Willie Garvin has lost the will to live. He had worked for Modesty Blaise for six years in The Network, Modesty''s criminal organization, and rose to the position of her right-hand man and became her very best friend. Willie was on top of the world. But then Modesty disbanded The Network and retired, and Willie didn''t know what to do with himself. He got involved as a mercenary in a South American revolution, but his heart wasn''t in it. He was captured and is now sitting in a primitive prison, waiting listlessly to be executed. Fortunately, Sir Gerald Tarrant, head of a British secret service organization, knows about Willie''s situation, and he needs the services of Modesty and Willie for a very special mission. Sir Gerald visits Modesty and lays his cards on the table. Modesty is very grateful, and agrees to help Sir Gerald as soon as she has rescued Willie. This is the start of the adventure. Sir Gerald''s job turns out to be a perilous intervention against the criminal mastermind Gabriel, who intends to steal a huge consignment of diamonds. The action starts in the south of France, where Willie causes Paco (who is on Gabriel''s payroll) to lose his head (literally). On to Egypt, where Modesty and Willie get captured by Gabriel''s gang. The diamond heist succeeds, and the action moves to a small island in the Mediterranean where Modesty has to vanquish the incredible Mrs. Fothergill in unarmed combat. But then all of Gabriel''s gang are in pursuit, and there is nowhere to run.

Modesty Blaise

,Maud sister Catherine has just married Sir Edward of Burning Wood when he forbids her to see her family again. Three years later, Maud receives an urgent summons from her brother-in-law to aid her sister in childbirth. The child is delivered safely, but Catherine falls ill and dies. Edward flies into a fury and orders Maud to get rid of the child. Maud christens the child Isabel, after her late mother, and gives her to the family of a blacksmith named Martin. His wife, Beatrice, recently served as a wet nurse to the fourth son of the king, Prince Julian. The prince frequently returns to visit over the course of his childhood, and he and Isabel, or "Bella", become fast friends. One day, when Julian is older, he is approached by Bella in front of his peers. But instead of acknowledging her as a friend, he pretends not to know her. Later, he is on his way to apologize to her when a messenger stops him to inform him that he is to be a hostage in a neighboring kingdom, Brutanna, with which they had been at war. The captivity is to enforce a peace treaty between the two kingdoms. Some time later, Maud returns to Bella''s village with a summons from her father, who has recently remarried. Bella sorrowfully leaves her family and journeys with her aunt to meet her father. Once there she finds him still cold and cruel, and her stepmother Matilda and stepsister Marianne unkind as well. Her other stepsister Alice has been silent ever since the death of her father. Marianne becomes lady-in-waiting to the queen, and thus is privy to some royal secrets. When she comes home she gossips with her family about the plot to attack Brutanna at the expense of Julian''s life. Bella cries out in protest and expresses her intent to save him, but her stepmother, trying to protect Marianne''s place at court, locks her in the storeroom. Alice sneaks to the storeroom and gives Bella a hairpin to pick the lock with. Once she is free, Alice gives her a ring that shows her the person she wants to see. Bella flees to Maud''s house, and Maud gives her the means to save Julian, including a gown and glass slippers. Bella rides to Brutanna as quickly as possible and warns Julian of the king''s plot. Julian rides out to convince his brother to leave, but he is captured. A battle begins between the soldiers of the two kingdoms when the Worthy Knight appears, halting the battle and blinding King Gilbert. Julian searches for Bella, but only finds her possessions. Sadly, he returns home to act as regent for his brother. He visits Sir Edward''s family, where Alice shows him how to use the ring. He sees the Knight and asks Alice to accompany him to find the Knight. They return to Brutanna to discover that the Worthy Knight is none other than Bella. She is heavily wounded but recovering in the care of a poor man and his son. Julian brings her back to Moranmoor and takes her to visit her adoptive family. He asks Martin for Bella''s hand in marriage, and, having consulted Bella and receiving a positive answer, accepts.

