Code Name
by Code Name
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About the book
With the confession of Morton Sobell in 2008 following the opening of the Grand Jury testimony preceding the trial for conspiracy ""of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Morton Sobell and Anatoly Yakovelev,"" it would appear that the famous case could at last be put to rest. But that was not the final word. The Venona revelations of 1995 set off a panic inside the newly formed SVR, the successor agency to the KGB's foreign intelligence department. In the scramble to respond the newly appointed Director Yevgeny Primakov decides to use the memoirs of veteran spy master Alexander Feklisov, the case officer for Julius Rosenberg and other important American and British agents. A rewriting project is set up and the voluminous recollections are edited down much to the dismay of their cantankerous author. An unsuspecting American publisher is identified to publish the book in the United States and Great Britain. But there are complications and a secret agenda emerges within the SVR regarding highly explosive Cold War documents tied to the events immediately preceding Stalin's death on March 5, 1953 through June 19, 1953 --the day Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were to die on the electric chair. These revelations are found in the notebooks of a pro-Soviet French journalist who is mysteriously poisoned in a Paris metro station two days after the Rosenbergs are executed. A major change then takes place in Moscow with the arrest and execution of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria and his group. Nikita Khrushchev slowly takes over the levers of power. What the notebooks contain and how they could be the cause of a long trail of political upheaval and assassination is revealed only at the end.
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Twentynine Palms
by Daniel Pyne
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About the book
Cracking in the desert heat, the sleepy town of Twenty nine Palms sits outside the bright blankness that is the sprawl of Los Angeles. For someone on the run like Jack Baylor, who needs a quick exit out of L.A. after a steamy affair with his best friends wife, Twenty nine Palms is the perfect refuge. Standing on the balcony of room 203 at Rancho del Doro tea, Jack plans to lay low for a few days, relax, and enjoy the high desert and the pool. But Jacks best friend, Tory, is already following his trail up Highway 61, and he wants nothing but revenge. Before Jack has a chance to plan his next move, a family disappears from the motel, leaving behind the signs of a gruesome struggle. In the eyes of the Twenty nine Palms police, Jack is the only logical suspect. Now Jack has to clear his name and escape his angry best friend. With the unexpected help of a 14-year-old girl, Jack desperately works to evade the police and Tory before his world comes entirely unhinged. With feverish Southern California as the backdrop, Twenty nine Palms is a sun-soaked, skittering race toward a surprising truth.
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Zen Meditation in Plain English
by John Daishin Buksbazen
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About the book
An excellent, practical introduction to Zen meditation. Written in a warm and easily accessible style, the book appeals to anyone with an interest in meditation, Zen, or, as is often the case today, a combination of the two. The book emphasizes the importance of receiving good instruction and of finding groups to practice with, yet it lays out the necessary steps to practice Zen meditation on your own. The book includes easily followed exercises to help the reader along. For anyone looking to uncover a clear and insightful path into the philosophy and practice of Zen meditation, this book represents the culmination of that search
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Wild Chickens and Petty Tyrants
by Ph.D. Arnold Kozak
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About the book
This engaging and accessible little book is filled with both humor and profound teaching. It presents 108 metaphors for mindfulness, meditation practice, the nature of the self, change, deep acceptance, and other related concepts that Dr. Kozak has cultivated over twenty-five years of meditating, practicing yoga, and working as a clinical psychologist. Metaphors are indispensable to understanding mindfulness, and to help deeply internalize it and make it a part of everyday life. These mentally catchy images can motivate us to practice, show us how and where to bring mindfulness to life in our personal experience, and help us employ powerful methods for transformation.
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Wholesome Fear
by Lama Zopa Rinpoche and Kathleen MacDonald
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About the book
Our anxiety around sickness, old age, and death can be a ''wholesome fear'' - a fear with a positive quality that ultimately enriches and nourishes our lives. Lama Zopa Rinpoche shows us how we can use our anxiety as a high-octane fuel to really live what's most important, and Kathleen McDonald presents meditations that integrate these teachings and lead to peace, compassion, and joy for ourselves and others. Doing so will help us to live well and, when the time comes as it inevitably will, to die well too. It's never too early to start making this most important of efforts - and, fortunately, it is never too late
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Unsuspecting Souls
by Barry Sanders
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About the book
In Unsuspecting Souls, Barry Sanders examines modern societys indifference to the individual. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution, when care for human beings began to disappear slowly, and ending with the modern era, when societal events require less person-to-person interaction and introduce radical changes in common attitudes toward death and life, Sanders laments that what makes us most human is slowly dying. Our days are filled with a continuous bombardment of ''information'' that demands our attention and brings us out of our world and into a sterile one of inhumanity and abstraction. Weve also lost the original sense of a collective consciousness. This loss has been culminating for two centuries now, dating back to the rise of European powers and worldwide colonization. We pick our poisons among several forms of radical fundamentalisms, each one not only a threat to the other but a threat to humanity itself. From references of Edgar Allan Poe to Abu Ghraib, this is a fascinating and worrisome story, impeccably researched and compellingly written.
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Towards Another Summer
by Janet Frame
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About the book
Self-styled writer Grace Cleave has writers block, and her anxiety is only augmented by her chronic aversion to leaving her home, to be ''among people, even for five or ten minutes.'' And so it is with trepidation that she accepts an invitation to spend a weekend away from London in the north of England. Once there, she feels more and more like a migratory bird, as the pull of her native New Zealand makes life away from it seem transitory. Grace longs to find her place in the world, but first she must learn to be comfortable in her own skin, feathers and all. From the author of An Angel at My Table comes an exquisitely written novel of exile and return, homesickness and belonging. Written in 1963 when Janet Frame was living in London, this is of a novel she considered too personal to be published while she was alive.
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