A SEARING INDICTMENT OF THE MASTER OF CHARM, BARACK OBAMA, FOR HIS HISTORIC WAR ON AMERICAN YOUTH “Let me be clear.” It was his come-hither call, his winsome whistle, his lingual lure. Barack Obama employed this phrase to sell his lies as maxims and his ineptitude as expertise. From JFK to Bill Clinton, America has experienced charming and coy presidents. But the most charming and coy is Obama, who seduced a generation of 95 million young Americans he used for his own political gain. Katie Kieffer is a gutsy commentator who gives it back to Barack. She turns his words against him. She grabs the high bar of transparency that Obama set for himself and snaps it with her wit. In Let Me Be Clear, Kieffer gives us an unflinching yet entertaining account of this administration’s exploitation of Millennials: · How: Obama spearheaded the Great Recovery—and young people could tell when their law degrees landed them jobs as baristas. · What: the “New Shacking Up” entails. (Hint: parents AND young people hate this trend.) · How: Barack’s buddy essentially wrote Obama-care without Congress. Plus, nearly 300 doctors offer free-market solutions to improve health care. · How: a constitutional law–professor president failed to rationally discuss gay marriage. · Why: Barack wouldn’t have been the best father for Trayvon Martin; he deserved better. · What: “Assuming We Don’t Die Tonight” reveals about the bloodcurdling story of Benghazi. · How: liberal lies about guns have “tattooed” all youths as criminals. Kieffer implodes the naïve War on Guns and presents solutions for mass violence with more love and more guns. Inspiring hope, Kieffer outlines how conser­vatives and independents can win electoral races and achieve entrepreneurial dreams. Kieffer’s got grit. She’s very clear with her president: she brings smooth-tongued bullies to justice. See for yourself.

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“A remarkably entertaining and thought-provoking look at the human voice and all of its myriad functions and sounds . . . Wonderful” (Library Journal, starred review). From Farinelli, the eighteenth-century castrato who brought down opera houses with his high C, to the recording of Johnny B. Goode affixed to the Voyager spacecraft, Let Me Clear My Throat dissects the whys and hows of popular voices, making them hum with significance and emotion. There are murders of punk rock crows, impressionists, and rebel yells; Howard Dean’s “BYAH!” and Marlon Brando’s “Stellaaaaa!” and a stock film yawp that has made cameos in movies from A Star is Born to Spaceballs. The voice is thought’s incarnating instrument and Elena Passarello’s essays are a riotous deconstruction of the ways the sounds we make both express and shape who we are—the annotated soundtrack of us giving voice to ourselves. “Standout pieces include a biography of the most famous scream in Hollywood history; a breakdown of the relationship between song and birdsong; and an analysis of the sounds of disgust. Akin to: A dinner party at which David Sedaris, Mary Roach and Marlon Brando are trying to out-monologue one another.” —Philadelphia Weekly “The beauty of Ellen Passarello’s voice is that it’s so confidently its own . . . I began randomly with her essay wondering what the space aliens will make of ‘Johnny B. Goode’ on the Voyager gold record and couldn’t stop after that.” —John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead

The Vatican has protected the spear of destiny for centuries. Very few in the church know of its existence and even fewer know of its true power. When the spear is stolen, the church vows to do whatever it takes to get it back, including kidnapping the family of the greatest warrior to ever walk the earth to force his cooperation in its retrieval. Resurrected after a thousand years in hell, Tanibus will stop at nothing to get his family back. But there is a child and also a crusade that stands between accomplishing his goal. Tanibus: Warrior of God is the second book in the Tanibus saga and immediately picks up where the first book, The Forgotten Disciple, ends, making for an easy transition for the reader. Follow the journey of the man who has walked with Jesus and gave his life to protect him in hell.

In Spiking the Sucker Punch, Robbie Q. Telfer's first published collection, the author profiles the modern comedian from the inside out - starting with the innards and moving toward a damaged laughter. His work blends surrealism and narrative, bending grammar and expectations along the way. These pieces interrogate identity, place, and lead the reader to a much higher understanding of bears. This gloriously bellowed lyrical and linguistic chaos, this ‘mess of crossed wires and mixed seagulls,’ will make your status quo ache, your perceptions implode, your horizons widen and shatter. -Patricia Smith, “Blood Dazzler” Robbie Q, our dazzling shooting star sparking the gritty Chicago heavens, crackling with the surprising and contradictory rhythms of life on the run and in the heat. Keep on, Brother Q, dance the dialectic, your wild inspired unruly convergence and conspiracy. -Bill Ayers, activist/educator/author In Spiking the Sucker Punch, Robbie Q. Telfer rocks out a bestiary of antic poetics all his own. In his open and generous hands, speech acts zoom in and out of our collective desire to live and love. You will feel alive again reading it. -Daniel Nester, “How to Be Inappropriate”

A Major Literary Event: a brilliant new translation of Thomas Mann's first great novel, one of the two for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929. Buddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1900, when Mann was only twenty-five, has become a classic of modem literature -- the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany. With consummate skill, Mann draws a rounded picture of middle-class life: births and christenings; marriages, divorces, and deaths; successes and failures. These commonplace occurrences, intrinsically the same, vary slightly as they recur in each succeeding generation. Yet as the Buddenbrooks family eventually succumbs to the seductions of modernity -- seductions that are at variance with its own traditions -- its downfall becomes certain. In immensity of scope, richness of detail, and fullness of humanity, Buddenbrooks surpasses all other modem family chronicles; it has, indeed, proved a model for most of them. Judged as the greatest of Mann's novels by some critics, it is ranked as among the greatest by all. Thomas Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929.