A collection of four adventure novels set on nineteenth century sailing ships.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower comes “an utterly necessary story” (The Wall Street Journal) that pulls back the curtain on the church of Scientology: one of the most secretive organizations at work today. • The Basis for the HBO Documentary. Scientology presents itself as a scientific approach to spiritual enlightenment, but its practices have long been shrouded in mystery. Now Lawrence Wright—armed with his investigative talents, years of archival research, and more than two hundred personal interviews with current and former Scientologists—uncovers the inner workings of the church. We meet founder L. Ron Hubbard, the highly imaginative but mentally troubled science-fiction writer, and his tough, driven successor, David Miscavige. We go inside their specialized cosmology and language. We learn about the church’s legal attacks on the IRS, its vindictive treatment of critics, and its phenomenal wealth. We see the church court celebrities such as Tom Cruise while consigning its clergy to hard labor under billion-year contracts. Through it all, Wright asks what fundamentally comprises a religion, and if Scientology in fact merits this Constitutionally-protected label.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Theory and Applications of Models of Computation, TAMC 2007, held in Shanghai, China in May 2007. It addresses all major areas in computer science; mathematics, especially logic; and the physical sciences, particularly with regard to computation and computability theory. The papers particularly focus on algorithms, complexity and computability theory.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Algorithmic Aspects in Information and Management, AAIM 2007, held in Portland, OR, USA in June 2007. It covers graph algorithms, combinatorics, scheduling, graph theory, network algorithms, game theory, option theory, computational geometry, graph theory and combinatorics, as well as networks and data.