Böcker utgivna av Harper Perennial

The Development of an Extraordinary SpeciesWe human beings share 98 percent of our genes with chimpanzees. Yet humans are the dominant species on the planet -- having founded civilizations and religions, developed intricate and diverse forms of communication, learned science, built cities, and created breathtaking works of art -- while chimps remain animals concerned primarily with the basic necessities of survival. What is it about that two percent difference in DNA that has created such a divergence between evolutionary cousins? In this fascinating, provocative, passionate, funny, endlessly entertaining work, renowned Pulitzer Prize?winning author and scientist Jared Diamond explores how the extraordinary human animal, in a remarkably short time, developed the capacity to rule the world . . . and the means to irrevocably destroy it.

The Dramatic History of Iraq in One Concise VolumeThe destinies of Iraq and America will be tightly intertwined into the foreseeable future due to the U.S. incursion into this complex, perplexing desert nation -- the latest in a long history of violent outside interventions. A country sitting atop the world's largest supply of crude oil, Iraq will continue to play an essential role in global economics and in Middle Eastern politics for many decades to come. Therefore, it is more important than ever for Westerners to have a clear understanding of the volatile, enigmatic "Land of Two Rivers" -- its turbulent past and its looming possibilities. In this acutely penetrating and endlessly fascinating study, acknowledged Middle East authority William R. Polk presents a comprehensive history of the tumultuous events that shaped modern Iraq, while offering well-reasoned judgments on what we can expect there in the years to come.

After enduring years of hunger, deprivation, and devastating loss at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, ten-year-old Loung Ung became the "lucky child," the sibling chosen to accompany her eldest brother to America while her one surviving sister and two brothers remained behind. In this poignant and elegiac memoir, Loung recalls her assimilation into an unfamiliar new culture while struggling to overcome dogged memories of violence and the deep scars of war. In alternating chapters, she gives voice to Chou, the beloved older sister whose life in war-torn Cambodia so easily could have been hers. Highlighting the harsh realities of chance and circumstance in times of war as well as in times of peace, Lucky Child is ultimately a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and to the salvaging strength of family bonds.

"[Alarcón's] tales, set largely in the hardscrabble world of Lima, build with all the power of a Flannery O'Connor story: a gentle enough start, an innocent setting, and before long the reader is adrift in a drama that defies the imagination--with characters that live long after the book is closed." -- Washington Post Book World In this exquisite story collection, Daniel Alarcón moves from Third World urban centers to the fault lines that divide nations and people to illuminate wars, both national and internal, waged in jungles, across the borders, in the streets of Lima, and in the intimacy of New York apartments. He tells of lives at the margins: an unrepentant terrorist remembers where it all began, a would-be emigrant contemplates the ramifications of leaving and never coming back, a reporter turns in his pad and pencil for the inglorious costume of a street clown. War by Candlelight is a devastating portrait of a world in flux from an extraordinary new voice in literary fiction, one you will not soon forget.

"Francine Prose has a knack for getting to the heart of human nature. . . . We are allowed to enter the moral dilemmas of fascinating characters whose emotional lives are strung out by the same human frailties, secrets and insecurities we all share." --USA TodayOne spring afternoon, Vincent Nolan, a young neo-Nazi walks into the office of a human rights foundation headed by Meyer Maslow, a charismatic Holocaust survivor. Vincent announces that he wants to make a radical change. But what is Maslow to make of this rough-looking stranger with Waffen SS tattoos who says that his mission is to save guys like him from becoming guys like him? As Vincent gradually turns into the sort of person who might actually be able to do that, he also begins to transform everyone around him, including Maslow himself. Masterfully plotted, darkly comic, A Changed Man poses essential questions about human nature, morality, and the capacity for change, illuminating the everyday transactions, both political and personal, in our lives.

The rivalry between the brilliant seventeenth-century Italian architects Gianlorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini is the stuff of legend. Enormously talented and ambitious artists, they met as contemporaries in the building yards of St. Peter's in Rome, became the greatest architects of their era by designing some of the most beautiful buildings in the world, and ended their lives as bitter enemies. Engrossing and impeccably researched, full of dramatic tension and breathtaking insight, The Genius in the Design is the remarkable tale of how two extraordinary visionaries schemed and maneuvered to get the better of each other and, in the process, created the spectacular Roman cityscape of today.