Bella at Midnight

Three years after the events of the first book, a funeral is finally carried out for Conrad''s missing father, Griffin Yeats, & there is an internal uproar over the symbols chosen for Griffin''s headstone (the choices made by Griffin himself) & while trying to figure out what the symbols mean, Conrad stumbles into a race to find a missing artifact that contains Atlantean information buried somewhere under Washington DC- but before he can get far, an ancient terrorist organization known as the Alignment, who have secretly infiltrated the ranks of every government, religious organization & secret society on the planet, send an assassin after him, sparking a murder investigation, which is twisted into an attempt to assassinate the president- Now Conrad must avoid his own government & discover the globe, with or without Serena''s help, before the Alignment can launch a global pandemic which will be set loose on the Fourth of July & wipe out almost all of humanity- allowing the Alignment to rise to power... and, he only has one week to accomplish all this!

The Atlantis Prophecy

The full title of the article is "The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power: Ruined lives. Lost fortunes. Federal crimes. Scientology poses as a religion but is really a ruthless global scam — and aiming for the mainstream". The article reported on the founding of the Church of Scientology by L. Ron Hubbard and controversies involving the Church and its affiliated business operations, as well as the suicide of a Scientologist. Lottick was a Russian studies student who had taken a series of Scientology courses; he died after jumping from a hotel tenth floor window. The Church of Scientology and Lottick''s family have differing positions on the effect Scientology coursework had on him. While none of the parties assigned blame, they expressed misgivings about his death. Initially, his father had thought that Scientology was similar to Dale Carnegie''s self-improvement techniques; however, after his ordeal, the elder Lottick came to believe that the organization is a "school for psychopaths". Mike Rinder, the head of the Church of Scientology''s Office of Special Affairs and a Church spokesman, stated "I think Ed Lottick should look in the mirror&nbsp;... I think Ed Lottick made his son''s life intolerable". The article outlined a brief history of Scientology, discussing Hubbard''s initial background as a science fiction writer, and cited a California judge who had deemed Hubbard a "pathological liar". Cynthia Kisser, then director of the Cult Awareness Network, was quoted: "Scientology is quite likely the most ruthless, the most classically terroristic, the most litigious and the most lucrative cult the country has ever seen. No cult extracts more money from its members".

The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power

According to White the historian begins his work by constituting a chronicle of events which is to be organized into a coherent story. These are the two preliminary steps before processing the material into a plot which is argumented as to express an ideology. Thus the historical work is "a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse that purports to be a model, or icon, of past structures and processes in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them". For the typologies of emplotment, argumentation and ideologies White refers to works by Northrop Frye, Stephen Pepper and Karl Mannheim. His four basic emplotments are provided by the archetypical genres of romance, comedy, tragedy and satire. The modes of argumentation, following Pepper''s ''adequate root metaphors'' are formist, organist, mechanicist and contextualist. Among the main types of Ideology White adopts anarchy, conservatism, radicalism and liberalism. White affirms that elective affinities link the three different aspects of a work and only four combinations (out of 64) are without internal inconsistencies or ''tensions''. The limitation arises through a general mode of functioning - representation, reduction, integration or negation, which White assimilates to one of the four main tropes: metaphor, metonymy synecdoche and irony. Strucuturalist as Roman Jakobson or Emile Benveniste have used mostly an opposition between the first two of them but White refers to an earlier classification, adopted by Giambattista Vico and contrasts metaphor with irony. The exemplary figures chosen by White present the ideal types of historians and philosophers. {| class="wikitable" border="1" style="text-align:center;" |+Synoptic table of Hayden White''s Metahistory !Trope!! Mode!! Emplotment!! Argument !! Ideology !! Historian !! Philosopher |- |Metaphor || Representational ||Romance ||Formist || Anarchist|| Michelet || Nietzsche |- |Metonymy|| Reductionist || Tragedy || Mechanicist || Radical || Tocqueville || Marx |- |Synecdoche|| Integrative ||Comedy || Organicist || Conservative|| Ranke|| Hegel |- |Irony || Negational ||Satire || Contextualist|| Liberal || Burckhardt || Croce |}

