Showing results by author "Leona" in All Categories

The polluted waters of the canals in Venice are an ever-present issue; but environmental concerns become significant in Commissario Guido Brunetti's work when an investigator from the Carabiniere—looking into the illegal hauling of garbage—asks for a favor. But the investigator is not the only one with a special request. Brunetti's father-in-law needs help and a mysterious woman comes into the picture. And the Commissario soon finds himself in the middle of an investigation into murder and corruption more dangerous than anything he's seen before.

Guido Brunetti faces a heinous crime committed outside his jurisdiction. He is drawn in innocently enough: two young American women have been badly injured in a boating accident, joyriding in the Laguna with two young Italians. However, Brunetti's curiosity is aroused by the behavior of the young men, who abandoned the victims after taking them to the hospital. If the injuries were the result of an accident, why did they want to avoid association with it?

The authors reached back into history to understand the reasons and methods brilliant rabbis and Talmudic scholars abandoned the Holy Land, both physically and spiritually, to settle in what came to be known as the lands of the Diaspora. This dramatic exodus was contrary to the biblical injunction that all Jews must live in the land of Israel. The Battle of the Two Talmuds explains in great detail how the Babylonian scholars created their own interpretation of the Torah that grew to take precedence over that of the Jerusalem scholars. This book shows that all human beings are subject in various ways to power, glory, and guilt.

A woman’s cryptic dying words in a Venetian hospice lead Guido Brunetti to uncover a threat to the entire region in Donna Leon’s haunting 29th Brunetti novel. When Dottoressa Donato calls the Questura to report that a dying patient at the hospice Fatebenefratelli wants to speak to the police, Commissario Guido Brunetti and his colleague, Claudia Griffoni, waste no time in responding.

On a cold November evening, Guido Brunetti and Paola are up late when a call from his colleague Ispettore Vianello arrives, alerting the Commissario that a hand has been seen in one of Venice’s canals. The body is soon found, and Brunetti is assigned to investigate the murder of an undocumented Sri Lankan immigrant. Because no official record of the man’s presence in Venice exists, Brunetti is forced to use the city’s far richer sources of information: gossip and the memories of people who knew the victim.

Soon after the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky led the Red Army against the counter-revolutionary White armies. Written in the white heat of the Civil War, "Terrorism and Communism" is one of the most potent defences of revolutionary dictatorship of the twentieth century. In his provocative commentary in this new edition, the coruscating critic Slavoj Zizek argues that Trotsky's attack on the illusions of democracy has a vital relevance to today.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was one of the most cataclysmic events in world history, profoundly shaping politics, international relations, social patterns, economics and science in the century that followed. It created long-lasting aftershocks which travelled far beyond its geographical borders. How did it happen? What were the sequence of events that led, following the shocking upheaval of the old Romanov order, to a fierce and violent rivalry between a variety of revolutionary factions and the ultimate victory of the Bolsheviks?

It's crass gun porn filled with fanboy pandering action movie references. Do you like action movies? Do you like dark, edgy, hard-boiled heroes? Do you like fully automatic weapons blasting guys' heads off? How about product endorsements that are awkwardly placed between depictions of intense violence? Yeah? Then this book is for you!

Imagine traveling through time to 5,000 AD and seeing nothing left on Earth, no human beings, just desolation and a huge statue of a golden horse. Imagine traveling through time to 47,000 AD and seeing grey aliens who speak to you telepathically and tell you they are humans, just like you are, that have evolved this way after 45,000 years of planetary abuse. Imagine traveling through time to 3,500 BC and seeing huge, muscular humanoid beings speaking a dialect of Hebrew and treating you like a slave.

John Elder Robison's best-selling memoir, Look Me in the Eye, is one of the most beloved accounts of life with autism. In Switched On, Robison shares the second part of his journey, pushing the boundaries of scientific discovery as he undergoes an experimental brain therapy known as TMS, or transcranial magnetic stimulation. TMS drastically changes Robison's life.

The Death Knight, Dan of Uptown, has been charged with an impossible ultimatum: retrieve the princess's heart—or die. Pursued by fanatical enemies, faced with a challenge too daunting for the greatest heroes of the realm, and left without options, Dan and his friends are about to find out exactly why Everybody Hates Tower Dungeons.

This book contains the fundamental works of Marxism, Anarchism and Bolshevism: The Communist Manifesto, originally the Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; Reform or Revolution by Rosa Luxemburg; The Conquest of Bread by the Russian anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin; Anarchism: What it Really Stands For by Emma Goldman; The State and Revolution by Vladimir Lenin; Fascism: What It Is and How To Fight It by Leon Trotsky.

This is the story of Dan—a high school dropout who plays guitar in a heavy metal band and has a minimum wage job wearing a mouse costume. He's not exactly destined for great things. Then Dan wakes up in another world—a world where science never progressed past the Middle Ages, and the laws of physics have been replaced by role-playing game rules. Dan makes some mistakes—some big mistakes. Dan becomes a Death Knight: a walking personification of death and darkness. Now, Dan must fight monsters, zealots, and demons just to survive, and he must do it all alone.

When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World is a landmark work of social psychology by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter which was published in 1956. The book examines the case of a UFO cult in Chicago called the Seekers, their expectation of an imminent apocalypse, and their coping mechanisms after the event did not occur.

La historia de la revolución, como toda historia, debe, ante todo, relatar los hechos y su desarrollo. Mas esto no basta. Es menester que del relato se desprenda con claridad por qué las cosas sucedieron de ese modo y no de otro. Los sucesos históricos no pueden considerarse como una cadena de aventuras ocurridas al azar ni engarzarse en el hilo de una moral preconcebida, sino que deben someterse al criterio de las leyes que los gobiernan. El autor del presente audiolibro entiende que su misión consiste precisamente en sacar a la luz esas leyes.

Commissario Guido Brunetti's hopes for a refreshing family holiday in the mountains are once again dashed when a gruesome discovery is made in Marghera--a body so badly beaten the face is completely unrecognizable. Brunetti searches Venice for someone who can identify the corpse but is met with a wall of silence. He then receives a telephone call from a contact who promises some tantalizing information.

We are all weird about money. Whether you have a lot or a little, your feelings and beliefs about money have been shaped by a combination of silence (or even shame) around talking about money, personal experiences, family and societal expectations, and a whole big complex system rigged against many of us from the start. Begin with that baseline premise and it’s no surprise so many of us find it so difficult to save enough money, emotionally draining to deal with student loans, and nearly impossible to understand the esoteric world of investing.

On a beautiful spring morning on the island of Pellestrina, south of the Lido on the Venetian lagoon, a small fishing boat moored at the docks suddenly explodes. When it becomes clear that the fire was deliberately set and the boat’s owners brutally murdered, Commissario Brunetti tries to dig up information from Pellestrina’s close-knit - and closemouthed - citizenry. But it is with mixed feelings that he accepts Signorina Elettra’s offer to visit her relatives there and search for clues.

They say that by the age of 40 you should have gained the skills and experience to have a better life. But the only thing I've gained is a job promotion to permanent desk jockey until retirement. I thought I escaped my mediocre destiny when I met my husband...until he died on our honeymoon and a series of unfortunate events left me with a strange mark on my body and my husband's corpse stolen right out of the funeral home!

Fifteen years ago a teenage girl fell into a canal late at night. Unable to swim, she went under and started to drown, surviving only thanks to a nearby man, an alcoholic, who heard her splashes and pulled her out, though not before she suffered irreparable brain damage that left her in a state of permanent childhood, unable to learn or mature. The drunk man claimed he saw her thrown into the canal by another man, but the following day he couldn't remember a thing.