"A book that will leave no one indifferent, and no one affected in quite the same way." --New York TimesA superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth centurySimone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her class, and striking out on her own with an intellectual and existential ambition exceedingly rare in a young woman in the 1920s.Beauvoir vividly evokes her friendships, love interests, mentors, and the early days of the most important relationship of her life, with fellow student Jean-Paul Sartre, against the backdrop of a turbulent political time.

By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, prose magician Michael Chabon conjured the golden age of comic books, interwining history, legend and story-telling verve. In The Final Solution, he has condensed his boundless vision to create a short, suspenseful tale of compassion and wit that re-imagines the classic 19th-century detective story.In deep retirement in the English countryside, an 89-year old man, vaguely recollected by the locals as a once-famous detective, is more concerned with his bookkeeping than his fellow man. Into his life wanders Linus Steinman, nine years old and mute, who has escaped from Nazi Germany with his sole companion: an African grey parrot. What is the meaning of the mysterious strings of German numbers the bird spews out--a top-secret SS code? The keys to a series of Swiss bank accounts? Or do they hold a significance at once more prosaic and far more sinister?Though the solution to this last case may be beyond even the reach of the once famed sleuth, the true story of the boy and his parrot is subtly revealed to the reader in a wrenching resolution to this brilliant homage. The Final Solution is a work from a master story-teller at the height of his powers.

Not unlike the elusive figure played by Greta Garbo, the real Queen Christina stood among the most flamboyant and controversial figures of the seventeenth century. All of Sweden could not contain her ambition or quench her thirst for adventure. Freed from her crown, she cut a breathtaking path across Europe -- spending madly, seeking out a more majestic throne, and stirring up trouble wherever she went. With a dazzling narrative voice and unerring sense of the period, Veronica Buckley goes beyond historical myth to breathe life into an extraordinary woman who set the world on fire and became an icon of her age -- a time of enormous change when Europe stood at the crossroads of religion and science, antiquity and modernity, war and peace.This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

"Made up of poems that are so original in their style and so startlingly accomplished in their confessional voice that they helped change the direction of contemporary poetry, Ariel is a masterpiece." -- New York ObserverSylvia Plath's famous collection, as she intended it.When Sylvia Plath died, she not only left behind a prolific life but also her unpublished literary masterpiece, Ariel. When her husband, Ted Hughes, first brought this collection to the public, it garnered worldwide acclaim, but it wasn't the draft Sylvia had wanted her readers to see. This facsimile edition restores, for the first time, Plath's original manuscript--including handwritten notes--and her own selection and arrangement of poems. This edition also includes in facsimile the complete working drafts of her poem "Ariel," which provide a rare glimpse into the creative process of a beloved writer. This publication introduces a truer version of Plath's works, and will alter her legacy forever.

Although frequently overlooked between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the War of 1812 tested a rising generation of American leaders; unified the United States with a renewed sense of national purpose; and set the stage for westward expansion from Mackinac Island to the Gulf of Mexico. USS Constitution, "Old Ironsides," proved the mettle of the fledgling American navy; Oliver Hazard Perry hoisted a flag boasting, "Don't Give Up the Ship"; and Andrew Jackson's ragged force stood behind it's cotton bales at New Orleans and bested the pride of British regulars. Here are the stories of commanding generals such as America's double-dealing James Wilkinson, Great Britain's gallant Sir Isaac Brock, Canada's heroine farm wife Laura Secord, and country doctor William Beanes, whose capture set the stage for Francis Scott Key to write "The Star-Spangled Banner." During the War of 1812, the United States cast off its cloak of colonial adolescence and -- with both humiliating and glorious moments -- found the fire that was to forge a nation.This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

The tenth book in David Feldman's bestselling Imponderables(R) series, packed with even more answers to perplexing questions and solutions to everyday mysteriesEvery day, we are confronted with innumerable small mysteries, which puzzle and confound. In his latest book, David Feldman answers 100 new and even more perplexing questions about food, popular culture, the human body, science, and more, such as: Why do pianos have 88 keys?Why is there no light in the freezer?And, of course, Do elephants jump?Like the other books in the Imponderables series, Do Elephants Jump? is in a question/answer format, with questions sent in by readers and fans of the series, and answers painstakingly researched and offered in Feldman's trademark humorous style. This tenth book in the series is complete with a master index to all the Imponderables(R) books, and charming illustrations by longtime collaborator Kassie Schwan.

