This White Courier Notebook / Journal makes an excellent Birthday, School, Graduation or Christmas gift for anyone that loves to follow their passion. It is 6x9 inches and has 109 blank pages, which makes it an ideal notebook to take with you everywhere you go. This journal is suitable for men or women, boys and girls of all ages, and makes the perfect gift for any occasion, such as birthdays, Christmas or just to give to family and friends!

America’s favorite storyteller, Pat Conroy, is back with a unique cookbook that only he could conceive. Delighting us with tales of his passion for cooking and good food and the people, places, and great meals he has experienced, Conroy mixes them together with mouthwatering recipes from the Deep South and the world beyond. It all started thirty years ago with a chance purchase of The Escoffier Cookbook, an unlikely and daunting introduction for the beginner. But Conroy was more than up to the task. He set out with unwavering determination to learn the basics of French cooking—stocks and dough—and moved swiftly on to veal demi-glace and pâte brisée. With the help of his culinary accomplice, Suzanne Williamson Pollak, Conroy mastered the dishes of his beloved South as well as the cuisine he has savored in places as far away from home as Paris, Rome, and San Francisco. Each chapter opens with a story told with the inimitable brio of the author. We see Conroy in New Orleans celebrating his triumphant novel The Prince of Tides at a new restaurant where there is a contretemps with its hardworking young owner/chef—years later he discovered the earnest young chef was none other than Emeril Lagasse; we accompany Pat and his wife on their honeymoon in Italy and wander with him, wonderstruck, through the markets of Umbria and Rome; we learn how a dinner with his fighter-pilot father was preceded by the Great Santini himself acting out a perilous night flight that would become the last chapters of one of his son’s most beloved novels. These tales and more are followed by corresponding recipes—from Breakfast Shrimp and Grits and Sweet Potato Rolls to Pappardelle with Prosciutto and Chestnuts and Beefsteak Florentine to Peppered Peaches and Creme Brulee. A master storyteller and passionate cook, Conroy believes that “A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.” “This book is the story of my life as it relates to the subject of food. It is my autobiography in food and meals and restaurants and countries far and near. Let me take you to a restaurant on the Left Bank of Paris that I found when writing The Lords of Discipline. There are meals I ate in Rome while writing The Prince of Tides that ache in my memory when I resurrect them. There is a shrimp dish I ate in an elegant English restaurant, where Cuban cigars were passed out to all the gentlemen in the room after dinner, that I can taste on my palate as I write this. There is barbecue and its variations in the South, and the subject is a holy one to me. I write of truffles in the Dordogne Valley in France, cilantro in Bangkok, catfish in Alabama, scuppernong in South Carolina, Chinese food from my years in San Francisco, and white asparagus from the first meal my agent took me to in New York City. Let me tell you about the fabulous things I have eaten in my life, the story of the food I have encountered along the way. . . ”

Winner of the Man Booker Prize Named a Best Book of the Century by The New York Times Book Review International Bestseller From acclaimed author Alan Hollinghurst, a sweeping novel about class, sex, and money during four extraordinary years of change and tragedy. In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby-whom Nick had idolized at Oxford-and Catherine, who is highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions. As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black man who works as a clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this is a major work by one of our finest writers.

In Testosterone Inc.: Tales of CEOs Gone Wild, bestselling authorand New York Post columnist Chris Byron chronicles the Gatsby-likesaga of the rise and fall of the celebrity CEO. During the heightof the 1990s bull market, they were America’s new heroes: theheroes of business. They were our bold new leaders, cutting thefat, pushing for productivity, implementing visionary plans, andmaking strategic deals. When the bull market turned to bust and the applause turned tocat-calls, the world was shocked at the truth. Drenched in moneyand public acclaim, our CEO-heroes—mostly white, mostly male,mostly middle-aged—turned out to be not much different than agroup of twenty-something rock stars—drunk on power anddriven by sex, greed, and glamour. Testosterone Inc. goes behind the boardroom doors to show theserial affairs and marriages of these acquisitive corporatetitans. At the center of this story is Jack Welch, thebiggest of America’s rock star CEOs and the former head ofGeneral Electric Co., surrounded by “mini-me” CEOs RonPerelman of Revlon, Al Dunlap of Sunbeam, and Dennis Kozlowski ofTyco—all gone wild in public displays of consumption andpredatory appetites writ large. Byron gets inside the bars where Welch liked to hang out andpick up women with his early “business soul mate”buddies. Byron hovers unseen at the elbow of Ron Perelman and hismistress aboard the Concorde for a week in Paris in his mistakenbelief that his wife knows nothing about his secret affair. Byronpeeks behind the curtains of a U.S. Army officers’ quartersto behold Al Dunlap horrifying his first wife, who claimed in herdivorce action that Dunlap would point his knife at her and say,“I often wondered what human flesh tasted like.” Byronbecomes a fly on the wall to chronicle the longing for respect andserial womanizing of Dennis Kozlowski. Frequently hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking, Testosterone Inc.follows the intertwined lives of these four corporate heroes, fromchildhood to their ultimate moments of glory and the crash-and-burncalamities that followed, as man’s age-old hunger for power,greed, and temptation undid them all. From suicide to murder,from dysfunctional childhoods to dysfunctional marriages inadulthood, from business chutzpah to financial suicide, here is theultimate untold business story of our time: what went on atcentury’s end, when testosterone got the best of businessmeneverywhere, and CEOs went wild.

The tale begins over three-hundred years ago, when the Fair People—the goblins, fairies, dragons, and other fabled and fantastic creatures of a dozen lands—fled the Old World for the New, seeking haven from the ways of Man. With them came their precious jewels: diamonds, rubies, emeralds, pearls... But then the Fair People vanished, taking with them their twelve fabulous treasures. And they remained hidden until now... Across North America, these twelve treasures, over ten-thousand dollars in precious jewels, are buried. The key to finding each can be found within the twelve full color paintings and verses of The Secret. Yet The Secret is much more than that. At long last, you can learn not only the whereabouts of the Fair People's treasure, but also the modern forms and hiding places of their descendants: the Toll Trolls, Maitre D'eamons, Elf Alphas, Tupperwerewolves, Freudian Sylphs, Culture Vultures, West Ghosts and other delightful creatures in the world around us. The Secret is a field guide to them all. Many "armchair treasure hunt" books have been published over the years, most notably Masquerade (1979) by British artist Kit Williams. Masquerade promised a jewel-encrusted golden hare to the first person to unravel the riddle that Williams cleverly hid in his art. In 1982, while everyone in Britain was still madly digging up hedgerows and pastures in search of the golden hare, The Secret: A Treasure Hunt was published in America. The previous year, author and publisher Byron Preiss had traveled to 12 locations in the continental U.S. (and possibly Canada) to secretly bury a dozen ceramic casques. Each casque contained a small key that could be redeemed for one of 12 jewels Preiss kept in a safe deposit box in New York. The key to finding the casques was to match one of 12 paintings to one of 12 poetic verses, solve the resulting riddle, and start digging. Since 1982, only two of the 12 casques have been recovered. The first was located in Grant Park, Chicago, in 1984 by a group of students. The second was unearthed in 2004 in Cleveland by two members of the Quest4Treasure forum. Preiss was killed in an auto accident in the summer of 2005, but the hunt for his casques continues.

Raising the Dead by Ron Rash is a collection of poetry.Many of the poems are set in the Southern Appalachian mountains.