“The future’s not ours to see Que sera, sera.” BARRY CULL wasn’t supposed to survive to his fifth birthday. He was born with a hole in his heart at a time when that was a death sentence; however, times were changing, and an experimental surgery under development in Canada gave his parents hope. Barry did survive: He survived childhood open-heart surgery from the man who pioneered the operation. He got to hold his baby sister, and a baby brother after that. He moved from England to Canada and back, and back again. He grew, went to camp and to an experimental self-directed high school, took an ill-advised hitchhiking trip to the West Coast, played in folk and garage bands, and eventually earned a masters in child development psychology. But the trauma of Barry’s heart condition, and the things he and his family sacrificed to see him to adulthood, would reverberate throughout his life. His parents’ relationship broke down as both parents retreated into self-destructive coping mechanisms—his father into alcoholism, his mother into self-delusion and fantasy. He was emotionally abused through his teens and young adulthood as he struggled to find his feet. Long after his heart was beating at its full potential, Barry would find himself facing down the lingering specter of what had happened when he was just a child. His story is one of trauma and resilience, of struggle and failure—and, in the end, of healing.
“The future’s not ours to see Que sera, sera.” BARRY CULL wasn’t supposed to survive to his fifth birthday. He was born with a hole in his heart at a time when that was a death sentence; however, times were changing, and an experimental surgery under development in Canada gave his parents hope. Barry did survive: He survived childhood open-heart surgery from the man who pioneered the operation. He got to hold his baby sister, and a baby brother after that. He moved from England to Canada and back, and back again. He grew, went to camp and to an experimental self-directed high school, took an ill-advised hitchhiking trip to the West Coast, played in folk and garage bands, and eventually earned a masters in child development psychology. But the trauma of Barry’s heart condition, and the things he and his family sacrificed to see him to adulthood, would reverberate throughout his life. His parents’ relationship broke down as both parents retreated into self-destructive coping mechanisms—his father into alcoholism, his mother into self-delusion and fantasy. He was emotionally abused through his teens and young adulthood as he struggled to find his feet. Long after his heart was beating at its full potential, Barry would find himself facing down the lingering specter of what had happened when he was just a child. His story is one of trauma and resilience, of struggle and failure—and, in the end, of healing.
Private Eye Revelations St. Jones just can't stay out of trouble, and that's the way we like him. In The Bold Stroke, he rescues a beautiful and brainy chemist from being held hostage in a cocaine factory. In The Sly Pass, the second of the series of three, St. Jones gets right with himself, his god, and the bastards that killed his girl. Hilarious, shocking, contemplative, irreverent adventure for grown ups.
On a September night in 1971, a few days after getting busted for dropping two of the 127 hits of acid found in a friend's shoe, a sixteen-year-old who is grounded for a year curls up in the corner of her ratty bedroom, picks up a pen, and begins to write. Once upon a cruddy time on a cruddy street on the side of a cruddy hill in the cruddiest part of a crudded-out town in a cruddy state, country, world, solar system, universe. The cruddy girl named Roberta was writing the cruddy book of her cruddy life and the name of the book was called Cruddy. Now the truth can finally be revealed about the mysterious day long ago when the authorities found a child, calmly walking in the boiling desert, covered with blood. She could not give the authorities any information about why she was the only survivor and everyone else was lying around in hacked-up pieces. Roberta Rohbeson, 1971. Her overblown, drug-induced teenage rant against a world bounded by "the cruddy top bedroom of a cruddy rental house on a very cruddy mud road behind cruddy Black Cat Lumber" soon becomes a detailed account of another story. It is a story about which Roberta has kept silent for five years, until, under the influence of a pale hippie called the Turtle and a drug called Creeper, her tale giddily unspools... Roberta Rohbeson, 1967. The world of Roberta, age eleven, is terrifyingly unbounded, a one-way cross-country road trip fueled by revenge and by greed, a violent, hallucinatory, sometimes funny, more often horrific year of killings, betrayals, arson, and a sinister set of butcher knives, each with its own name. Welcome to Cruddy, Lynda Barry's masterful tale of the two intertwined narratives set five years -- an eternity -- apart, which form the backbone of Roberta's life. Cruddy is a wild ride indeed, a fairy tale-cum-low-budget horror movie populated by a cast of characters that will remain vivid in the reader's mind long after the final page: Roberta's father, a dangerous alcoholic and out-of-work meat cutter in search of his swindled inheritance; the frightening owners of the Knocking Hammer Bar and sometime slaughterhouse; and two charming but quite mad escapees from the Barbara V. Herrmann Home for Adolescent Rest. Written with a teenager's eye for freakish detail and a nervous ability to make the most horrible scenes seem hilarious, Roberta's two stories -- part Easy Rider and part bipolar Wizard of Oz -- painfully but inevitably converge in a surprising denouement in a nightmarish Dreamland in the Nevada desert. By turns terrifying, darkly funny, and resonant with humanity, propelled by all the narrative power of a superior thriller and burnished by the author's pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, Cruddy is a stunning achievement.
Pan blinked. Something strange was happening to her mind and body. She felt relaxed, but at the same time, acutely aware of everything. She remembered the Professor's words: she was the cause of the destruction of humanity. And she felt the truth of those words. Pandora Jones's problems appear insurmountable. She must convince her team that nothing is as it seems and that they must escape and expose The School to save the world from the plague she unwittingly inflicted on it. The only things Pan has on her side are her gift of intuition, and her belief in the people she cares about. But with the clock ticking, can she find a way to stop the plague, and should she do it at any cost? Pan and her friends face off against the might of The School as the final pieces fall into place in the hugely compelling Pandora Jones series.
Takes magic out of the realm of children's birthday parties and shows how to infuse added fun into your daily life. Filled with photos and diagrams to help the novice magician, this book makes magic accessible to adults who have been reluctant to try it previously.
May Contain Nuts! absolutely the first definitive review of the incompetent, inadvertent and occasionally illegal world of business in the new Millenium.
May Contain Nuts! absolutely the first definitive review of the incompetent, inadvertent and occasionally illegal world of business in the new Millenium.
In Warning: May Contain Nuts we are once again pleasantly immersed in the world which is Barry Gibbons. Following on from his best selling Dream Merchants and Howboys, Barry Gibbons, former CEO of Burger King and iconoclast, gives a hilarious and insightful account of how and why businesses get it wrong! Through a series of droll vignettes, Gibbons takes us on a romp-roaring ride through the next 999 years of corporate mayhem and madness - bad behaviours which affect everyone - from the street sweeper to the CEO in his private jet. Because we're not talking about little blips on a profit and loss statement in a poxy sector of some niche industry. Business has far more an impact on our daily lives than government or politics. About half of the world's biggest economies are now corporations. From Enron's attempt to bring back the eighties with their excessive greed to Vodafone's loosing millions (that didn't actually exist in the first place) - Gibbons rips into the antics of these once trusted companies. So is it all doom and gloom? Are we destined for failure because of the frolicking these companies get up to - at our expense!? Are there any lessons or optimistic quick turn-around plans of action that Gibbons can share with us? Not really. But Warning: May Contain Nuts makes for some highly entertaining reading. And for the clever among us the lessons are implied. Just don't be daft.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.