"David Laskin deploys historical fact of the finest grain to tell the story of a monstrous blizzard that caught the settlers of the Great Plains utterly by surprise. . . . This is a book best read with a fire roaring in the hearth and a blanket and box of tissues near at hand." -- Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City"Heartbreaking. . . . This account of the 1888 blizzard reads like a thriller." -- Entertainment WeeklyThe gripping true story of an epic prairie snowstorm that killed hundreds of newly arrived settlers and cast a shadow on the promise of the American frontier.January 12, 1888, began as an unseasonably warm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mild that children walked to school without coats and gloves. But that afternoon, without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently changed. One moment the air was calm; the next the sky exploded in a raging chaos of horizontal snow and hurricane-force winds. Temperatures plunged as an unprecedented cold front ripped through the center of the continent.By the next morning, some five hundred people lay dead on the drifted prairie, many of them children who had perished on their way home from country schools. In a few terrifying hours, the hopes of the pioneers had been blasted by the bitter realities of their harsh environment. Recent immigrants from Germany, Norway, Denmark, and the Ukraine learned that their free homestead was not a paradise but a hard, unforgiving place governed by natural forces they neither understood nor controlled.With the storm as its dramatic, heartbreaking focal point, The Children's Blizzard captures this pivotal moment in American history by tracing the stories of five families who were forever changed that day. David Laskin has produced a masterful portrait of a tragic crucible in the settlement of the American heartland.The P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Throughout time, from ancient Rome to modern Britain, the great empires built and maintained their domination through force of arms and political power. But not the United States. America has dominated the world in a new, peaceful, and pervasive way -- through the continued creation of staggering wealth. In this authoritative, engrossing history, John Steele Gordon captures as never before the true source of our nation's global influence: wealth and the capacity to create more of it.This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Trivia lovers and other browsers will be unable to resist this delightful compendium of little-known but often-argued facts, from the bestselling author of "When Do Fish Sleep?."

"In this insightful, warm and groundbreaking work of reporting, Abigail Garner addresses the most challenging issues that arise among gay parents and their families."-- Noelle Howey, author of Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods--My Mother's, My Father's, and MineAbigail Garner was five years old when her parents divorced and her dad came out as gay. Like the millions of children growing up in these families today, she often found herself in the middle of the political and moral debates surrounding lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) parenting.Drawing on a decade of community organizing, and interviews with more than fifty grown sons and daughters of LGBT parents, Garner addresses such topics as coming out to children, facing homophobia at school, co-parenting with ex-partners, the impact of AIDS, and the children's own sexuality.Both practical and deeply personal, Families Like Mine provides an invaluable insider's perspective for LGBT parents, their families, and their allies.

What is the real legacy of divorce? To answer this question, Constance Ahrons, Ph.D., interviewed one hundred and seventy-three grown children whose divorcing parents she had interviewed twenty years earlier for her landmark study, the basis of which was the highly acclaimed book The Good Divorce. What she has learned is both heartening and significant.Challenging the stereotype that children of divorce are emotionally troubled, drug abusing, academically challenged, and otherwise failing, Dr. Ahrons reveals that most children can and do adapt, and that many even thrive in the face of family change. Although divorce is never easy for any family, she shows that it does not have to destroy children's lives or lead to a family breakdown. With the insight of these grown children and the advice of this gifted family therapist, divorcing parents will find helpful road maps identifying both the benefits and the harms to which postdivorce children are exposed and, ultimately, what they can do to maintain family bonds.