Metahistory

The story begins by introducing a high school classroom, and introduces a small portion of Kyle''s past. After Kyle learns about an unknown event, the Monster Mash, he begins to question the concept of costumes and Halloween, which he had no previous knowledge concerning. Josh takes it upon himself to teach Kyle all about Halloween by taking Kyle to a costume store. There Josh dresses in a football costume, which causes one girl, Samantha Jeffries, to mistakenly believe him to be a quarterback (with Josh''s help). Kyle finds himself upset with the entire concept of "pretending" for Halloween and considers it lying. Nicole tries to ease Kyle''s pain by explaining the fun of Halloween, but Kyle struggles with this concept. Due to his amnesia he believes he is already pretending to be someone he is not. As Kyle questions his role in Halloween, Lori and Josh experience their own problems. Lori continues to struggle with her relationship to Declan. While Lori wants to go with Declan and attend the Monster Mash together, Lori refuses to ask Declan to go, believing that the man should ask the woman, much to Hilary''s chagrin. As Josh prepares for his date with Samantha, whom he considers to be the hottest girl around, he realizes he needs to learn how to handle alcohol consumption, as many of the football players drink. When he fails to get into his parents'' locked liquor cabinet he finds a bottle of vodka and begins pouring shots. After several drinks, he passes out. The next day, Lori notices that Josh is hungover, and the incident helps Josh to realize he never wants to drink again. Kyle''s quest to get Amanda to notice him takes an interesting turn when Hilary decides to launch Operation Make Her Jealous, in an effort to get Amanda away from Charlie and with Kyle. Hilary begins spreading rumors about Kyle, while a rumor that Declan had a date put Lori on edge. When the Mash finally arrives, Josh is forced to reveal that he is not a football player, which immediately disgusts Samantha. As she drunkily stumbles away Josh realizes that it was better if he wasn''t with her, and ironically, he runs into Ashleigh Redmond, the girl who skinny-dipped with Josh in Diving In. Kyle decides he doesn''t want to lie to Amanda when he sees her look of disappointment at the notion of Kyle and Hilary together. Amanda disappears from the Mash, while Kyle tries to look for her and explain. On the school roof, a fight breaks out as Kyle arrives to look for Amanda. In the midst of the fight, Kyle and Asheigh are thrown from the roof, and Kyle instictively grabs Asheligh, but cannot land evenly, crashing onto his back. Having worn a Halloween mask, Kyle escapes without anyone realizing his identity. Declan visits Lori at home, where she stayed and the two reconcile their feelings. After returning to the Mash sans mask, Kyle finds Amanda and the two connect for the first time. Amanda is unsure what to say to Kyle, but she is interrupted by Charlie. After Amanda leaves, Kyle and Hilary have a discussion in which Hilary, for the first time tells the truth, admitting her crush on Kyle. As the dance ends, Kyle cannot wait to return home.

