Thirty Years Later: "The Oyster and the Pearl" is a delightful, endearing read that puts a smile on your face from start to finish. It chronicles the chance meeting, courtship, and ultimate marriage of two people who seemingly have nothing in common. It delves into the deep commitment they developed to each other, to their marriage, and to a happy family life. It will make you laugh, and it will make you cry as it maintains your keen interest until the very last page. Whether you are married, single, or contemplating marriage, this romance elicits emotion that all can identify with. If you have ever fallen in love, this book is for you. Thirty Years Later: "The Oyster and the Pearl" is the first of a three-part series, each one leaving you anxiously desiring to read more. Enjoy!

Until they were expelled from power thirty years ago, in early 1986, the late dictator Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos (she, the Shoe Queen) jointly ruled the Philippines with impunity for 20+ years. They were an efficient cash-and-carry team—while he raided the national till, she shopped 'til she dropped. In the words of the US congressman investigating them, "Compared to her (Imelda), Marie Antoinette was a bag lady," . . . while Ferdinand made master embezzler Bernie Madoff look like a rank amateur. With the passing of 30 years, this book becomes a full accounting of the rapacious and avaricious rule the pair enjoyed—how they hoodwinked an unsuspecting people, and the truth behind many of the dirty tricks they employed revealed at last. The present is an opportune time to take stock, especially as their only son and heir, Ferdinand, Jr., and others of his ilk, launches a comeback attempt for national office in this year's Philippine elections, and trying to re-fabricate history in the process. This book will set the record straight.

Europe in 1618 was riven between Protestants and Catholics, Bourbon and Hapsburg--as well as empires, kingdoms, and countless principalities. After angry Protestants tossed three representatives of the Holy Roman Empire out the window of the royal castle in Prague, world war spread from Bohemia with relentless abandon, drawing powers from Spain to Sweden into a nightmarish world of famine, disease, and seemingly unstoppable destruction.

"Thirty years ago, I lay in the womb of a woman, conceived in a sexual act of rape, being carried during the prenatal period by an unwilling and rebellious mother, finally bursting from the womb only to be tormented in a family whose members I despised or pitied, and brought into association with people whom I should never have chosen." Shortly after its 1925 publication, Gertrude Beasley's ferociously eloquent feminist memoir was banned and she herself disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Though British Nobel Prize winner Bertrand Russell called My First Thirty Years "truthful, which is illegal" and Larry McMurtry pronounced it the finest Texas book of its era, Beasley's words have been all but inaccessible for almost a century—until now. Beasley penned one of the most brutally honest coming-of-age historical memoirs ever written, one which strips away romantic notions about frontier women's lives at the turn of the 20th century. Her mother and sisters braved male objectification and the indignities of poverty, with little if any control over their futures. With characteristic ferocity, Beasley rejected a life of dependence, persisting in her studies and becoming first a teacher, then a principal, then a college instructor, and finally a foreign correspondent. Along the way, Beasley becomes a strident activist for women's rights, socialism, and sex education, which she sees as key to restoring bodily autonomy to women like those she grew up with. She is undaunted by authority figures but secretly ashamed of her origins and yearns to be loved. My First Thirty Years is profoundly human and shockingly candid, a rallying cry that cost its author her career and her freedom. Her story deserves to be heard. Praise for My First Thirty Years: "For almost a century in Texas literary circles, Gertrude Beasley's 1925 memoir has been more a legend than a book... The tangled history of My First Thirty Years, and Beasley's horrific personal fate, are case studies in society's merciless treatment of women of her era who gave voice to socially unspeakable truths. The memoir's republication this month, which makes it widely available for the first time in 96 years, is a long-overdue moment of reckoning. It's also a rich gift to the Texas literary canon."—Texas Monthly "We should all be as fierce, loud, and convinced of our own self-worth as Gertrude Beasley was. This story of a justifiably angry woman living ahead of the world she lived in will resonate deeply today."—Soraya Chemaly, activist and award-winning author of Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger "Gertrude Beasley's 1925 memoir grabs the reader by the arm and holds tight, speaking with a voice as compelling as if she had just put down her pen this morning. Feminist, socialist, and acute observer of both herself and the world around her, Beasley gives us stories that illuminate the costs of poverty and of being a woman. To read My First Thirty Years is to be in conversation with an extraordinary mind."—Anne Gardiner Perkins, author of Yale Needs Women

30th Anniversary edition. The Ruby Slippers of Oz exposes the clandestine and often treacherous underground of movie memorabilia, this Hollywood mystery may be the film industry's most bizarre account of ambition, greed, obsession, and deception. Something's afoot here as a colorful group of characters are spellbound by the charm and curse of the screen's most indelible and iconic image: The Ruby Slippers of Oz. Updated for the first time in 30 years, with many new revelations, this is a fascinating read for any Oz movie buff and those who love a good mystery.

Europe Thirty Years After 1989 explores what happened in the former socialist countries during the last thirty years and the reasons behind these events. The authors examine how values, memory, and identity have been transforming these countries since the year 1989.

Edwin Forbes’s Thirty Years After is surely one of the most remarkable firsthand accounts of the Civil War ever published. Originally issued in 1890--thus the title--the lavish, oversized book is both a pictorial and a written record of the daily experience of war. It contains almost two hundred etchings of Civil War scenes along with twenty equestrian portraits of Union generals such as Grant, Sherman, McClellan, and Custer, reproduced from oil paintings. The present edition is a facsimile of the original, with the addition of an Introduction by William J. Cooper, Jr, who discusses the significance of the books and provides a biographical sketch of Edwin Forbes and information about the role of journalists in the war. Forbes, born in New York City in 1839, was a staff artist for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. On assignment for the paper, Forbes traveled with the federal army from the battle of Cross Keys, in 1862, to the siege of Petersburg, in 1864. A keen observer, Forbes sketched battlefields, campsites, and other scenes that he later rendered in relief etchings on copper plate. Some of the etchings were published in a portfolio in 1876. For the much larger Thirty Years After, Forbes executed scores of additional etchings and wrote an informative text to go with them. The book is divided into dozens of brief chapters, with each chapter’s text serving to introduce and explain the accompanying illustrations. Although Forbes made drawings of officers, he was clearly more interested in depicting the common soldier. His evocative etchings show such scenes as a regiment marching into camp at nightfall, an artillery reserve rolling into action at Cemetery Hill, a cavalry charge at Brandy Station, a band of prisoners lined up for execution, positioned so that they would tumble directly into their coffins. Forbes did not flinch from portraying the full terror and force of combat, but he also clearly understood that soldiering was not a one-dimensional experience. Many of his studies reveal the almost-forgotten minutiae of war. He shows soldiers engaged in such ordinary activities as preparing meals, laundering uniforms, avidly reading about events at him whenever newspapers were available, and relaxing between skirmishes. His illustrations also depict supply trains, pontoon bridges, army hospitals, and slaver cabins. In drawings of Confederate soldiers, Forbes emphasizes the comradely bond that sometimes could develop between opposing sides. A particularly telling etching shows Confederate pickets exchanging tobacco for coffee with their Union counterparts. For the modern reader, this visually arresting book offers a unique perspective on the Civil War.