Bøger udgivet af Harper Perennial

In this fascinating story of evolution, religion, politics, and personalities, Matthew Chapman captures the story behind the headlines in the debate over God and science in America.Kitzmiller v. Dover Board of Education, decided in late 2005, pitted the teaching of intelligent design (sometimes known as "creationism in a lab coat") against the teaching of evolution. Matthew Chapman, the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, spent several months covering the trial from beginning to end. Through his in-depth encounters with the participants--creationists, preachers, teachers, scientists on both sides of the issue, lawyers, theologians, the judge, and the eleven parents who resisted the fundamentalist proponents of intelligent design--Chapman tells a sometimes terrifying, often hilarious, and above all moving story of ordinary people doing battle in America over the place of religion and science in modern life.

"Complex and nervy, Shriver's clever meditation will intrigue anyone who has ever wondered how things might have turned out had they followed, or ignored, a life-changing impulse." -- People (Critic's Choice)This dazzling novel from the Orange Prize-winning author of the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin takes a psychological and deeply human look at love and volitionDoes the course of life hinge on a single kiss? Whether the American expatriate Irena McGovern does or doesn't lean into a certain pair of lips in London will determine whether she stays with her smart, disciplined, intellectual American partner Lawrence, or runs off with Ramsey--a wild, exuberant British snooker star the couple has known for years. Employing a parallel-universe structure, Shriver follows Irena's life as it unfolds under the influence of two drastically different men.In a tour de force that, remarkably, has no villains, Shriver explores the implications, both large and small, of our choice of mate--a subject of timeless, universal fascination for both sexes.

Global warming is the story of the twenty-first century. It is the most serious issue facing the future of humankind, but American energy and environmental policy is driving the whole world down a path toward global catastrophe. According to Joseph Romm, we have ten years, at most, to start making sharp cuts to our greenhouse gas emissions, or we will face disastrous consequences. The good news, he writes, is that there is something we can do--but only if the leadership of the U.S. government acts immediately and asserts its influence on the rest of the world.Hell and High Water is nothing less than a wake-up call to the country. It is a searing critique of American environmental and energy policy, and a passionate call to action by a writer with a unique command of the science and politics of climate change.

Fiona Sweeney wants to do something that matters, and she chooses to make her mark in the arid bush of northeastern Kenya. By helping to start a traveling library, she hopes to bring the words of Homer, Hemingway, and Dr. Seuss to far-flung tiny communities where people live daily with drought, hunger, and disease. Her intentions are honorable, and her rules are firm: due to the limited number of donated books, if any one of them is not returned, the bookmobile will not return.But, encumbered by her Western values, Fi does not understand the people she seeks to help. And in the impoverished small community of Mididima, she finds herself caught in the middle of a volatile local struggle when the bookmobile's presence sparks a dangerous feud between the proponents of modernization and those who fear the loss of traditional ways.

A Washington Post Book World Best Book of the YearWinner of the Israel Fishman-Stonewall Book Award for Nonfiction"Tender and amusing. . . . Doty brilliantly captures the qualities that make dogs endearing." -- The New YorkerWhen Mark Doty decides to adopt a dog as a companion for his dying partner, he brings home Beau, a large, malnourished golden retriever in need of loving care. Joining Arden, the black retriever, to complete their family, Beau bounds back into life. Before long, the two dogs become Doty's intimate companions, and eventually the very life force that keeps him from abandoning all hope during the darkest days. Dog Years is a poignant, intimate memoir interwoven with profound reflections on our feelings for animals and the lessons they teach us about living, love, and loss.

One Sunday morning, a band of guerrillas comes to Mariquita and takes all the men away, leaving behind only the priest and a fair-skinned boy disguised as a little girl. Without men, the small Colombian mountain village becomes a sinking wasteland filled with women resigned to food shortages, littered streets, and mourning. But Rosalba viuda de Patiño, wife of the former police sergeant, envisions a different future for the town of widows. Declaring herself magistrate, she promises to instill law and order, and restore the failing economy and infrastructure--and proceeds to create a utopia far greater than any revolutionary's imagined ideal society.Deft, rich, and darkly humorous, Tales from the Town of Widows marks the arrival of an unforgettable new literary talent.

