The Smell of Wet Bricks is a pioneering short novel in English by a Kurdish author. ”The smell of wet bricks” is a fresh voice from a region marked by violence and wars over a century. An author from Kurdistan in Iran, Parvizpur “craves to become the voice of a rich repository of powerful stories.” Excerpt: “His life was not empty of excitement; never did he have a monotonous life, and, even now that his body is lying in a corner thereunder a tree, never will he be immune from menace. Wanderer, nomad, homeless, or whatever you may call him will not make a change in his path, since he is an emperor. Nothing else matters to him except for his mission. He is in thorough possession of freedom and, equally, emancipated from any kind of blameworthiness.” … “The girl closes the notebook. She thinks about the day that she can go to Resho’s room to be exposed to his inspirations. She would smell the bricks of his room’s wall from which Resho detached its plasters to pour water on them. He loved the smell of wet bricks.”

Chronicling the rise of Los Angeles through shifting ideas of race and ethnicity, William Deverell offers a unique perspective on how the city grew and changed. Whitewashed Adobe considers six different developments in the history of the city—including the cementing of the Los Angeles River, the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1924, and the evolution of America's largest brickyard in the 1920s. In an absorbing narrative supported by a number of previously unpublished period photographs, Deverell shows how a city that was once part of Mexico itself came of age through appropriating—and even obliterating—the region's connections to Mexican places and people. Deverell portrays Los Angeles during the 1850s as a city seething with racial enmity due to the recent war with Mexico. He explains how, within a generation, the city's business interests, looking for a commercially viable way to establish urban identity, borrowed Mexican cultural traditions and put on a carnival called La Fiesta de Los Angeles. He analyzes the subtle ways in which ethnicity came to bear on efforts to corral the unpredictable Los Angeles River and shows how the resident Mexican population was put to work fashioning the modern metropolis. He discusses how Los Angeles responded to the nation's last major outbreak of bubonic plague and concludes by considering the Mission Play, a famed drama tied to regional assumptions about history, progress, and ethnicity. Taking all of these elements into consideration, Whitewashed Adobe uncovers an urban identity—and the power structure that fostered it—with far-reaching implications for contemporary Los Angeles.

A British writer's first collection of stories, set in a newly independent India, contemporary England, and the American South. In the title story, told from a mother's point of view, a teenaged son has been taken over with alcoholic binges; he vomits; he loses all cognizance of himself. As we learn more of the father, we find that he, too, is an alcoholic, a chain-smoker, and not far from death. The piece ends on a note of misogyny and violent helplessness, as if to imply like father, like son. Alcoholism, violence, class and racial prejudice figure throughout these stories, which are often garish and melodramatic, like the tale of a Britisher gone completely to seed in India (``Bombay Morning''). Leask makes it clear that he's brought his woes upon himself. The same self-destructive impulse grows a bit maudlin in ``Smoking Section,'' about a man who can't pay his bill at a sleazy diner. But in ``Daddy's Eyes'' and the fine ``Piggybank,'' Leask offers a more reflective view: in the first, an overworked, unhappily married father, whose own childhood was miserable, manages nonetheless to enter his small son's world with empathy and love; in the second, a young boy views his repulsive family's bankruptcy and abusive ways with the determination to do better. The question in many of these stories may be whether alcohol has led to unpleasant behavior, or whether these are unpleasant people who become even more unpleasant when they drink. Accomplished, but to trade upon some mythic eternal wound among men seems facile. The women here are no better. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Brickwork Level 3 has been adapted from John Hodge's classic Brickwork for Apprentices – the established textbook on brickwork for bricklayers. Designed to meet new requirements of the City and Guilds bricklaying programmes this book has been written to match the latest industry-based requirements and technical developments in the field, including recent changes to the Building Regulations. Each chapter follows the syllabus and contains a section of multiple-choice questions to provide trainees with vital practice for the job knowledge and multiple-choice tests. Highly illustrated throughout and now in full colour, this is the essential reference for qualified bricklayers and other professionals working in the construction industry, as well as students wishing to embark on a career in bricklaying. There is also the facility to access the Support Material on the Routledge website, which includes: PowerPoint slides for each chapter Lesson plans and schemes of work Multiple-choice questions and answers Job knowledge questions and answers Practical drawings and mark sheets

LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine that chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use.

Falling Into Light is a luminous memoir, the story of a woman with impaired vision, who sees with depth and clarity. Clare Morris sees the undulations of her long life-river so vividly she transports us into her world. A Quaker, Morris follows her spiritual yearning into Catholicism and the convent. A fiery social activist, she follows her Quaker conscience into the peace movement. A painful mother-daughter estrangement is healed, in the context of protesting war.

“A vibrantly told love story” with tragic roots in WWII Czechoslovakia (The Washington Post). An American-born son of Czech immigrants grows up in postwar New York, part of a boisterous community of the displaced where he learns fragments of European history, Czech fairy tales, and family secrets gleaned from overheard conversations. Central in his young imagination is the heroic account of the seven Czech parachutists who, in 1942, assassinated a high-ranking Nazi. Yet one essential story has always evaded him: his mother’s. He suspects she had a great wartime love, the loss of which bred a sadness that slowly engulfed her. As an adult, he travels to Prague, hoping to piece together her hidden past—leading to the compelling story at the heart of The Visible World—an “almost unbearably poignant work . . . a penetrating, beautifully composed novel from a writer with a tangible sense of place and period,” the acclaimed author of Brewster and God’s Fool, named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle (Booklist). “The sheer beauty of Mark Slouka’s prose will draw comparisons to The English Patient.” —Gary Shteyngart, New York Times–bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story “A book that will last.” —Colum McCann, National Book Award–winning author of Let the Great World Spin

“Unbeatable fun . . . [Christopher Fowler] takes delight in stuffing his books with esoteric facts.” —The Guardian The brilliant duo of Arthur Bryant and John May uncovers a nefarious plot behind the seemingly innocuous death of an old lady—and when the case leads them to London Bridge, it all comes down on the Peculiar Crimes Unit. When ninety-one-year-old Amelia Hoffman dies in her top-floor flat on a busy London road, it’s considered an example of what has gone wrong with modern society: she slipped through the cracks in a failing system. But detectives Arthur Bryant and John May of the Peculiar Crimes Unit have their doubts. Mrs. Hoffman was once a government security expert, though no one can quite remember her. When a link emerges between the old lady and a diplomat trying to flee the country, it seems that an impossible murder has been committed. Mrs. Hoffman wasn’t the only one at risk. Bryant is convinced that other forgotten women with hidden talents are also in danger. And, curiously, they all own models of London Bridge. With the help of some of their more certifiable informants, the detectives follow the strangest of clues in an investigation that will lead them through forgotten alleyways to the city’s fabled bridge in search of a desperate killer. But just when the case appears to be solved, they discover that Mrs. Hoffman was smarter than anyone imagined. There’s a bigger game afoot that could have terrible consequences.