Ray Porter
Gorgeous young women in revealing poses; extravagant mansion parties packed with celebrities; a hot-tub grotto, elegant smoking jackets, and round rotating beds; the hedonistic pursuit of uninhibited sex—put these images together and a single name springs to mind: Hugh Hefner. From his spectacular launch of Playboy magazine and the dizzying expansion of his leisure empire to his recent television hit The Girls Next Door, the publisher has
...The Washington Post's former Baghdad bureau chief, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, takes us into the Green Zone, headquarters for the American occupation in Iraq. In this bubble separated from wartime realities, the task of reconstructing a devastated nation competes with the distractions of a Little America—a half-dozen bars, a disco, a shopping mall—much of it run by Halliburton. While qualified Americans willing to serve in Iraq are screened
...26) Dispatches
From the writer whose first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, defined a generation comes a collection of stories drawn from his nearly three-decade career. Whether set in New England, Los Angeles, New York, or the South, they unveil the manic flux of our society as they capture various stages of adulthood: a young man confronting the class system at a summer resort; a young woman holed up in a remote cabin while her boyfriend campaigns for the highest
...28) Flat spin
The irresistible David Freed's first mystery is a stay-up-late-to-finish thriller.
Based in sunny Rancho Bonita—"California's Monaco" as the city's moneyed minions like to call it—Cordell Logan is a literate, sardonic flight instructor and aspiring Buddhist with dwindling savings and a shadowy past. When his beautiful ex-wife, Savannah, shows up out of the blue to tell him that her husband has been murdered in Los Angeles, Logan is
..."A rare gut-punch writer, full of grit and insight, who we will be happily reading for years to come." —Gregg Hurwitz, New York Times bestselling author of the Orphan X series?
In this third high-octane thriller in the "seriously good" (Lee Child,...
In 1983, Muhammad Yunus established Grameen, a bank devoted to providing the poorest citizens of Bangladesh with miniscule loans. Believing that credit is a basic human right, not the privilege of a few, Yunus aimed to support that spark of personal initiative and enterprise by which the poor might lift themselves out of poverty forever. Grameen Bank now provides over 2.5 billion dollars of micro-loans to more than two million families in rural
...Welcome to the tragedy-of-the-month club! In one nine-month period, Mark Millhone's youngest son nearly dies from birth complications, his oldest son is injured in a household accident, his father is diagnosed with prostate cancer, and his mother has a heart attack and passes away. In the aftermath of this year-from-hell, his marriage also begins to fray.
He deals with this as only a "real man" could: he logs on to eBay and bids on his dream
...33) The Devil's hand
From the humble heights of a Class-A pitcher's mound tothe deflating lows of sleeping on his gun-toting grandmother's air mattress,veteran reliever Dirk Hayhurst steps out of the bullpen to deliver the bestpitch of his career—a raw and unflinching account of his life in the minorleagues. Whether training tarantulas to protect his room from thievingemployees in a backwater hotel or absorbing the gentle mockery of somenot-quite-starstruck schoolchildren,
...In the go-go nineties, Jordan Belfort proved that you didn't need to be on Wall Street to make a fortune in the stock market. His company was good at separating wealthy investors from their cash and spending it as fast as it came in—on hookers, yachts, and drugs. But when Jordan's empire crashed, the man who had become legend was cornered into a five-year stint cooperating with the feds.
In this astounding account, Belfort tells the true story
...David Farland delivers the second in his high fantasy Runelords series, featuring a complex system of magic and a wondrous, expertly realized world. Raj Ahten, ruler of Indhopal, has used enough forcibles to transform himself into the ultimate warrior: The Sum of All Men. Ahten seeks to bring all of humanity under his rule, destroying anyone in his path. But young Prince Gaborn has fulfilled a two-thousand-year-old prophecy and become the Earth
...Muhammad Yunus, the practical visionary who pioneered microcredit and won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his world-changing efforts, here develops his revolutionary new concept that promises to redeem the failed promise of free enterprise: social business. Designed to fill the gap between profit-making and human needs, social business applies entrepreneurial thinking to problems like poverty, hunger, pollution, and disease, creating self-supporting
...In 1956 a plane bearing mysterious cargo takes off from a small airport outside Los Angeles and disappears into a raging storm. Nearly sixty years later, while flying over the Sierra Nevada, retired military assassin turned civilian flight instructor and would-be Buddhist Cordell Logan catches a glint of sunlight on metal and spots what appears to be an aircraft wreckage. His life will never be the same.
Logan and his beautiful ex-wife, Savannah,
...