Canterbury Tales Guesthouse

[Daveo]

Wicked Words 8 By Kerri Sharp & Madelynne Ellis......

In the Erotic - Gay - Les section @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe..

Wicked Words - a collection of saucy and compelling short stories. Outrageously sexy and deliciously daring, Wicked Words short stories are the best in the contemporary sexy fiction. The series is a showcase of writing by women at the cutting edge of erotic literature, pushing the boundaries of fantasy to bring you encounters of unashamed indulgence. Fun irreverent and seductive, this anthology combines humour and attitude with wildly imaginative sensual writing. Arousing, lively and entertaining, Wicked Words collections are the juiciest erotic stories to be found anywhere in the world. Including stories by bestselling authors Fiona Locke, Primula Bond and Madelynne Ellis.

[Daveo]

Big Spender by John McCabe.....

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

Jake Cooper is a safety inspector, a connoisseur of that most maligned of art forms, the safety instructional video. Then Jake's uncle Norbert dies, a cheapskate who won't be missed much, but has some strange circumstances surrounding his accidental death.

[Daveo]

Operation Snakebite: The Explosive True Story of an Afghan Desert Siege by Stephen Grey. . . . . .

Traded into our huge War section @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

Coming up to Christmas and reporter Stephen Grey is embedded with B Company, 2 Yorks, in southern Afghanistan during Operation Snakebite.

Their mission: to take the Taliban stronghold of Musa Qala. For some this battle will be their last.

In the thick of the fighting, Grey provides a breathtaking boots-and-bullets glimpse of combat chaos as British, American and Afghan forces struggle to secure a dusty little desert town known to be crucial to the drug trade.

Operation Snakebite reveals everything you need to know about the brutal conflict in Afghanistan: from the political infighting and bureaucratic interference to the frontline troops soldiering on with unsuitable gear and poor intelligence.

[Daveo]

Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon.....

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe.

Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all. With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred. The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx. As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them. Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

[Daveo]

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond...

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe..

In this "artful, informative, and delightful" book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world.

Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religion - as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war - and adventure on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures.

A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth club of California's Gold Medal.

[Daveo]

Talking on Tour : The Best Anecdotes from Golf's Master Storyteller by Don Wade. .

& more golf books @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe..

For more than a decade, Don Wade has entertained golf fans with many captivating collections of sometimes hilarious, sometimes moving, but always true golf stories in his bestselling "And Then Jack Said to Arnie . . ." series. Now golf's master storyteller has selected the absolute best stories from his earlier volumes and showcased them in one deluxe edition.

[Daveo]

Golf 365 Days: A History by Robert Sidorsky.
@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe.
The whole spectacular world of golf comes to life in these pages - the great players, men and women, pro and amateur; the architects; the courses; the wonderful stories and marvelous images. 
A companion volume to Robert Sidorsky’s Golf Courses Around the World: 365 Days, Golf 365 Days takes the reader on a tour of the game’s greatest personalities, complete with anecdotes and stunning photography. Sidorsky’s narrative begins in Scotland, the home of golf’s legendary origins, and continues through the most recent tournaments and dramas, including modern phenoms such as Tiger Woods, Michelle Wie, Zach Johnson, and Paula Creamer.
With hundreds of pictures and detailed commentaries, Golf 365 Days is a source of endless interest and pleasure for any active or armchair golfer.

[Daveo]

No Man's Land by Ruth Fowler...

This book was $24.95 US - our price 160 baht - plus 50% trade in for credit when finished with it @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe..

First song, dress on…

“It sounds like an obvious statement when I say that girls don’t grow up wanting to be strippers, but you’d be surprised. Most people - civilians that is - seem to think that even in the cradle we were wrapping ourselves around a greasy pole and grinding our hips to Britney Spears.…When we get drunk the regrets come out. ‘I’m a good girl, really I am,’ sighs one.

She takes a drag of her cigarette and I think to myself, I’m not a good girl. Not really. Not anymore. But I sure as hell would like to be.”

With forty-three countries, twelve boats, dozens of flights, a fistful of “life experience” behind her and a lot of ambition fueling her dreams, twenty-five-year old Ruth Fowler arrives in New York City.

A Brit with a Cambridge degree and a middle-class background, she doesn’t think it will be too hard to start a new life.

But getting a work visa in post-9/11 U.S.A. proves to be tricky, and to kick-start a writing career, Fowler starts documenting her experiences.