Previously titled Father of Frankenstein, this acclaimed novel was the basis for the 1998 film starring Sir Ian McKellen, Lynn Redgrave, and Brendan Fraser. It journeys back to 1957 Los Angeles, where James Whale, the once-famous director of such classics as Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, is living in retirement, haunted by his past. Rescuing him from his too-vivid imagination is his gardener, a handsome ex-marine. The friendship between these two very different men is sometimes tentative, sometimes touching, often dangerous--and always captivating.This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

On October 12, 1972, an Uruguayan Air Force plane carrying a teamof rugby players crashed in the remote snowy peaks of the Andes. Ten weeks later, only sixteen of the forty-five passengers were found alive. This is the story of those ten weeks spent in the shelter of the plane's fuselage without food and with scarcely any hope of a rescue. The survivors protected and helped one another, and came to the difficult conclusion that to live meant doing the unimaginable. Confronting nature at its most furious, two brave young men risked their lives to hike through the mountains looking for help -- and ultimately found it.This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Ponder, if you will ...Has anyone ever seen a live Cornish game hen?Why do quarterbacks say "Hut"?Why do "sea" gulls congregate in parking lots of shopping centers?What does the "Q" in Q-Tips stand for?Pop culture guru David Feldman demystifies these questions and much more in Are Lobsters Ambidextrous? Part of the Imponderables® series?the unchallenged source of answers to civilization's everyday mysteries?and charmingly illustrated by Kassie Schwan, this book provides you with information that encyclopedias, dictionaries, and almanacs just don't have. And think about it, where else are you going to find out what happens to the caffeine left over from making decaffeinated coffee?

A family without men, the Birches live gloriously offbeat lives in the lush, green backwoods of North Carolina. Radiant, headstrong Sophia and her shy, brilliant daughter, Margaret, possess powerful charms to ward off loneliness, despair, and the human misery that often beats a path to their door. And they are protected by the eccentric wisdom and muscular love of the remarkable matriarch Charlie Kate, a solid, uncompromising, self-taught healer who treats everything from boils to broken bones to broken hearts.Sophia, Margaret, and Charlie Kate find strength in a time when women almost always depended on men, and their bond deepens as each one experiences love and loss during World War II. Charms for the Easy Life is a passionate, luminous, and exhilarating story about embracing what life has to offer ... even if it means finding it in unconventional ways.This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Arranged alphabetically by topic, from Adam to Youth, and culled from his novels, speeches, letters, and conversations, this anthology of quotes is timeless and represents the very essence of Mark Twain -- hilarious, cranky, and insightful.

In this powerful indictment of George W. Bush's White House, environmental attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., charges that the administration has taken corporate favoritism to unprecedented heights -- threatening our health, our national security, and our democracy.Kennedy lifts the veil on how the administration, in order to enrich its corporate paymasters, has eviscerated the laws that protect our nation's air, water, public lands, and wildlife. He describes the White House doling out lavish subsidies and tax breaks to energy barons while allowing the corporations to profit by poisoning the public and eliminating security at the more than 15,000 nuclear and chemical facilities that are prime targets for terrorist attacks. He shows how right-wing White House ideologues have taken the "conserve" out of conservatism and trampled the free-market democracy in favor of a kind of corporate-crony capitalism that is as antithetical to democracy, efficiency, and prosperity in America as it is in Nigeria.Crimes Against Nature is a book for both Democrats and Republicans, people like the traditionally conservative farmers and fishermen whom Kennedy represents in lawsuits against polluters. "Without exception," he writes, "these people see the current administration as the greatest threat not just to their livelihoods but to their values, their sense of community, and their idea of what it means to be American."

"Lobster is served three ways in this fascinating book: by fisherman, scientist and the crustaceans themselves. . . . Corson, who worked aboard commercial lobster boats for two years, weaves together these three worlds. The human worlds are surely interesting; but they can't top the lobster life on the ocean floor." -- Washington PostIn this intimate portrait of an island lobstering community and an eccentric band of renegade biologists, journalist Trevor Corson escorts the reader onto the slippery decks of fishing boats, through danger-filled scuba dives, and deep into the churning currents of the Gulf of Maine to learn about the secret undersea lives of lobsters. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

