Rachel Cartland came to Hong Kong in 1972 as one of just two female expatriates in the colonial government's elite administrative grade. Her career was shaped by the momentous events that rocked Hong Kong during the following 34 years: corruption and the police mutiny, currency crisis, Tiananmen Square, the change of sovereignty and the devastation of SARS. This accessible memoir ranges from Government House to the infamous Walled City to the rural New Territories.

New York magazine was born in 1968 after a run as an insert of the New York Herald Tribune and quickly made a place for itself as the trusted resource for readers across the country. With award-winning writing and photography covering everything from politics and food to theater and fashion, the magazine's consistent mission has been to reflect back to its audience the energy and excitement of the city itself, while celebrating New York as both a place and an idea.

Activities to expand children's favorite books. Primary grades.

Enjoy a lesson in skiing, Enjoy a lesson in living, Enjoy the Tao of glee, The Bible of happiness. "GLEE" The « SKIPANDA » Panda ski method is a new ski technique, a ski school, which teaches skiing through physical control of gravity, and psychological control of the fear gravity inspires. Born from the learn to ski method, "GLEE" is the first literary essay on skiing, a tale of happiness, a poem to fatherly love, a Little Prince of Skiing, the Tao of skiing. The recreational skier, alike anyone learning to drive a car, is concerned with finding the brake and the steering wheel. But in skiing, the engine is the invisible, unattainable, irresistible gravity. The ski method teaches taming the fear of gravity. The tale spans the whole rainbow of human concern from vivid kinetic descriptions to a new scientific spirituality

No Japanese writer was more obsessed with desire than Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (1886–1965). Over a career that spanned half a century, he explored, with both joyful fascination and ruthless insight, the dazzling varieties of sexuality, the complementary attractions of exoticism and nostalgia, the human yearning for mastery over others, and the tense relationship between fantasy and the exterior world. His fiction is filled with portrayals of desire in all its violence, irony, pathos, and comedy. In one of Tanizaki's novels, a young engineer fascinated with the West sets out to transform a Japanese bar girl into his very own version of Mary Pickford. He succeeds to such an extent that the girl, growing tired of his immutable Japaneseness, begins to take foreign lovers. Cuckolded and humiliated though his is, the engineer is unable to leave his fantasy-come-to-life and resigns himself to enslavement. In another novel, a Westernized Japanese finds himself gradually drawn to the past. Specifically, he is attracted to his father-in-law's companion, a young woman who has been trained and costumed to play the part of an old-fashioned mistress. Though this woman is no more a flesh-and-blood embodiment of tradition than a bunraku doll, the protagonist contemplates a life with someone like her, a life defined by the pursuit of abstract, dehumanized cultural ideals. Visions of Desire locates such novels in the shifting discourse on cultural identity and cultural aspiration that permeates Japanese life. Ito argues that Tanizaki's novels do not merely end in the reification and contemplation of cultural ideals but rather problematize the desire behind such ideals. He finds in the writer's fiction a subtle understanding of cultural aspiration as a process riddled with subversions, influenced by patterns of mediation, and circumscribed by the lonely efforts of individual subjectivity. He discovers in Tanizaki's fables about the male effort to transform women into cultural icons a clear awareness of the sexual and class hierarchies that make such transformation possible. Visions of Desire is the first book in English on a writer who is possibly modern Japan's greatest novelist. Ito has written for both the specialist and the general reader, setting his argument in a discussion both of Tanizaki's times and of the life of a writer who believed in living out the fantasies that fueled his fictions.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A resourceful runaway alone in the wilds of Los Angeles, twelve-year-old Billy Straight suddenly witnesses a brutal stabbing in Griffith Park. Fleeing into the night, Billy cannot shake the horrific memory of the savage violence, nor the pursuit of a cold-blooded killer. For wherever Billy turns—from Hollywood Boulevard to the boardwalks of Venice—he is haunted by the chuck, chuck sound of a knife sinking into flesh. “Taut, compelling . . . Everything a thriller ought to be. The writing is excellent. The plotting is superior. The characters ring true.”—USA Today As LAPD homicide detective Petra Connor desperately searches for the murderer, as the media swarms mercilessly around the story, the vicious madman stalks closer to his prey. Only Petra can save Billy. But it will take all her cunning to uncover a child lost in a fierce urban labyrinth—where a killer seems right at home.