A powerful bomb destroys a Sydney liquor store and kills its owner, Goran Pekič. Private investigators Damon Ogilvy and Janet Maitland try to find the killer. They discover that Pekič was a member of Drugavi, an organization that protects the perpetrators of the Srebrenica massacre during the Bosnian War.They also uncover a cocaine smuggling ring. Two of its leaders hold Damon and Janet responsible for the deaths of their brothers, and swear vengeance. Then the heads of the Drugavi organization realize that Damon and Janet's investigation has resulted in the arrest of a number of their comrades, who now face trial for genocide.A murderous game of cat and mouse now ensues. Damon and Janet flee to Canada, pursued by both Drugavi and the cocaine gang. From there, they fly to France where police set a trap with Damon and Janet as the bait. The chase ends with a Wild West-style shoot-out in a chocolate shop in Provence.
Zug um Zug besser, Schlag um Schlag stärker. Nur noch einen Sieg, dann ist Leah Baxter Junior-Schachgroßmeisterin. Zumindest, wenn es nach ihrer ehrgeizigen Mutter und ihrem Coach geht. Doch Leah beginnt ihr eigenes Spiel zu sabotieren, hängt ihre Schachkarriere an den Nagel und wirft alles hin. Doch ihre Leidenschaft holt sie schnell wieder ein. Unter dem Decknamen "Park Girl" nimmt sie an illegalen Wettkämpfen im Schachboxen teil und wird in der Unterwelt Manhattens schnell zum gefürchteten Champion. Mit Hirn, Herz und einem starken rechten Haken kämpft sie ihren wichtigsten Kampf: den für ihr eigenes Leben.
The average chess player spends too much time on studying opening theory. In his day, World Champion Emanuel Lasker argued that improving amateurs should spend about 5% of their study time on openings. These days club players are probably closer to 80%, often focusing on opening lines that are popular among grandmasters. Club players shouldn't slavishly copy the choices of grandmasters. GMs need to squeeze every drop of advantage from the opening and therefore play highly complex lines that require large amounts of memorization. The main necessity for club players is to emerge from the opening with a reasonable position, from which you can simply play chess and pit your own tactical and positional understanding against that of your opponent. Gerard Welling and Steve Giddins recommend the Old Indian-Hanham Philidor set-up as a basis for both Black and White. They provide ideas and strategies that can be learned in the shortest possible time and require the bare minimum of maintenance and updating. They deliver exactly what you need: rock-solid positions that you know how to handle. By adopting a similar set-up for both colours, with similar plans and techniques, you further reduce study time. With this compact and straightforward opening approach, Welling and Giddins argue, club players will have more time to focus on what is really decisive in the vast majority of non-grandmaster games: tactics, positional understanding and endgame technique.
Many club players think that studying chess is all about cramming as much information in their brain as they can. Most textbooks support that notion by stressing the importance of always trying to find the objectively best move. As a result amateur players are spending way too much time worrying about subtleties that are really only relevant for grandmasters. Emanuel Lasker, the second and longest reigning World Chess Champion (27 years!), understood that what a club player needs most of all is common sense: understanding a set of timeless principles. Amateurs shouldn’t waste energy on rote learning but just strive for a good grasp of the basic essentials of attack and defence, tactics, positional play and endgame play endgame play. Chess instruction needs to be efficient because of the limited amount of time that amateur players have available. Superfluous knowledge is often a pitfall. Lasker himself, for that matter, also studied chess considerably less than his contemporary rivals. Gerard Welling and Steve Giddins have created a complete but compact manual based on Lasker’s general approach to chess. It enables the average amateur player to adopt trustworthy openings, reach a sound middlegame and have a basic grasp of endgame technique. Welling and Giddins explain the principles with very carefully selected examples from players of varying levels, some of them from Lasker’s own games. The Lasker Method to Improve in Chess is an efficient toolkit as well as an entertaining guide. After working with it, players will dramatically boost their skills – without carrying the excess baggage that many of their opponents will be struggling with.
The Basman-Sale Variation is a relatively unexplored weapon for Black in the Sicilian Defence. After the perfectly normal moves 1.e4 c5, 2. Nf3 e6, 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Black lashes out with 4…Bc5! English IM Michael Basman and Croatian IM Srdjan Sale were the pioneers of this cunning chess opening system. The advantages are clear: it is surprising, aggressive and easy to learn. Compared to the complexity of mainstream Sicilian variations it requires little theoretical preparation, while you don’t run excessive risks. That is why The Lazy Man’s Sicilian is ideal for club players who don’t have much time to study opening theory (or are not too fond of hard work anyway). This easily accessible and up-to-date book offers everything you need to get started with the Basman-Sale Variation. In well-organized chapters it describes the history and underlying ideas of the variation and explains the pawn-structures, the strategies and the tactical themes. What’s more, if you play the Basman-Sale system, there is plenty of room for your own creativity as well!