Kyle XY: Nowhere to Hide

The story is set in a small frontier town under the jurisdiction of a political entity known only as "the Empire". The town''s magistrate is the story''s protagonist and first-person narrator. His rather peaceful existence in the town comes to an end with the declaration of a state of emergency and arrival of the Third Bureau, special forces of the Empire, led by a sinister Colonel Joll. There are rumours that the natives of the land, called "barbarians", are preparing an attack on the Empire, and so Colonel Joll and his men conduct an expedition into the land beyond the frontier. They capture a number of barbarians, bring them back to town, torture them, kill some of them, and leave for the capital in order to prepare a larger campaign against the barbarians. In the meantime, the Magistrate begins to question the legitimacy of imperialism and personally nurses a barbarian girl who was left crippled and partly blinded by the Third Bureau''s torturers. The magistrate has an intimate yet ambiguous relationship with the girl. Eventually, he decides to take her back to her people. After a life-threatening trip through the barren land, during which they have sex, he succeeds in returning her&mdash;finally asking, to no avail, if she will stay with him&mdash;and returns to his own town. The Third Bureau soldiers have reappeared there and now arrest the Magistrate for having deserted his post and consorting with "the enemy". Without much possibility of a trial in wartime, the Magistrate remains in a locked cellar for an indefinite period, experiencing for the first time a near-complete lack of basic freedoms. He finally acquires a key that allows him to leave the makeshift jail, but finds that he has no place to escape to and only spends his time outside the jail scavenging for scraps of food. Later, Colonel Joll triumphantly returns from the wilderness with several barbarian captives and makes a public spectacle of their torture. Although the crowd is encouraged to participate in their beatings, the Magistrate bursts onto the scene to stop it, but is subdued. Taking the Magistrate, a group of soldiers hangs him up by his arms, culminating his understanding of imperialistic violence in a personal experience of torture. With the Magistrate''s spirit clearly crushed, the soldiers mockingly let him roam freely through the town, knowing he has nowhere to go and no longer poses a threat to their mission. The soldiers, however, begin to abandon the town as winter approaches and their campaign against the barbarians starts to fall apart. The Magistrate tries to confront Joll on his final return from the wild, but the colonel refuses to speak to him, hastily fleeing the area with the last of the soldiers. With a widespread belief that the barbarians intend to invade the town soon, all the soldiers and many civilians have now departed, though the Magistrate helps encourage the remaining townspeople to continue their lives and to prepare for the winter. There is no sign of the barbarians by the time the season''s first snow falls on the town.

Waiting for the Barbarians

Life of Pi is divided into three sections. In the first, the main character, Pi, an adult, reminisces about his childhood. He was named Piscine Molitor Patel after a swimming pool in France. He changes his name to "Pi" when he begins secondary school, because he is tired of being taunted with the nickname "Pissing Patel". His father owns a zoo in Pondicherry, providing Pi with a relatively affluent lifestyle and some understanding of animal psychology. Pi was born a Hindu, but as a fourteen-year-old he is introduced to Christianity and Islam, and starts to follow all three religions as he "just wants to love god." He tries to understand God through the lens of each religion and comes to recognize benefits in each one. Eventually, his family decides to sell their animals and move to Canada due to political concerns in India. In the second part of the novel, Pi''s family embark on a small Japanese boat to Canada carrying some of the animals from their zoo, but a few days out of port the ship suddenly sinks. Pi ends up in a small lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, a spotted hyena, an injured zebra, and an orangutan. The other humans and animals on the ship all drown. The hungry hyena tears off the zebra''s leg, and spends the next several days eating the zebra bit by bit. The hyena also kills the orangutan. Richard Parker then kills and eats the hyena. Pi is left as the only other survivor. Pi finds food and water supplies on the boat, but as they grow scarce, Pi begins fishing. Pi feeds Richard Parker so that the tiger will not eat him; he also wants to keep the tiger alive to avoid total solitude on the ocean. Pi ensures that the tiger considers Pi the alpha animal and will therefore refrain from attacking him. Pi recounts that after an indeterminate time at sea, the pair encountered a mysterious island, seemingly constructed of edible algae supporting a forest and a large population of meerkats. Following a period of recuperation, Pi becomes afraid of the island after discovering that the algae is carnivorous, and leaves with the tiger. In all, Pi survives 227 days in the lifeboat, often half delusional with thirst and hunger. The lifeboat reaches the coast of Mexico and Richard Parker escapes into the nearby jungle, so that rescuers find only Pi. The third part of the novel is a conversation between two officials from the Maritime Department in the Japanese Ministry of Transport. They seek to ascertain why the ship sank, so they interview Pi, but they do not believe his story. Pi then tells a similar story, but this time without animals. Instead, he recounts a story of human brutality, being adrift on a lifeboat with his mother, a sailor with a broken leg, and the ship''s cook, who killed the sailor and Pi''s mother and cut them up to use as bait and food. Parallels to Pi''s first story lead the Japanese officials to believe that the orangutan represents his mother, the zebra represents the sailor, the hyena represents the cook, and Richard Parker is Pi himself. Pi asks if this new story is acceptable, or if he should change any parts that are still too unbelievable; the officials change the subject back to the sinking of the ship. After giving all the relevant information, Pi asks which of the two stories they prefer. Since the officials cannot prove which story is true and neither is relevant to the reasons behind the shipwreck, they choose the story with the animals. Pi thanks them and says, "and so it goes with God".

