Books

Rachael Ray 365

Even your favorite dinner can lose its appeal when it’s in constant rotation, so mix it up! With her largest collection of recipes yet, Food Network’s indefatigable cook Rachael Ray guarantees you’ll be able to put something fresh and exciting on your dinner table every night for a full year... without a single repeat! <BR>Based on the original 30-Minute Meal cooking classes that started it all, these recipes prove that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every night. Rachael offers dozens of recipes that, once mastered, can become entirely new dishes with just a few ingredient swaps. Learn how to make a Southwestern Pasta Bake and you’ll be able to make a Smoky Chipotle Chili Con Queso Mac the next time. Try your hand at Spring Chicken with Leeks and Peas and you’re all set to turn out a rib-sticking Rice and Chicken Stoup that looks and tastes like an entirely different dish. <BR>As a best-selling cookbook author and host of three top-rated Food Network shows, Rachael Ray believes that both cooking and eating should be fun. Drawing from her own favorite dishes as well as those of her family, friends, and celebrities, she covers the flavor spectrum from Asian to Italian and dozens of delicious stops in between. Best of all, these flavor-packed dishes will satisfy your every craving and renew your taste for cooking. With so many delicious entrees to choose from you’ll never have an excuse for being in a cooking rut again. <BR>How about a brand-new 30-minute dinner every night for an entire year? <BR>Tired of making the same old same old, week after week after week? <BR>With Rachael’s most varied and comprehensive collection of 30-minute recipes ever, you’ll have everyone at your tablesaying "Yummo!" all year long. <BR>It’s amazing what a half hour can do for your tastebuds ... 365 days a year!

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The Truth (with Jokes)

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Freakonomics

Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime? <P>These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much heralded scholar who studies the stuff and riddles of everyday life -- from cheating and crime to sports and child rearing -- and whose conclusions regularly turn the conventional wisdom on its head. He usually begins with a mountain of data and a simple, unasked question. Some of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: freakonomics. <P>Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives -- how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonomics, they set out to explore the hidden side of ... well, everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Ku Klux Klan. <P>What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and -- if the right questions are asked -- is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking. Steven Levitt, through devilishly clever and clear-eyed thinking, shows how tosee through all the clutter. <P>Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. But Freakonomics can provide more than that. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.

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Don’t Get Too Comfortable

David Rakoff’s bestselling collection of autobiographical essays, "Fraud, established him as one of today’s funniest and most insightful writers. Now, in "Don’t Get Too Comfortable, Rakoff moves from the personal to the public, journeying into the land of unchecked plenty that is contemporary America. Rarely have greed, vanity, selfishness, and vapidity been so mercilessly and wittily skewered. <BR>Somewhere along the line, our healthy self-regard has exploded into obliterating narcissism; our manic getting and spending have now become celebrated as moral virtues. Whether contrasting the elegance of one of the last flights of the supersonic Concorde with the good-times-and-chicken-wings populism of Hooters Air, working as a cabana boy at a South Beach hotel, or traveling to a private island off the coast of Belize to watch a soft-core video shoot--where he is provided with his very own personal manservant--Rakoff takes us on a bitingly funny grand tour of our culture of excess. He comes away from his explorations hilariously horrified. <BR>At once a Wildean satire of our ridiculous culture of overconsumption and a plea for a little human decency, "Don’t Get Too Comfortable shows that far from being bobos in paradise, we’re in a special circle of gilded-age hell.

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Blink

<p>In his landmark bestseller <i>The Tipping Point</i>, Malcolm Gladwell redefined how we understand the world around us. Now, in Blink, he revolutionizes the way we understand the world within. <i>Blink</i> is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant - in the blink of an eye - that actually aren’t as simple as they seem. Why are some people brilliant decision makers, while others are consistently inept? Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others end up stumbling into error? How do our brains really work - in the office, in the classroom, in the kitchen, and in the bedroom? And why are the best decisions often those that are impossible to explain to others?</p><p>In <i>Blink</i> we meet the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach who knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance. Here, too, are great failures of "blink": the election of Warren Harding; "New Coke"; and the shooting of Amadou Diallo by police. Blink reveals that great decision makers aren’t those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of "thin-slicing" - filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables.</p><p>Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience and psychology and displaying all of the brilliance that made <i>The Tipping Point</i> a classic, Blink changes the way you understand every decision you make. Never again will you think about thinking the same way.</p>

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At First Sight

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The Chronicles of Narnia

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Beauty of Color

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The Da Vinci Code

Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call while on business in Paris. The elderly curator of the Louvre has been found murdered inside the museum, his body surrounded by a series of bizarre ciphers scribbled in invisible ink. As Langdon and a gifted young French crvptologist, Sophie Neveu, attempt to make sense of the chilling clues left around the body, they are stunned to realize the riddles are connected to the works of Da Vinci and may be linked to a mystery that stretches deep into the history of the Catholic Church.<P>Langdon learns the late curator was the gatekeeper of the Priory of Sion -- an actual secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Da Vinci -- and has sacrificed his life to protect the Priory’s most sacred trust: the location of a vastly important religious relic hidden for centuries. It appears that Opus Dei, a clandestine, malevolent, Vatican-sanctioned religious sect that has long plotted to seize the Priory’s secret, has now made its move. Unless Langdon and Neveu can crack the Da Vinci code and quickly assemble the pieces of the puzzle, the Priory’s secret -- and a stunning historical truth -- will be lost forever.<P>In an exhilarating blend of scholarly intelligence, relentless adventure, and cutting wit, Robert Langdon (first introduced in Dan Brown’s Angels Demons) is the most original detective to appear in years. Combining the punch of Robert Ludlum, the intriguing historical touch of Umberto. Eco, and the nonstop suspense of Michael Crichton, "The Da Vinci Code" is a rocket ride of an intelligent thriller.

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Complete New Yorker

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