Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life death and hope in a Mumbai undercity

From Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century’s great unequal cities.
 
In this brilliantly written fast-paced book based on three years of uncompromising reporting a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human.
 
Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport and as India starts to prosper Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck her sensitive beautiful daughter—Annawadi’s “most-everything girl”—will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians like Kalu a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call “the full enjoy.”
 
But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion caste sex power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so too are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi.
 
With intelligence humor and deep insight into what connects human beings to one another in an era of tumultuous change Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds and into the lives of people impossible to forget.[]

[Compare Product Price!!!]

[Customer Reviews!!!]

[Shop Now !!!]

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Her name was Henrietta Lacks but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture they are still alive today though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer viruses and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization cloning and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.

Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown buried in an unmarked grave.

Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small dying hometown of Clover Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters faith healings and voodoo—to East Baltimore today where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.

Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows the story of the Lacks family—past and present—is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans the birth of bioethics and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

Over the decade it took to uncover this story Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister Elsie who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine why couldn’t her children afford health insurance? 
          
Intimate in feeling astonishing in scope and impossible to put down The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery as well as its human consequences.[]

[Compare Product Price!!!]

[Customer Reviews!!!]

[Shop Now !!!]

Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010

From the bestselling author of Losing Ground and The Bell Curve this startling long-lens view shows how America is coming apart at the seams that historically have joined our classes.


In Coming Apart Charles Murray explores the formation of American classes that are different in kind from anything we have ever known focusing on whites as a way of driving home the fact that the trends he describes do not break along lines of race or ethnicity.

Drawing on five decades of statistics and research Coming Apart demonstrates that a new upper class and a new lower class have diverged so far in core behaviors and values that they barely recognize their underlying American kinship—divergence that has nothing to do with income inequality and that has grown during good economic times and bad.

The top and bottom of white America increasingly live in different cultures Murray argues with the powerful upper class living in enclaves surrounded by their own kind ignorant about life in mainstream America and the lower class suffering from erosions of family and community life that strike at the heart of the pursuit of happiness. That divergence puts the success of the American project at risk.

The evidence in Coming Apart is about white America. Its message is about all of America.[]

[Compare Product Price!!!]

[Customer Reviews!!!]

[Shop Now !!!]

Beauty and the Beast

Through her great capacity to love a kind and beautiful maid releases a handsome prince from the spell which has made him an ugly beast.[]

[Compare Product Price!!!]

[Customer Reviews!!!]

[Shop Now !!!]

Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus (Modern Library)

Frankenstein is a masterpiece of nineteenth-century Gothicism and the prototype of the twentieth-century science-fiction novel. It was conceived in the Swiss Alps in mid-June 1816 after a conversation about bringing corpses to life provoked a nightmare and was written over the next eleven months in largely morbid circumstances. Death and the terrors of childbirth--as much as Romanticism a burgeoning awareness of unconscious drives and contemporary ideas of atheism the collapse of the social contract and the corrupting influence of society on human nature--inform this story of a man (or monster) built by Dr. Victor Frankenstein and brought to life by electricity. The monster's culpability for various horrific acts his powerlessness in the face of his complete ostracism from society and Dr. Frankenstein's lies abdication of responsibility and the pain he inflicts on his creation raised chilling questions that made the novel an immediate bestseller.[]

[Compare Product Price!!!]

[Customer Reviews!!!]

[Shop Now !!!]

Mortal Sin

**DON'T MISS OUT ON THREE RARE HARDCOVER COLLECTIBLES! Mortal Sin~Lawyer Jake Lassiter is defending Florida real estate developer Nicky Florio in a civil suit regarding an environmentalist's death at a poolside party. While Lassiter has doubts that the death was accidental he also worries about the possible conflict of interest involved in sleeping with his client's wife Gina. After Lassiter wins the case he is sucked into the machinations of Florio and Gina and finds himself witness to a beheading accused of embezzlement and murder and on the run. Indian rights animal rights and slimy politicians and lawyers all surface in this fourth Lassiter novel. Permeated with cynicism and the corruption of South Florida that recall the work of Carl Hiaasen this thriller races to a smashing climax. Book Condition~Has minor rubwear and shelfwear to dust jacket OTHERWISE in EXCELLENT condition!/The Tamer~ First Published In Sweden (1973) under the title "Dar Vaxer Inga Roser I Sagspanet. This is a powerful romantic and vivid story of circus life as it really is told by someone who experienced it firsthand and knew it well. Book Condition~Very minor discoloration and very light rubwear to dust jacket; This 30-year-old book is in EXCELLENT condition./The Darkest Evening Of The Year~Koontz delivers suspense for all seasons with a transcendent thriller--a heart-gripping tour de force featuring a dedicated dog rescuer a very special golden retriever she saves and the murderous adversaries they must face together. Book Condition~Very Minor rubwear to dust jacket OTHERWISE is in Near Mint condition![]

[Compare Product Price!!!]

[Customer Reviews!!!]

[Shop Now !!!]

Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero

“What was he like?”Jack Kennedy said the reason people read biography is to answer that basic question. With the verve of a novelist Chris Matthews gives us just that. We see this most beloved president in the company of friends. We see and feel him close-up having fun and giving off that restlessness of his. We watch him navigate his life from privileged rebellious youth to gutsy American president. We witness his bravery in war and selfless rescue of his PT boat crew. We watch JFK as a young politician learning to play hardball and watch him grow into the leader who averts a nuclear war.What was he like this person whose own wife called him “that elusive unforgettable man”? The Jack Kennedy you discover here wanted never to be alone never to be bored. He loved courage hated war lived each day as if it were his last.Chris Matthews’s extraordinary biography is based on personal interviews with those closest to JFK oral histories by top political aide Kenneth O’Donnell and others documents from his years as a student at Choate and notes from Jacqueline Kennedy’s first interview after Dallas. You’ll learn the origins of his inaugural call to “Ask what you can do for your country.” You’ll discover his role in the genesis of the Peace Corps his stand on civil rights his push to put a man on the moon his ban on nuclear arms testing. You’ll get more than ever before to the root of the man including the unsettling aspects of his personal life. As Matthews writes “I found a fighting prince never free of pain never far from trouble never accepting the world he found never wanting to be his father’s son. He was a far greater hero than he ever wished us to know.”[]

[Compare Product Price!!!]

[Customer Reviews!!!]

[Shop Now !!!]