Practicing architect Schaefer whimsically combines the mobile home with the history of architecture, presenting 29 drawings from Egyptian obilisks being toted by bearers (the mobilisk) to a version of Frank Gehry's most famous building on wheels (Guggenheim Cruise-Seum). Accompanying text combin
Following architect Steve Schaecher's groundbreaking Outhouses by Famous Architects and Mobile Homes by Famous Architects (Pomegranate, 2000 and 2002), we present his new array of historical inquiries. In deft ink-and-watercolor illustrations and knowledgeable prose, Schaecher informs each of his twenty-nine booths with the sensibility of the architect who supposedly designed it.Schaecher's books are not mere parodies. While he envisions humorous applications for the talents of Palladio, Le Corbusier, Wright, and other giants, his watercolors are true reflections of the architects' styles; e.g., Erik Gunnar Asplund's phone booth, the Stockholm Dialibrary, clearly exemplifies Asplund's design precepts, and the concise text explores the Swede's architectural principles—as well as the assertion that music by the Swedish 1970s supergroup Abba is piped into the Dialibrary to ease the pain of being on hold.Schaecher brings a generous sense of humor to analyses of building styles from classical Egypt through Renaissance mastery, Enlightenment engineering, and Modern uplift before arriving among the competing theories of today. His past performance has won accolades from the likes of Robert Venturi, and Phone Booths keeps up the good work.
Outhouses have been much ridiculed and maligned structures, thought worthy of only the lowliest of humor and virtually ignored by architectural critics as inconsequential blips in the development of building design. And yet--as architect Steve Schaecher so poignantly reveals in this collection of renderings--architects of genius from time immemorial have used their considerable talents to enhance the beauty and function of the outhouse. His extensive research has uncovered a wealth of stunning outdoor bathroom designs that say much about the history of architecture. Although Schaecher's friends and family have worried about his obsession with bathroom drawings, it is clear that with the publication of this tome, his seat in the annals of architectural history will never be put down.Here are reproductions of stylish (dare we say perfectionist?) renderings of Thronehenge, Wright's Flushing Water, the Odor Dame Cathedral, the Taj Ma-stall, Jefferson's Johnicello, Sullivan's Merchants First National Outhouse, Le Corbusier's Bidet Savoye, Fuller's Geodesic Throne, the Hancock's John Building, the Centre Pompidoodoo-the unmistakable outhouse for that weird-looking French museum-and many others. Each is accompanied by insightful historical and analytical text, depending on your definitions of insightful and analytical. The preface, by architectural critic I.P. Daley, will leave you in no doubt of the importance of this completely nonsensical book.
An identification guide covering all the bird species to have occurred in the European region. Birding is one of the most popular activities and pastimes in Europe and so it follows that it is essential to be able to identify the birds on view, be it in the back garden or for making more serious in-depth studies. This book aims to bring together as much information as possible in one volume, using extremely detailed, up-to-date guides and identification of every species known to have occurred in Europe and the West Palearctic, that is, the whole of Europe, North Africa as far south as the Central Sahara, the Middle East to the border of Iran, the Azores, Madeira, Canary Islands, the islands off Mauritania and the Cape Verde islands, as defined by Cramp and Simons 1977. They have certainly been successful in doing so and have produced a wonderfully comprehensive guide covering nearly 900 species, showing a wide range of differing plumages. The colour plates are exquisite and have been painted by some of Europe's leading bird artists. The text is clear and can be followed by beginners but finer points of identification are included for the benefit of more serious bird watchers. Particularly helpful is the cross-referencing of the text and colour plates. There are more than 600 colour maps to identify where the birds are to be found, which are simple and easy to use with excellent descriptions of status and habitat.
British cinema has been around from the very birth of motion pictures, from black-and-white to color, from talkies to sound, and now 3D, it has been making a major contribution to world cinema. Many of its actors and directors have stayed at home but others ventured abroad, like Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock. Today it is still going strong, the only real competition to Hollywood, turning out films which appeal not only to Brits, just think of Bridget Jones, while busily adding to franchises like James Bond and Harry Potter. So this Historical Dictionary of British Cinema has a lot of ground to cover. This it does with over 300 dictionary entries informing us about significant actors, producers and directors, outstanding films and serials, organizations and studios, different films genres from comedy to horror, and memorable films, among other things. Two appendixes provide lists of award-winners. Meanwhile, the chronology covers over a century of history. These parts provide the details, countless details, while the introduction offers the big story. And the extensive bibliography points toward other sources of information.
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.