The huge ceramics kiln had been turned off in the middle of the night, before it had finished firing, because of a mysterious phone call. Once opened, something was discovered inside the kiln, along with the under-glazed pots...human bones. Jean and her artist husband are soon involved in finding the murderer and finding out why the kiln was the weapon. It will take NASA, computers, secret glazes, and a strange funeral to guide Jean in solving the crime. But it will also lead her deeper into danger. The circumstances of the murder of a begonia acquaintance point to a close friend as the main suspect. Jean has to prove this friend didn't do the poisoning. Secret trips to Haiti, The Vodon, and the appearance of a fancy new begonia lead Jean to the killer. Can she get to the police before the killer finds her? There is one more mystery before Jean's done.

Even as a canon, he lived in princely style, with a retinue of two knights and forty squires, and he wrote at the request of John of Hainault, the uncle of queen Philippa. He was thus able to draw directly on the verbal accounts of the Crécy campaign given to him by soldiers from Hainault who had fought on both sides; and his description of warfare in Scotland is the most realistic account of what it was like to be on campaign that survives from this period.

Sixteen disabled artists talk about their lives and how art has made a difference to them.

"In Jeans, journalist and pop culture critic James Sullivan tells the story of this amazing garment, from its humble utilitarian origins to its ubiquitous presence in the twenty-first-century global economy. Beginning with the appearance of front-buckled denim pants in nineteenth-century America, Sullivan untangles the legends surrounding the origin of jeans and traces their adoption as work clothing in the West. Jeans then follows their mass production by regional entrepreneurs including San Francisco's legendary Levi Strauss, their widespread adoption as youth clothing and westernwear in the twentieth century, and their popularization around the world."--BOOK JACKET.

The story of the First Crusade, as witnessed by contemporary writers 'O day so ardently desired! O time of times the most memorable! O deed before all other deeds!' The fall of Jerusalem in the summer of 1099 to an exhausted and starving army of western European soldiers was one of the most extraordinary events of the Middle Ages. It was both the climax of a great wave of visionary Christian fervour and the beginning of what proved to be a futile and abortive attempt to implant a new European kingdom of heaven in an overwhelmingly Muslim world. This remarkable collection brings together a wide variety of contemporary accounts of the First Crusade, including Pope Urban II's initial call to arms of 1095, as well as the first-hand writings of priests, knights, a Jewish pilgrim, a destitute noblewoman, an Iraqi poet and the historian Anna Comnena. Together they provide a vivid and nuanced picture of the First Crusade and the people who were swept up in it. Edited with an introduction and notes by Christopher Tyerman