She funds her efforts with cash-in-hand jobs and a stint writing for The Village Voice, but it doesn’t take long for funds and hope to run out - sending her to the heart of Manhattan's dark underbelly, the strip clubs and “Champagne Rooms” of Times Square.

As “Mimi,” she has a chance of survival. But when this persona threatens to consume every vestige of Fowler’s identity, when her life spirals out of control and her true self remains so deeply buried that it seems impossible to resurrect, relying on “Mimi” seems like the biggest mistake she has ever made. No Man’s Land is a shocking, raw account about losing identity and finding it again.

[Daveo]

Donkey's hind leg by George Torode...

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe..

A great mixture of humour ad nostalgia from George Torode, one of the Donkeys as Guernsey people call themselves.

The stories and anecdotes are told around a pot bellied stove in a workshop called Stalag 10 on the basis that anywhere which keeps you 8 hours a day against your will is a Prison Camp.

The stories are about,for example, 'Steve Piquet' who lived in a German bunker, Speed Cop Noel Trotter, Bonnie Newton, Stan Ogier, The Bird Lady Marjorie Ozanne, Reggie (Rubber Legs) Lamb and many more.

A great way to pass a few hours.

[Daveo]

How They Stole the Game by David A. Yallop

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe.

What's wrong with Football today? In June 2011, Sepp Blatter was elected - uncontested - as president of Fifa once more.

Despite attempts to halt the vote amidst allegations and accusations of corruption, the show went on.

As How They Stole The Game, David Yallop's classic expose of the dark heart behind the beautiful game showed when it was first published, Football was rotten from the top down.

In the book Yallop reveals the story of Jo?o Havelenge, Fifa President from 1974 to 1998, the Godfather of football, and how he turned a religion to millions of fans into a multi-billion dollar business, riven with suspicious deals and unexpected payments.

[Daveo]

The Birthday Party: A Memoir of Survival by Stanley N. Alpert. . . ..

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe..

On January 21, 1998, the night before his thirty-eighth birthday, federal prosecutor Stanley Alpert was kidnapped off the streets of Manhattan. This is the story of what happened next. . . . Alpert was taken by a carful of gun-toting thugs looking to use his ATM card, but when they learned his bank balance the plan changed. They took him, blindfolded with his own scarf, to a Brooklyn apartment, with the idea of going to a bank the next day and withdrawing most of his money.

But the later it got, the more the plan changed again . . . and again . . . as his captors alternately held guns to his head, threatened his family, engaged him in discussions of "gangsta" philosophy, sought his legal advice, and, once they learned it was his birthday, offered him sexual favors from their prostitute girlfriends as a "birthday present."

All the while, Alpert, still blindfolded, talked with them, played on their attitudes and fears, tried to figure out where their mood swings would take them next, and memorized every detail he could in the event that he ever managed to get out of there alive. In the meantime, his friends and law enforcement colleagues, worried that they hadn't heard from him, launched a major police and FBI investigation. It, too, would take many twists and turns before it was done-and some of them would be very strange indeed. Filled with immediacy, drama, and extraordinary characters, told not only from Alpert's memory and notes but from police reports, interviews with NYPD detectives, FBI agents, and witnesses, videotaped confessions, and court records, The Birthday Party reads like a thriller-but every word is true.

[Daveo]

All God's Children by Rene Denfeld . ..

Fascinating books @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe..

James Daniel Nelson first hit the streets as a teenager in 1992. He joined a clutch of runaways and misfits who camped out together in a squat under a Portland bridge. Within a few months the group - they called themselves a "family" was arrested for a string of violent murders.

While Nelson sat in prison, the society he had helped form grew into a national phenomenon.

Street families spread to every city from New York to San Francisco, and to many small towns in between, bringing violence with them.

In 2003, almost eleven years after his original murder, Nelson, now called "Thantos", got out of prison, returned to Portland, created a new street family, and killed once more. Twelve family members were arrested along with him. Rene Denfeld spent over a decade following the evolution of street family culture. She discovered that, contrary to popular belief, the majority of these teenagers hail from loving middle-class homes.

Yet they have left those homes to form insular communities with cultish hierarchies, codes of behavior, languages, quasi religions, and harsh rules.

She reveals the extremes to which desperate teenagers will go in their search for a sense of community, and builds a persuasive and troubling case that street families have grown among us into a dark reversal of the American ideal.

[Daveo]

The Kings of New York: A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs, and Geniuses Who Make Up America's Top High School Chess Team by Michael Weinreb. . . .

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange.

An award-winning sportswriter takes you inside a year with the nation’s top high school chess team.