The follow-up to her million-copy bestseller The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands, Dr. Laura focuses on both partners in the relationship and reveals how to bring marriage back from the brink of disaster.Jumping off her million-copy bestseller The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands, Dr. Laura now exposes the sensitive and loving truth in appreciating the polarity between masculine and feminine in order to produce and sustain a wonderfully satisfying marriage. Both husband and wife have power in the relationship, and each needs to realize this in order to ensure personal satisfaction. Using real-life examples and solutions from her call-in radio show, Dr. Laura focuses on the typical mistakes made by men and women in their relationships, and shows how marriages can come back from the brink of disaster and divorce.

It is the mid-1950s, and Kockroach, perfectly content with his life infesting a fleabag hotel off Times Square, awakens to discover that somehow he's been transformed into, of all things, a human. A tragic turn of events, yes, but cockroaches are awesome coping machines, so Kockroach copes. Step by step, he learns the ways of man--how to walk, how to talk, and how to wear a jaunty brown fedora. Led by his primitive desires and insectile amorality, he navigates through the bizarre human realms of crime, business, politics, and sex. Will he find success or be squashed flat from above? Will he change humanity, or will humanity change him?

The Mathematics of Love is a poignant chronicle of two people, separated by centuries, whose lives--amazingly, impossibly--become interwoven in a brilliant tapestry of tragedy, memory, and time. Following alternate but intimately connected stories--of a curious, promiscuous teenager in her season of exile and awakening in the English countryside in 1976, and a nineteenth-century soldier damaged on the fields of Waterloo, struggling to find his way back to life with the help of a compassionate, extraordinary woman--Emma Darwin's breathtaking narrative brilliantly evokes the horrors of war, the pain of loss, the heat of passion, and the enduring power of love.

Over the course of an extraordinary year, Zev Chafets--former New York Daily News columnist and onetime director of the Israeli government press office--traveled the world to explore the improbable confluence of Jews and evangelicals. He spent quality time with Jerry Falwell, visited Jewish cadets at West Point, attended the world's biggest Christian retail show, embarked on a road trip with the rabbi with the largest gentile following since Jesus, journeyed to the Holy Land with a band of repentant Christian pilgrims, and broke bread with George W. Bush and five hundred fellow Jewish Republicans.A Match Made in Heaven is the penetrating, engaging, and often hilarious narrative of Chafets's determined quest to get to the root of a very serious question: Why do evangelicals support Israel so strongly? Equal parts history, comedy, travelogue, and political tract, it is a smart and adventurous odyssey along a rapidly changing religious and political border.

From the perspective of 2007, the unintentional irony of Chance's boast is manifest--these days, the question is when will the Cubs ever win a game they have to have. In October 1908, though, no one would have laughed: The Cubs were, without doubt, baseball's greatest team--the first dynasty of the 20th century.Crazy '08 recounts the 1908 season--the year when Peerless Leader Frank Chance's men went toe to toe to toe with John McGraw and Christy Mathewson's New York Giants and Honus Wagner's Pittsburgh Pirates in the greatest pennant race the National League has ever seen. The American League has its own three-cornered pennant fight, and players like Cy Young, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, and the egregiously crooked Hal Chase ensured that the junior circuit had its moments. But it was the National League's--and the Cubs'--year. Crazy '08, however, is not just the exciting story of a great season. It is also about the forces that created modern baseball, and the America that produced it. In 1908, crooked pols run Chicago's First Ward, and gambling magnates control the Yankees. Fans regularly invade the field to do handstands or argue with the umps; others shoot guns from rickety grandstands prone to burning. There are anarchists on the loose and racial killings in the town that made Lincoln. On the flimsiest of pretexts, General Abner Doubleday becomes a symbol of Americanism, and baseball's own anthem, "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," is a hit. Picaresque and dramatic, 1908 is a season in which so many weird and wonderful things happen that it is somehow unsurprising that a hairpiece, a swarm of gnats, a sudden bout of lumbago, and a disaster down in the mines all play a role in its outcome. And sometimes the events are not so wonderful at all. There are several deaths by baseball, and the shadow of corruption creeps closer to the heart of baseball--the honesty of the game itself. Simply put, 1908 is the year that baseball grew up.Oh, and it was the last time the Cubs won the World Series.Destined to be as memorable as the season it documents, Crazy '08 sets a new standard for what a book about baseball can be.

