and prefer the style of more straightforward prose such as that of Dean Koontz, then this might not interest you as well.

The only other book I've read recently that reminds me of this one is the very popular Cormac McCarthy Pulitzer Prize winner and Oprah Book Club selection, The Road. They both chronicle the journey of a boy (in The Road's case, a boy and his father) beating unbelievable odds and inconceivable circumstances to try and survive after a catastrophic event. Both are also written in a way that makes you feel as if you are experiencing the distress of the main characters, but in opposite ways. The Road has short, grammatically incorrect sentences that convey the urgency and erratic behavior of the parent and child on the run and trying to stay alive. In Life of Pi, the author sometimes rambles on in a nonsensical way, the same way your brain would function if you were suffering from hallucinations while nearing death on a lifeboat in the Pacific for over 200 days. I think that the authors' styles are what take both of the stories from just a couple of unremarkable novels you'd find in the discount bin, to truly memorable works of art.

In fact, I'm finding it very discomfiting that so many people gave it such bad reviews. I read through some of them, and I think the negative things they had to say about it says more about them than Martel's work. One review says they wish they were illiterate so they wouldn't have had to endure it and it made them vomit and want to scratch their skin off in the shower like a drug addict. Gee...I don't think I have to explain myself on that one. Others said it was boring, which makes me question our society's attention span more than anything because many of those same reviewers said they didn't even finish reading it. These same people are the ones that stopped watching the tv show Lost at the beginning of last season for the same reason. Well, if they would have just stuck around for a little while longer, in both cases, they would have been in for a pleasant surprise.

*Spoiler Alert in this Paragraph only*
Also, a common theme in the bad reviews was their distain for the ending. I thought that the ending was what really made the book something special. While anyone with half a brain would know that his original story had to have been false, whether he knew it or not since his delirium was quite advanced at some of his lowest points, the fact that he actually gives an alternate version of the story to the Japanese men, felt like a big payoff to me. I'm the kinda gal that likes to know what really happened...it helps me to bond with the characters and ultimately enjoy the story more in the end.

I was starting to get really upset with all the "1 star" reviews, until I did the math. A staggering 78% (as of today) gave it 4 or 5 stars which means they liked or loved it. Well, knowing that at least restored a little bit of my faith in the general public, because though it's not perfect nor the best thing I've ever read, it definitely doesn't deserve to be called horrible.

If you read a lot, like I do, and are looking for a unique story told in a distinctive style, and have an open mind, then definitely give this one a try.

Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film (Culture and the Moving Image)

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Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film (Culture and the Moving Image)
Paula J. Massood
Manufacturer: Temple University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1592130038

Book Description

In Black City Cinema, Paula Massood shows how popular films reflected the massive social changes that resulted from the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to cities in the North, West, and Mid-West during the first three decades of the twentieth century. By the onset of the Depression, the Black population had become primarily urban, transforming individual lives as well as urban experience and culture.

Massood probes into the relationship of place and time, showing how urban settings became an intrinsic element of African American film as Black people became more firmly rooted in urban spaces and more visible as historical and political subjects. Illuminating the intersections of film, history, politics, and urban discourse, she considers the chief genres of African American and Hollywood narrative film: the black cast musicals of the 1920s and the "race" films of the early sound era to blaxploitation and hood films, as well as the work of Spike Lee toward the end of the century. As it examines such a wide range of films over much of the twentieth century, this book offers a unique map of Black representations in film.

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Vida De Pi / Life of Pi (Coleccion Ancora Y Delfin, V. 978)
Yann Martel , and Bianca Southwood
Manufacturer: Destino Ediciones
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Life of Pi : A Novel

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It's a little too short

Bookclub-in-a-box Discusses Life of Pi, the novel by Yann Martel (Bookclub in a Box Discusses)
Yann Martel
Manufacturer: Bookclub-in-a-Box
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Glass Castle: A Memoir

ASIN: 0973398477
Release Date: 2005-05-23

Book Description

The story of a boy, a boat, and a tiger promises an adventure which some may find hard to believe. However, with the Bookclub-in-a-Box discussion companion to Yann Martel's novel, Life of Pi, readers begin to consider how to believe the unbelievable. While Yann Martel takes readers on a voyage of discovery, Bookclub-in-a-Box interprets his exploration: can miracles exist? what is the power of faith? what guarantees successful survival? Let Bookclub-in-a-Box take readers into Pi's mind, the influences in his life, his physical struggle to survive at sea and his spiritual struggle to understand his own faith and his place in the world. There are a great many deep concepts to reflect upon in this small fictional narrative, and Bookclub-in-a-Box presents them for thoughtful consideration.

Customer Reviews:

It's a little too short.......2006-11-14

The book is nice, but too thin for this price.

By Royal Command: The Official Life and Personal Reminiscences of Colonel Curtis Pi Ehu Iaukea at the Court of Hawaii's Rulers

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By Royal Command: The Official Life and Personal Reminiscences of Colonel Curtis Pi Ehu Iaukea at the Court of Hawaii's Rulers
Curtis Pi Ehu Iaukea
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The Bridge of Life: From Reality to Mystery

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Augusto PI SUNER
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Bookclub-In-A-Box Discusses the Novel Life of Pi

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Bookclub-In-A-Box Discusses the Novel Life of Pi
Marilyn Herbert
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M. D. Augusto Pi Suner
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Democracy as a way of life (The Kappa Delta Pi lecture series)

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