“Urban erotica has never been hotter!” –Nikki Turner, author of Black Widow Have you ever been betrayed by those you love? Violated in the worst kind of way? And no matter how hard you tried to fight your way out of a trick bag, no matter how tall you tried to walk, did the cold streets of life lead you right back to your grimy destiny? The bestselling author of G-Spot and Candy Licker, Noire pens the intense tale of Eva Patterson, a tragic daughter of the ghetto who finds peril on the streets of New York. With an abusive mother and a heroin monkey on her back, Eva experiences a series of traumatizing events, forcing her to flee her Brooklyn tenement and seek refuge with her beloved cousin Fiyah in Harlem. But fate is not done wreaking havoc in Eva’s life yet. Poised on the brink of progress, Eva meets King Brody, a vicious Harlem drug lord who runs Bricks, the hottest rap club in town. Unbeknownst to Eva, her cousin Fiyah’s thirst for glory leads him to cut a killer deal with Brody. A trade-off is arranged: Fiyah gets a recording contract–and Brody gets Eva. The problem is, Eva already has a man: Ice Mello Williams, a hot Harlem rapper who has a bitter feud going with Fiyah and is determined to seize his recording contract. Torn between the man she loves and a violent kingpin, Eva becomes an unwilling pawn in a deadly game of cat and mouse. Can Fiyah and Mello help her elude the sadistic jaws of Brody, or will she end up losing her life in his brutal trap?

Argues that most words do not have multiple meanings and criticizes the assignment of additional meanings through overspecification

Pervasive drug abuse among children and young adults is at an all-time high. None of us expect it to happen in our own homes, but it can Written from parents of kids on drugs, to parents of kids on drugs, Hit by a Ton of Bricks highlights pastor and speaker John Vawter's experience with his daughter on the road from addiction to sobriety. Other pastors, counselors, and teachers share their journeys in this poignant, groundbreaking book about substance abuse. - Explore what drew now-sober adult children to drugs and/or alcohol. - Walk with the authors through difficult days and sleepless nights. - Hear intimate stories that provide encouragement and strength. - Understand the miracle of God's grace.

Calling All Tinkerers, Experimenters & Inventors! Unleash Your Creative Powers with Exciting LEGO® Innovations Use science and engineering to transform your bin of LEGO® bricks into amazing, movable toys, machines and gadgets. Bestselling author Sarah Dees is back with an all-new collection of projects featuring ingenious designs and simple scientific principles that real engineers use every day. Make yourself a robot pal whose legs move as he rolls along, or a drummer who really plays the drums. Build a wind-up car complete with a flywheel that’ll send your minifigures zooming. Or challenge your friends to a game of pinball on a LEGO® pinball machine you built from scratch. Each project is cooler than the next! It’s easy and fun to build each of these awesome contraptions and games by following the clear step-by-step instructions and photographs. Think you have a different way to build something? Exercise your inventing muscles and tinker away! You’re in charge of your designs, so experiment and tweak to make your inventions personal to you. No matter what you end up creating, you’ll learn exciting new things about science, impress your family and have a blast along the way. Collect the whole series with Sarah Dees' other bestselling LEGO books: - The Big Book of LEGO Creations with Bricks You Already Have - Awesome LEGO Creations with Bricks You Already Have - Epic LEGO Adventures with Bricks You Already Have - Incredible LEGO Creations From Space with Bricks You Already Have

The American urban scene, and in particular New York's, has given us a rich cultural legacy of slang words and phrases, a bonanza of popular speech. Hot dog, rush hour, butter-and-egg man, gold digger, shyster, buttinsky, smart aleck, sidewalk superintendent, yellow journalism, breadline, straphanger, tar beach, the Tenderloin, the Great White Way, to do a Brodie--these are just a few of the hundreds of popular words and phrases that were born or took on new meaning in the streets of New York. In The City in Slang, Irving Lewis Allen traces this flowering of popular expressions that accompanied the emergence of the New York metropolis from the early nineteenth century down to the present. This unique account of the cultural and social history of America's greatest city provides in effect a lexicon of popular speech about city life. With many stories Allen shows how this vocabulary arose from city streets, often interplaying with vaudeville, radio, movies, comics, and the popular songs of Tin Pan Alley. Some terms of great pertinence to city people today have unexpectedly old pedigrees. Rush hour was coined by 1890, for instance, and rubberneck dates to the late 1890s and became popular in New York to describe the busloads of tourists who craned their necks to see the tall buildings and the sights of the Bowery and Chinatown. The Big Apple itself (since 1971 the official nickname of New York) appeared in the 1920s, though first in reference to the city's top racetracks and to Broadway bookings as pinnacles of professional endeavor. Allen also tells fascinating stories behind once-popular slang that is no longer in use. Spielers, for example, were the little girls in tenement districts who danced ecstatically on the sidewalks to the music of the hurdy-gurdy men and, when they were old enough, frequented the dance halls of the Lower East Side. Following the trail of these words and phrases into the city's East Side, West Side, and all around the town, from Harlem to Wall Street, and into the haunts of its high and low life, The City in Slang is a fascinating look at the rich cultural heritage of language about city life.

Life is a series of losses. I've decided to be very Zen about it. I have lost two husbands, my parents, my brother, countless friends; it is just one loss after another. You might as well get used to it." So muses the author's mother in this poignant and humorous memoir about mothers and daughters. Loss is a way of life for both Catherine and her mother. But where it made the daughter ravenous for contact, it made the mother lose her appetite for people. While the two always had a fierce attachment, by turns intimate and tumultuous, decades of fractious and contentious and frustrating interactions found a reprieve after the birth of Catherine's daughter, Olive. Witty and direct, weaving back and forth in time, the book charts the transformation of this volatile and unique mother-daughter relationship from longing to connection. A book about love, mortality, and the nature of family bonds, It Hit Me Like a Ton of Bricks is a must-read for anyone trying to navigate their way through the distance between their fantasies of love and the realities of family relationships.

The Dictionary Of Americanisms, Canadianisms, Briticisms and Australianisms is a complete, modern, and comprehensive dictionary featuring a large word list of more than 20000 entries. The purpose of this book is to provide a generous sampling of words and expressions of the various spheres of life in the USA, Great Britain, Australia and Canada during the last centuries. The dictionary also features a collection of slang and colloquial expressions in these four countries in the twentieth century. It has a clear, easy-to-use format and is ideal for students, schools, libraries, tourists and anyone who is interested in varieties of English spoken in major English-speaking countries.