Some books you read. A few read you back.The Arimasen Dialogues belongs firmly to that second, stranger category.Welcome to Arimasen. The word is Japanese for there is not, and the place is quite like Earth in most respects, save for one: it lies beyond Space, Time, and Matter. Coherence has quietly decamped. The philosophers approve, the politicians do not. Whether Arimasen is a planet, a metaphor, a hallucination, or a long shared dream is a question the ...

They Were White and They Were Slaves is a thoroughly researched challenge to the conventional historiography of colonial and industrial labor, a stunning journey into a hidden epoch, the slave trade of Whites, hundreds of thousands of whom were kidnapped, chained, whipped and worked to death in the American colonies and during the Industrial Revolution. This is a chronicle that has never been fully told, part of a vital heritage that has until now comprised the dustiest shelf in the darkes...

"Is Arimasen a nation, then?""As to what Arimasen is and is not... oh, Ephraim, did you but know what a subject you... unwittingly, in all innocence... oh, children, how I love your bright, shining faces, your bright, shining eyes! Is Arimasen a nation? No. Arimasen is not a nation. Nor a planet. Nor a city.""A state of mind, then!""Perhaps, Umeboshi, it is that. Perhaps. I said not a planet. And yet... yes, a planet. I said not a city. And yet... yes, a city. A sta...

Why does religion sometimes increase support for democracy and sometimes do just the opposite? In Faith in Numbers, political scientist Michael Hoffman presents a theory of religion, group interest, and democracy. Focusing on communal religion, he demonstrates that the effect of communal prayer on support for democracy depends on the interests of the religious group in question. For members of groups who would benefit from democracy, communal prayer increases support for democrati...

Michael Hoffman started writing poetry when he was forty-five. He kept his mind busy while in prison for the six years that he was there. He turned his life over to God, and he started writing poetry in many different themes, writing for his children to their mother during a fall on relationship.He was the one who had to change his life around. No one else could force him to change, but it had to be him who had to do it. He kept thinking and praying and doing it to be able to go ho...

Brave Tsavo, the first African lion hound, never dies. A nature god blesses him with reincarnation, and he lives again and again as an angel of mercy for the people he loves. Follow his heroic journey from the Dark Continent to the 9/11 disaster site and the Battle of Gettysburg. Watch him outwit a famous psychiatrist and cross the genetic line between man and animal to heal his old master's broken heart. Magical realism makes anything possible in these unusual, irresistible stories.

Green will illustrate and shed new light on the gamut of issues associated with renewable energy, a topic whose importance increases exponentially with every temperature record-setting year. Jane and Michael Hoffman use their years of experience to explain the technological and economic future of this ecologically significant issue. They incisively explain its politics: what countries are doing right now and, most importantly, what the U.S. should be doing. Green...

Presenting the desperate conflict of the First World War through the eyes of an ordinary German soldier, Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel is translated by Michael Hofmann in Penguin Modern Classics.'As though walking through a deep dream, I saw steel helmets approaching through the craters. They seemed to sprout from the fire-harrowed soil like some iron harvest.'A memoir of astonishing power, savagery and ashen lyricism, Storm of Steel depicts Ernst Jünger's...

In the Antebellum South, when a family was about to lose a child to yellow fever or small pox, a photograph of the dying child would be commissioned. A desperate and frightening memento, it was called a remembrance photo.Three days ago, ten-year-old Steven Haggerty, son of successful attorney and true crime author Richard Haggerty, disappeared from a playground near his Marin County home.This morning, Richard received a manila envelope in his San Francisco office stamped wi...

WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZEBerlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power. And the world ...

Brought to you by Penguin.Werner Herzog is the undisputed master of extreme cinema: building an opera house in the middle of the jungle; walking from Munich to Paris in the dead of winter; descending into an active volcano; living in the wilderness among grizzly bears - he has always been intrigued by the extremes of human experience.From his early movies to his later documentaries, he has made a career out of exploring the boundaries of human endurance: wh...

A novel from the author of The Radetzky March, "considered by many to be one of the most important Jewish voices in German literature written between the two wars" ( The Forward).From Joseph Roth, an allegorical yet decidedly modern novelist, comes this story of postwar disillusion, the limits of faith, and "personal fate as governed by the blind, casual workings of a machine controlled by no one and for which no one is responsible" ( The New ...