In this passionate, provocative book, Peter Beinart offers a bold new vision and sounds the call for liberals to revive the spirit that once swept America and inspired the world.

"An elegant, personalized integration of anecdote, analysis, scholarship, memory and speculation. . . . Not since Henry James, perhaps, has a fiction writer examined the process of writing with such insight, authority and range of reference and allusion." --Russell Banks, New York Times Book Review"A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight-errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose."In this thought-provoking, endlessly enlightening, and entertaining essay on the art of the novel, renowned author Milan Kundera suggests that "the curtain" represents a ready-made perception of the world that each of us has--a pre-interpreted world. The job of the novelist, he argues, is to rip through the curtain and reveal what it hides. Here an incomparable literary artist cleverly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilization. In doing so, he celebrates a prose form that possesses the unique ability to transcend national and language boundaries in order to reveal some previously unknown aspect of human existence.

One Tuesday afternoon Allen Rucker, Hollywood comedy writer and family man, wakes from a nap to find himself paralyzed from the waist down. Shocking? Yes. Unfair? Absolutely. Reality? Inescapably. Rucker is shaken up and angry, but soon realizes he's stuck in a wheelchair forever. He begins to reevaluate everything in his life, from the simplest bodily functions to the mysteries of the universe. Luckily, he's invited us along on the bumpy, poignant, and often hilarious road to recovery that leads him to completely redefine his life.The Best Seat in the House is Rucker's unpretentious, unapologetic, refreshingly comic, and powerfully heartfelt paean to life and its fragility, and to the resilience and adaptability of a single, normal, very funny human being.

After a failed career and marriage in California, Hugh Davoren is back in Helena, Montana, as a construction hand at the old Pettyjohn Ranch, home of many childhood memories--including the seemingly accidental death of his teenaged first love, Celia.Hugh is just trying to get through another long workday on the ranch when he discovers two dead stallions. A further probe into the matter only pushes Hugh into dangerous corners, as he finds that the ranch's slick new owner, his beautiful wife, and even old Mr. Pettyjohn have terrible secrets to keep.

She is Nefertiti--beautiful and revered. With her husband, Akhenaten, she rules over Egypt, the most affluent, formidable, sophisticated empire in the ancient world. But an epic power struggle is afoot, brought on by the royal couple's inauguration of an enlightened new religion and the construction of a magnificent new capital. The priests are stunned by the abrupt forfeiture of their traditional wealth and influence; the people resent the loss of their gods--and the army is enraged by the growing turbulence around them. Then, just days before the festival that will celebrate the new capital, Nefertiti vanishes.Rahotep, the youngest chief detective in the Thebes division, has earned a reputation for his unorthodox yet effective methods. Entrusted by great Akhenaten himself with a most secret investigation, Rahotep has but ten days to find the missing Queen. If he succeeds, he will bask in the warmth of Akhenaten's favor. But if Rahotep fails, he and his entire family will die.

Is this a great country or what?You can bet on the turn of the card or a roll of the dice, but also on the NFL, the NCAA, and which Olsen twin marries first. We bet $80 billion a year, the amount growing wildly as more and more people gain access to this huge American wheel of fortune. No longer quarantined in Las Vegas, gambling has become as local and convenient as our neighborhood cineplex. If there's not a casino around the corner, there's one on your laptop computer.In Jackpot Nation, Richard Hoffer takes us on a headlong tour, alternately horrifying and hilarious, across our landscape of luck. Whether he's trying to win a side of bacon in a Minnesota bar, hustling a paper sack filled with $100,000 in cash across Las Vegas parking lots, poring over expansion plans with a tribal chief in California, or visiting the New York prison cell of a retired bus salesman with a poor understanding of three-game parlays, Hoffer explores with wit and heart our national inclination--a cultural predisposition, even--to take a chance.

