A two year old girl is abandoned on the streets of Ulaan Bataar with a bag of clothes and a note pinned to her: ‘Please take care of me ...'Twelve year old Betty, alone looking after her dying mother, is kidnapped to become a child soldier ...An Australian aid worker finds himself off the tourist map confronted by the struggles of people in the developing world, across six continents. He discovers the inspirational and the beautiful; people and cultures responding to their changing landscape; the stories and courage of individuals who bring fresh perspectives to life. And so much that is just funny ... 'A bold, humane and utterly readable book.' GEORGE NEGUS

From the UK Poet Laureate and bestselling translator, a spirited book that demystifies and celebrates the art of poetry today In A Vertical Art, acclaimed poet Simon Armitage takes a refreshingly common-sense approach to an art form that can easily lend itself to grand statements and hollow gestures. Questioning both the facile and obscure ends of the poetry spectrum, he offers sparkling new insights about poetry and an array of favorite poets. Based on Armitage’s public lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry, A Vertical Art illuminates poets as varied as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn, A. R. Ammons, and Claudia Rankine. The chapters are often delightfully sassy in their treatment, as in “Like, Elizabeth Bishop,” in which Armitage dissects—and tallies—the poet’s predilection for similes. He discusses Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, poetic lists, poetry and the underworld, and the dilemmas of translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Armitage also pulls back the curtain on the unromantic realities of making a living as a contemporary poet, and ends the book with his own list of “Ninety-Five Theses” on the principles and practice of poetry. An appealingly personal book that explores the volatile and disputed definitions of poetry from the viewpoint of a practicing writer and dedicated reader, A Vertical Art makes an insightful and entertaining case for the power and potential of poetry today.

The past can be a foreign country and, for Kim Slade, a clinical psychologist specializing in young women with eating disorders, it's deadly, too. Upon returning to work after a mental breakdown, Kim is summoned to the deathbed of a former client, Mimi Vellender. Mimi's dying wish is that Kim find her brother, Nicholas, who mysteriously disappeared five years ago. Just as mysteriously, Kim's long-estranged mother, Monica, comes back into her life following the suspicious death of the judge she worked for as a live-in housekeeper. Is the sudden desire for a family reunion all it seems, or does Monica have something to hide? Praise: "Aims to please readers who like to keep guessing and aren't put off by a gruesome murder or more."—Kirkus Reviews

Prepare yourself for an eye-opening odyssey through magical, metaphysical realities The spaces between... ...Are filled with wonder, spectacle and the unexpected. So says Joseph, the ancient, discarnate spirit communicator in this, the eighth book of his internationally-acclaimed series, as he draws back the heavy curtain of 'reality' to reveal aspects of the world and of our physical and spiritual lives that have remained unnoticed, unseen and unappreciated for countless aeons. Within these pages you will meet the many wondrous expressions of spiritual life, both positive and negative, that co-habit and interact with us on Earth -- hugely influential beings that at worst have been dismissed entirely and at best confined to the realms of folklore and myth as a result of our current fascination with all things material and the glamour of our express-train society. You will also come face to face with and discover the nature of some of the deepest facets of yourself, allowing you to gain greater control over your life and to express and project the noblest aspects of 'you' into the world for your personal benefit, the benefit of all humanity and the good of the planet itself. Prepare yourself for an enlightening, enthralling and sometimes shocking journey through the parallel realms that exist around and within you at this very moment, waiting to once again be recognised and understood. ...By the last page you will be in no doubt that the 'spaces between' -- on Earth, in the heavens and deep within yourself -- are, in fact, anything but.

From the renowned biochemist and author of The Vital Question, an illuminating inquiry into the Krebs cycle and the origins of life. “Nick Lane’s exploration of the building blocks that underlie life’s big fundamental questions—the origin of life itself, aging, and disease—have shaped my thinking since I first came across his work. He is one of my favorite science writers.”—Bill Gates What brings the Earth to life, and our own lives to an end? For decades, biology has been dominated by the study of genetic information. Information is important, but it is only part of what makes us alive. Our inheritance also includes our living metabolic network, a flame passed from generation to generation, right back to the origin of life. In Transformer, biochemist Nick Lane reveals a scientific renaissance that is hiding in plain sight —how the same simple chemistry gives rise to life and causes our demise. Lane is among the vanguard of researchers asking why the Krebs cycle, the “perfect circle” at the heart of metabolism, remains so elusive more than eighty years after its discovery. Transformer is Lane’s voyage, as a biochemist, to find the inner meaning of the Krebs cycle—and its reverse—why it is still spinning at the heart of life and death today. Lane reveals the beautiful, violent world within our cells, where hydrogen atoms are stripped from the carbon skeletons of food and fed to the ravenous beast of oxygen. Yet this same cycle, spinning in reverse, also created the chemical building blocks that enabled the emergence of life on our planet. Now it does both. How can the same pathway create and destroy? What might our study of the Krebs cycle teach us about the mysteries of aging and the hardest problem of all, consciousness? Transformer unites the story of our planet with the story of our cells—what makes us the way we are, and how it connects us to the origin of life. Enlivened by Lane’s talent for distilling and humanizing complex research, Transformer offers an essential read for anyone fascinated by biology’s great mysteries. Life is at root a chemical phenomenon: this is its deep logic.

In a marketplace that demands perpetual upgrades, the survival of interactive play ultimately depends on the adroit management of negotiations between game producers and youthful consumers of this new medium. The authors suggest a model of expansion that encompasses technological innovation, game design, and marketing practices. Their case study of video gaming exposes fundamental tensions between the opposing forces of continuity and change in the information economy: between the play culture of gaming and the spectator culture of television, the dynamism of interactive media and the increasingly homogeneous mass-mediated cultural marketplace, and emerging flexible post-Fordist management strategies and the surviving techniques of mass-mediated marketing. Digital Play suggests a future not of democratizing wired capitalism but instead of continuing tensions between "access to" and "enclosure in" technological innovation, between inertia and diversity in popular culture markets, and between commodification and free play in the cultural industries. -- publisher description.