From the bestselling author of 'The Queen's Conjuror', comes the story of Nicholas Culpeper ? legendary rebel, radical, Puritan, and author of the great 'Herbal'. This is a powerful history of medicine's first freedom fighter set in London during Britain's age of revolution. In the mid-17th century, England was visited by the four horsemen of the apocalypse: a civil war which saw levels of slaughter not matched until the Somme, famine in a succession of failed harvests that reduced peasants to 'anatomies', epidemics to rival the Black Death in their enormity, and infant mortality rates that left childless even women who had borne eight or nine children. In the midst of these terrible times came Nicholas Culpeper's 'Herbal' ? one of the most popular and enduring books ever published. Culpeper was a virtual outcast from birth. Rebelling against a tyrannical grandfather and the prospect of a life in the church, he abandoned his university education after a doomed attempt at elopement. Disinherited, he went to London, where he was to find his vocation in instigating revolution. London's medical regime was then in the grip of the College of Physicians, a powerful body personified in the 'immortal' William Harvey, anatomist, royal physician and discoverer of the circulation of the blood. Working in the underground world of religious sects, secret printing presses and unlicensed apothecary shops, Culpeper challenged this stronghold at the time it was reaching the very pinnacle of its power ? and in the process helped spark the revolution that toppled a monarchy. In a spellbinding narrative of impulse, romance and heroism, Benjamin Woolley vividly recreates these momentous struggles and the roots of today's hopes and fears about the power of medical science, professional institutions and government. 'The Herbalist' tells the story of a medical rebel who took on the authorities and paid the price.

When Do Fish Sleep? is the third book in David Feldman's best-selling Imponderables(TM) series, packed with answers to perplexing questions and solutions to everyday mysteries, repackaged and featuring a new cumulative index to all ten Imponderables(TM) books.In his bestselling Imponderables(TM) series, David Feldman has shown conclusively that there are answers to just about every question that has been baffling the human race in our relentless search for knowledge and self-improvement. Not the "What is life?" sort of questions, but the really hard ones, like "Why does Mickey Mouse have only four fingers?" or "Why don't birds tip over when they sleep on a telephone wire?"Where lesser mortals fear to tread, David Feldman charges on undaunted and brings us When Do Fish Sleep?, the third installment of his witty, intelligent, enlightening Imponderables(TM) series. Since 1986, the Imponderables(TM) series has delighted and edified more than 2.1 million readers, as well as the countless visitors to the Imponderables(TM) website, and dauntless players of Malarky, the hugely popular Imponderables(TM) board game. With more than 150 irresistible entries--submitted by his loyal readers--charming illustrations by Kassie Schwan, and more than 300,000 copies sold, When Do Fish Sleep? is one of the author's biggest, funniest, and richest collections of answers to the seemingly unanswerable.

Here's what I tell my students on the first day when I teach one of my creative writing courses: You will be published if you possess three qualities--talent, passion, and discipline.In Write Away, New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth George offers would-be writers exactly what they need to know about how to construct a novel. She provides a detailed overview of the craft and gives helpful instruction on all elements of writing, from setting and plot to technique and process. To illustrate her points, George presents excerpts from a number of well-known writers, including Barbara Kingsolver, Harper Lee, E. M. Forster, John Irving, Toni Morrison, Stephen King, Ernest Hemingway, and Alice Hoffman.In addition to being a clear and concise guide to fiction writing, Write Away also opens a window into the life of Elizabeth George. It reveals the inspiring personal story of how the distinguished author came to be published and how she meticulously researches and crafts her novels.I have a love-hate relationship with the writing life. I wouldn't wish to have any other kind of life . . . and on the other hand, I wish it were easier. And it never is. The reward comes sentence by sentence. The reward comes in the unexpected inspiration. The reward comes from creating a character who lives and breathes and is perfectly real. But such effort it takes to attain the reward! I would never have believed it would take such effort. George's solid understanding of the craft is conveyed in the enticing manner of a true storyteller, making Write Away not only a marvelous, interesting, and informative book but also a glimpse inside the world of a beloved writer.

Do you know the true meaning of a dollar?Few people do. Now an expert on arcane symbolism uncovers the fascinating secret meanings behind the design of the money we use every day.In The Secret Symbols of the Dollar Bill, David Ovason explores the visual complexity and magic behind the world's most influential currency. Lively and readable, this extraordinary book invites you to take a dollar bill in hand and set off on a visual adventure. You will discover dazzling explanations of its secret contents -- from the symbols derived from the Great Seal to the extraordinary strands of numerology interwoven into its structure, to sur-prising hidden alignments.Once you discover the magic and mystery revealed in The Secret Symbols of the Dollar Bill, you will find that the dollar in your wallet is worth so much more than what you can buy with it.