Life of Pi

The play starts in the town square of a small, unnamed French village. Two friends; the eloquent, intellectual but incredibly prideful Jean and the simplistic, shy, kind-hearted drunkard Berenger; meet up in a coffee house to talk about an unspecified urgent matter. Instead of talking about what they were supposed to, Jean becomes furious at Berenger''s tardiness and drunken state and berates him until a rhinoceros rampages across the square, considerably startling the people there. The people there begin to discuss what has happened when another rhinoceros appears and crushes a woman''s cat. This generates incredible outrage and people begin to band together to argue that the presence of these rhinos should not be allowed. The beginning of a mass movement is seen onstage. Berenger arrives late for work at the local newspaper office, but the newspaper''s receptionist Daisy (with whom Berenger is in love), covers for him. At the office, an argument has broken out between the sensitive and logical Dudard and the violent, temperamental Botard; since Botard does not believe a rhinoceros could actually appear in France despite all the claims by eyewitnesses that one did. Suddenly, Mrs. Bœuf (the wife of a fellow employee) appears to say that her husband has turned into a rhinoceros and that streets are plagued with people who have turned into them. Botard argues against the existence of the so called rhinoceritis movement that Mrs. Bœuf claims is occurring, saying that the local people are too intelligent to be tricked by the empty rhetorics of a mass movement. Despite this, Mr. Bœuf (turned into a rhinoceros) arrives and destroys the staircase that leads out of the office, trapping all the workers and their boss, Mr. Papillion, inside. Mrs. Bœuf joins her husband by jumping down the stairwell while the office-workers escape through a window. Berenger goes to visit Jean in order to apologize for the previous day''s argument they had, but finds him in bed, heavy with a sickness he has never had. The two friends begin to argue again, initially about the possibility of people actually turning into rhinos and then about the morality of the transformations. Jean is initially staunchly against the rhinos, but gradually grows lenient. As the scene progresses, Jean''s skin turns greener and greener, the bumps in his head grow into a horn, his voice grows hoarse and he begins to pace around his apartment like a caged beast. Finally, he proclaims that rhinoceros have just as much of a right to life as humans and that "Humanism is dead, those who follow it are just old sentimentalists" before he turns into a rhino himself and chases Berenger out of his apartment. Everyone in town has succumbed to rhinoceritis save for Berenger, Dudard and Daisy. Berenger is locked up in his apartment, yelling at the rhinos that rush by for having destroyed civilization until Dudard arrives to check on him. Dudard trivializes the transformations by saying that people have the right to choose what they do, even transform; but Berenger insists that the transformations couldn''t be voluntary since his friend Jean had initially hated the rhinos and that he was probably brainwashed. Dudard counterargues that people can change their minds and gradually grows more accepting until he concludes that he must "follow [his] peers and [his] leaders" before departing and turning into a rhino. Just before he departs, Daisy arrives. She and Berenger realize that they are left completely alone - the only humans left in a world of monsters. Berenger professes his love for Daisy and she seems to reciprocate. They attempt, albeit briefly, to have a normal life amongst the rhinoceroses. After Berenger suggests that they attempt to re-populate the human race, Daisy begins to move away from him, suggesting that Berenger doesn''t understand love. She comes to believe the rhinoceroses are in the right - they who are truly passionate. Berenger slaps Daisy without thinking, immediately recanting his action. They consider their state with Berenger exclaiming that, "in just a few minutes we have gone through twenty-five years of married life!" They attempt to reconcile, but fail. As Berenger examines himself in a mirror for any evidence of transformation, Daisy quietly leaves to join the rhinoceroses. Discovering he is completely alone, Berenger laments his behavior with Daisy. In his solitude he begins to doubt his existence - his language, his appearance, and his mind. Alone, he finds himself in the wrong and attempts to change into a rhinoceros. He struggles and fails. He returns to the mirror, face-to-face with his fate and breaks down as he struggles to accept the place he has given himself. Suddenly, he snaps out of it and renews his vow to take on the rhinos. Berenger valiantly shouts "I''m not capitulating!" to the audience before returning to the window to hurl abuse at the passing rhinoceros.