Michael Stephenson's Patriot Battles is a comprehensive and richly detailed study of the military aspects of the War of Independence, and a fascinating look at the nuts and bolts of eighteenth-century combat. Covering everything from what motivated those who chose to fight to how they were enlisted, trained, clothed, and fed, it offers a close-up view of the war's greatest battles, with maps provided for each. Along the way many cherished myths are challenged, reputations are reassessed, and long-held assumptions are tested.One of the most satisfying and illuminating contributions to the literature on the War of Independence in many years, Patriot Battles is a vastly entertaining work of superior scholarship and a refreshing wind blowing through some of American history's dustier corridors.

When CSI investigator Claire Watson meets John Rock on holiday, the attraction is instant--but so is the feeling that they've met before. Now uneasy memories from a decade earlier are beginning to surface for Claire: memories of a body found at the bottom of a cliff in Northern Ireland, a possible suicide or, perhaps, a murder. Now, ten years later in the South of France, she has once again encountered the dead woman's husband, the man Claire and her colleagues had believed was the killer, though they could never pin the crime on him.But did John's wife really die by his hands? And if he is a cold-blooded murderer, why is Claire so violently attracted to him?

Why can't you remember where you put your keys? Or the title of the movie you saw last week? Anyone older than forty knows that forgetfulness can be unnerving, frustrating, and sometimes terrifying. With compassion and humor, acclaimed journalist Cathryn Jakobson Ramin explores the factors that determine how well or poorly one's brain will age. She takes readers along on her lively journey--consulting with experts in the fields of sleep, stress, traumatic brain injury, hormones, genetics, and dementia, as well as specialists in nutrition, cognitive psychology, and the burgeoning field of drug-based cognitive enhancement. Along the way, she turns up fresh scientific findings, explores the dark regions of the human brain, and hears the intimate confessions of high-functioning midlife adults who--like so many of us--are desperate to understand exactly what's going on upstairs.

America's health care system is unraveling, with millions of hard-working people unable to pay for prescription drugs and regular checkups, let alone hospital visits. Jonathan Cohn traveled across the United States--the only country in the developed world that does not guarantee its citizens access to medical care--to investigate why this crisis is happening and to see firsthand its impact on ordinary Americans. Passionate, powerful, illuminating, and often devastating, Sick chronicles the decline of America's health care system, and lays bare the consequences any one of us could suffer if we don't replace it.

"Brilliantly framed . . . fascinating . . . a well-told story of discovery, conquest, business, and politics." -- Kirkus ReviewsFour centuries ago, and 14 years before the Mayflower, a group of men--led by a one-armed ex-pirate, an epileptic aristocrat, a reprobate cleric and a government spy--left London aboard a fleet of three ships. Despite their shortcomings, and against the odds, they built Jamestown, a ramshackle outpost that laid the foundations of the British Empire and the United States of America.Drawing on new discoveries, neglected sources, and manuscript collections scattered across the world, Savage Kingdom challenges the textbook image of Jamestown as a mere money-making venture. It reveals a reckless, daring enterprise led by outcasts of the Old World who found themselves interlopers in a new one. An intimate story in an epic setting, it shows how the land of Pocahontas came to be drawn into a new global order.

