American Bastard is a lyrical inquiry into the life of being a bastard, sandblasting the myth of the "chosen baby."

American Bastard is a lyrical inquiry into the life of being a bastard, sandblasting the myth of the "chosen baby."

Finalist for the 2011 ForeWord Book of the Year in the Autobiography/Memoir Category "I was born in 1944, but raised in the twelfth century." With that, Joanna Clapps Herman neatly describes the two worlds she inhabited while growing up as the child of Italian American immigrants in Waterbury, Connecticut, a place embedded with values closer to Homer's Greece than to Anglo-American New England, where the ethic of hospitality was and still is more Middle Eastern and North African than Anglo-European, and where the pageantry and ritual were more pagan Mediterranean than Western Christian. It was also a place where a stuffed monkey wearing a fedora sat and continues to sit on her grandmother's piano, and a place where, when the donkey got stubborn and wouldn't plow the field, her grandfather bit the animal in a fury. In essays filled with wry humor and affectionate yet probing insights, Herman maps and makes palpable the very particular details of this culture—its pride and its shame, its profound loyalty and its Byzantine betrayals.

American Bastards is not an acid novel, although some characters occasionally do take acid. It is not a fairy tale, but it might, at times, seem magical. It is not a science fiction story, despite taking place in another world. The world is Americana and it features a panel of dead rock stars trying to save the world, a booze hound Tom Sawyer, a hitchhiking Uncle Sam heading to Hollywood with stars in his eyes, a love story with a prostitute, fortune tellers, gypsy-punk circus performers, visions of New York City invaded by the restless dead, and a war between Art and Business. American Bastards also deals with a generation challenging more than authority, but the nature of their existence. Rising up not in protest marches, but in creativity, they all feel what the not-so-humble narrator knows: that we are the bastard children of the American Dream because it, like so many dead-beat dads, abandoned us at birth.

From New York Times bestselling author Sam Kean comes the gripping, untold story of a renegade group of scientists and spies determined to keep Adolf Hitler from obtaining the ultimate prize: a nuclear bomb. Scientists have always kept secrets. But rarely have the secrets been as vital as they were during World War II. In the middle of building an atomic bomb, the leaders of the Manhattan Project were alarmed to learn that Nazi Germany was far outpacing the Allies in nuclear weapons research. Hitler, with just a few pounds of uranium, would have the capability to reverse the entire D-Day operation and conquer Europe. So they assembled a rough and motley crew of geniuses -- dubbed the Alsos Mission -- and sent them careening into Axis territory to spy on, sabotage, and even assassinate members of Nazi Germany's feared Uranium Club. The details of the mission rival the finest spy thriller, but what makes this story sing is the incredible cast of characters -- both heroes and rogues alike -- including: Moe Bergm, the major league catcher who abandoned the game for a career as a multilingual international spy; the strangest fellow to ever play professional baseball. Werner Heisenberg, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist credited as the discoverer of quantum mechanics; a key contributor to the Nazi's atomic bomb project and the primary target of the Alsos mission. Colonel Boris Pash, a high school science teacher and veteran of the Russian Revolution who fled the Soviet Union with a deep disdain for Communists and who later led the Alsos mission. Joe Kennedy Jr., the charismatic, thrill-seeking older brother of JFK whose need for adventure led him to volunteer for the most dangerous missions the Navy had to offer. Samuel Goudsmit, a washed-up physics prodigy who spent his life hunting Nazi scientists -- and his parents, who had been swept into a concentration camp -- across the globe. Irène and Frederic Joliot-Curie, a physics Nobel-Prize winning power couple who used their unassuming status as scientists to become active members of the resistance. Thrust into the dark world of international espionage, these scientists and soldiers played a vital and largely untold role in turning back one of the darkest tides in human history.

The first volume in the addictive saga of the American Revolution by the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of the North and South trilogy. Meet Phillipe Charboneau: the illegitimate son and unrecognized heir of the Duke of Kentland. Upon the Duke’s death, Phillipe is denied his birthright and left to build a life of his own. Seeking all that the New World promises, he leaves London for America, shedding his past and preparing for the future by changing his name to Philip Kent. He arrives at the brink of the American Revolution, which tests his allegiances in ways he never imagined. The first volume of John Jakes’s wildly successful and highly addictive Kent Family Chronicles, The Bastard is a triumph of historical fiction. This ebook features an illustrated biography of John Jakes including rare images from the author’s personal collection.

Eddie's Bastard spins the warm, endearing tale of William Amos Mann IV and of the inhabitants of his eponymous small upstate New York town, Mannville. Related in flashback by the adult Billy, the story begins with him being deposited as an infant on the doorstep of his grandfather's home in a simple wicker basket with a plain two-word message pinned to his shawl reading 'Eddie's Bastard'. Eddie had been killed in Vietnam three months earlier - his father, Thomas Mann Jnr, had given up on life, having lost his only son and, he thought, his only heir. But now, suddenly, Thomas has a grandson and an heir - if not to the once-vast Mann fortune (for Thomas had recklessly squandered that in a foolhardy enterprise just after his heroic return from WWII), then at least to the long legacy of the Mann family stories, stretching back to the Civil War. Eddie's Bastard is filled with episodes of madcap adventure and resonates with the power of lifelong friendship. By turns hilarious, thrilling and heart-breaking, here is a début that stays in the mind long after the reading is over.