Rhinoceros

As volunteers clean up after a huge outdoor rock concert in Yorkshire in 1969, they discover the body of a young woman wrapped in a sleeping bag. She has been brutally murdered. The detective assigned to the case, Stanley Chadwick, is a hard-headed, strait-laced veteran of the Second World War. He could not have less in common with - or less regard for - young, disrespectful, long-haired hippies, smoking marijuana and listening to the pulsing sounds of rock and roll. But he has a murder to solve, and it looks as if the victim was somehow associated with the up-and-coming psychedelic pastoral band the Mad Hatters. In the present, Inspector Alan Banks is investigating the murder of a freelance music journalist who was working on a feature about the Mad Hatters for MOJO magazine. This is not the first time that the Mad Hatters, now aging rock superstars, have been brushed by tragedy. Banks finds he has to delve into the past to find out exactly what hornets'' nest the journalist inadvertently stirred up.

Piece of My Heart: A Novel of Suspense

Someone found a piece of a Bug Fighter and the government is going to test it at a laboratory. Unsurprisingly, the Yeerks don''t want it tested. The Animorphs have a battle at an airport. During the fight Cassie ends up unconscious on the belt with all the luggage. When she wakes up, she is in the cargo bay of a plane flying to Sydney, Australia. The plane is attacked by Yeerks looking for the "Andalite bandit" so she jumps out after unsuccessfully attempting to elude them on board. She hides in the sand as a flea until the Yeerks leave. After the Yeerks leave, she demorphs and meets Yami who lives nearby. He takes her to his family. His grandfather cut himself with a piece of a Bug fighter that he was using as a wood carving tool. Cassie morphs to Hork-Bajir and helps amputate his leg. Later, the Blade ship turns up again and Visser Three demands that she come outside. She does and tries to lead the Yeerks away from Yami''s family. A Chee who was aboard the Blade ship turns up and she goes back home.

The Unexpected

Frank Pollard wakes up in an alley at night, filled with confusion and fear. He knows nothing but his name, and that he must escape fast, or else he will be killed. Pursued by a mysterious assailant, Frank barely escapes with his life. Every time he goes to sleep, he wakes up to find evidence of bizarre nighttime travels which he cannot remember. Afraid of his own actions, Frank enlists the help of husband-wife security team, Bobby and Julie Dakota. At first, the case merely seems absurd, but as they track deeper into the life and past of the mysterious Frank Pollard, the Dakotas uncover an increasingly bizarre and dangerous world threatened by a madman who thirsts for blood. It is ultimately revealed that Frank Pollard is the brother to the mysterious madman as well as twin sisters. They were born from a mother who was the product of an incestuous relationship. Her father was a hallucinogenic drug-abuser and her mother was his sister. She is a hermaphrodite and impregnated herself with her own seed. As a result of this compounded inbreeding, Frank and his siblings developed unusual psychic abilities. Frank, wanting a normal life, tries to escape from his family while being pursued by his brother who seeks to either bring him back or kill him, and nothing will stand in his way. After a message from Julie''s younger brother, who has Down Syndrome and possesses minor psychic ability himself, Bobby, Julie, Frank and his family begin speeding into a final confrontation.

Over 8000 Takeaways For Your Brain!

Read - Listen - Learn

Modesty Blaise

By Peter O''Donnell

Bella at Midnight

By Bagram Ibatoulline

The Atlantis Prophecy

No Author Listed

The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power

By Richard Behar

Metahistory

By Hayden V. White

Kyle XY: Nowhere to Hide

No Author Listed

Waiting for the Barbarians

By John Maxwell Coetzee

Life of Pi

By Yann Martel

Rhinoceros

By Eugène Ionesco

Piece of My Heart: A Novel of Suspense

By Peter Robinson

The Unexpected

By K. A. Applegate

The Bad Place

By Dean Koontz