"Overdosed America reveals the greed and corruption that drive health care costs skyward and now threaten the public health. Before you see a doctor, you should read this book." --Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food NationUsing the examples of Vioxx, Celebrex, cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, and anti-depressants, Overdosed America shows that at the heart of the current crisis in American medicine lies the commercialization of medical knowledge itselfFor twenty years, John Abramson, M.D., cared for patients of all ages in a small town north of Boston. But increasingly his role as family doctor was undermined as pressure mounted to use the latest drugs and high-tech solutions for nearly every problem. Drawing on his background in statistics and health policy research, he began to investigate the radical changes that were quietly taking place in American medicine.At the heart of the crisis, he found, lies the changed purpose of medical knowledge--from seeking to optimize health to searching for the greatest profits. The lack of transparency that has become normal in commercially sponsored medical research now taints the scientific evidence published in even our most prestigious medical journals. And unlike the recent scandals in other industries that robbed Americans of money and jobs, this one is undermining our health.Commercial distortion pervades the information that doctors rely upon to guide the prevention and treatment of common health problems, from heart disease to stroke, osteoporosis, diabetes, and osteoarthritis. The good news, as Dr. Abramson explains, is that the real scientific evidence shows that many of the things that you can do to protect and preserve your own health are far more effective than what the drug companies' top-selling products can do for you--which is why the drug companies work so hard to keep this information under wraps.In what is sure to be one of the most important and eye-opening books you or your doctor will ever read, John Abramson offers conclusive evidence that American medicine has broken its promise to best improve our health and is squandering more than $500 billion each year in the process.

Not since the Civil War has the United States been so polarized, politically and ideologically. At the heart of this fracture is a fascinating, paradoxical marriage between our country's politics and religions.In The Holy Vote, Ray Suarez explores the advent of this polarization and how it is profoundly changing the way we live our lives. With hands-on reporting, Suarez explores the attitudes and beliefs of the people behind the voting numbers and how the political divide is manifesting itself across the country. The reader will come to a greater understanding of what Americans believe, and how this belief structure fuels the debates that dominate the issues on our evening news broadcasts.

On an outing from her boarding school, young Lucía meets Manuel--art historian and exquisite storyteller--who shares with her the tale of one of history's most tumultuous loves: Queen Juana of Castile's legendary devotion to her husband, Prince Philippe the Handsome. Embracing a union thrust upon her by political necessity, Juana responds with all the passionate abandon inherent in her fiery nature--and is forced to pay a high price for her honest sensuality. For there are those at the Renaissance court who will not allow such unabashed independence in the heir to one of the world's most powerful empires--and they declare Juana mad, denying her ascension to the throne. But is she truly insane, or is she merely a victim of her own impetuosity and unbridled desire? Or is Juana a pawn in a fierce power struggle for control of the throne? Lucía attends raptly to the tale Manuel relates--and their own story begins to miraculously, dangerously mirror that of Juana the Mad and her beloved prince.

Following the resounding success of the eponymous West End and Broadway hit play, Frost/Nixon tells the extraordinary story of how Sir David Frost pursued and landed the biggest fish of his career--and how the series drew larger audiences than any news interview ever had in the United States, before being shown all over the world.This is Frost's absorbing story of his pursuit of Richard Nixon, and is no less revealing of his own toughness and pertinacity than of the ex-President's elusiveness. Frost's encounters with such figures as Swifty Lazar, Ron Ziegler, potential sponsors, and Nixon as negotiator are nothing short of hilarious, and his insight into the taping of the programs themselves is fascinating.Frost/Nixon provides the authoritative account of the only public trial that Nixon would ever have, and a revelation of the man's character as it appeared in the stress of eleven grueling sessions before the cameras. Including historical perspective and transcripts of the edited interviews, this is the story of Sir David Frost's quest to produce one of the most dramatic pieces of television ever broadcast, described by commentators at the time as "a catharsis" for the American people.

"BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY." --TimeVolume 2 of the Nobel Prize-winner's towering masterpiece: the story of Solzhenitsyn's entrance into the Soviet prison camps, where he would remain for nearly a decade. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum."The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times." --George F. Kennan"It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century." --David Remnick, The New Yorker"Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece. . . . The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today." --Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, from the foreword

"BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY." --TimeVolume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum."The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times." --George F. Kennan"It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century." --David Remnick, The New Yorker"Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece. . . . The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today." --Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, from the foreword