With strict admission standards and a progressive curriculum, Brooklyn’s Edward R. Murrow High School has long been one of New York’s public-education success stories, serving a diverse neighborhood of immigrants and minorities and ranking among the nation’s best high schools.

At Murrow, there are no sports teams, and the closest thing to jocks are found on the school’s powerhouse chess team, which annually competes for the national championship.

In The Kings of New York sportswriter Michael Weinreb follows the members of the Murrow chess team through an entire season, from cash games in Washington Square Park to city and state tournaments to the SuperNationals in Nashville, where this eclectic bunch competes against private schoolers and suburbanites.

Along the way, Weinreb brings to life a number of colorful characters: the Yale-educated calculus teacher (and former semipro hockey player) who guides the savants while struggling to find funding for his team; an aspiring rapper and tournament hustler who plays with cutthroat instinct; the team’s lone girl, a shy Ukrainian immigrant; the Puerto Rican teen from the rough neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant who plays an ingenious opening gambit named the Orangutan; and the Lithuanian immigrant and team star whose chess rating is climbing toward grandmaster status.

In the bestselling tradition of such books as Word Freak and Friday Night Lights, The Kings of New York is a riveting look inside the world of competitive chess and an inspiring profile of young genius.

[Daveo]

The Secret Life of Siegfried and Roy: How the Tiger Kings Tamed Las Vegas by Jim Mydlach Jimmy Lavery Louis Mydlach & Henrietta Tiefenthaler. . .

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe..

The Secret Life of Siegfried and Roy reveals the touching, little-known story of how two youngsters founded a friendship, a franchise, and a tempestuous on-and-off love affair that would last a lifetime. On October 3, 2003, animal lover Roy Horn was savagely attacked on stage by his 600-pound white tiger, Montecore. Beating back death after he literally died on the operating table, dark-haired Roy fought for survival. Suddenly the show was over, or was it? In the spotlight as never before, the mauling triggered the relentless press investigation into the secret world of these Las Vegas icons. For the first time ever, the authors detail Roy's traumatic recovery and the agonies of rehabilitating the partially paralyzed performer.

[Daveo]

Wrecking Crew by Caesar Campbell ...

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe..

Wrecking Crew takes you into the heart of the Bandidos, and the outlaw biker world, through the eyes, fists and boots of Caesar Campbell, founding member of the Bandidos in Australia and the club's first sergeant at arms and legendary enforcer.

Jailed for seven years after the bloody ambush at Milperra that saw two of his brothers killed, Caesar led and protected the other imprisoned members of his club inside some of Australia's toughest jails.

But when he was finally released Caesar found that the world of the outlaw motorcycle gangs was changing, and that his particular values of courage, brutal force and utter loyalty to your club were making him more enemies than friends. And with Caesar Campbell you'd rather be a friend than an enemy...

[Daveo]

Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara by Jorge G. Castañeda...

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe..

By the time he was killed in the jungles of Bolivia, where his body was displayed like a deposed Christ, Ernesto "Che" Guevara had become a synonym for revolution everywhere from Cuba to the barricades of Paris. This extraordinary biography peels aside the veil of the Guevara legend to reveal the charismatic, restless man behind it.

Drawing on archival materials from three continents and on interviews with Guevara's family and associates, Castaneda follows Che from his childhood in the Argentine middle class through the years of pilgrimage that turned him into a committed revolutionary.

He examines Guevara's complex relationship with Fidel Castro, and analyzes the flaws of character that compelled him to leave Cuba and expend his energies, and ultimately his life, in quixotic adventures in the Congo and Bolivia. A masterpiece of scholarship, Companero is the definitive portrait of a figure who continues to fascinate and inspire the world over.

[Daveo]

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005 by Thomas E. Ricks. . .

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe..

Thomas E. Ricks 's Fiasco, transformed the political dialogue on the war in Iraq.

Now Ricks has picked up where Fiasco left off-Iraq, late 2005. With more news breaking information, including hundreds of hours of interviews with top U.S. officials who were on the ground during the surge and beyond, The Gamble is the natural companion piece to Fiasco, and the two are sure to become the definitive examinations of what ultimately went wrong in Iraq.

[Daveo]

The Unknown Maxwell: His Astonishing Secret Lives Revealed by His Aide and Close Companion by Nicholas Davies. . . .

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe..

A portrait of Robert Maxwell by the Foreign Editor of the "Daily Mirror", who was also one of Maxwell's few companions and confidantes outside the immediate family. The author was party to extraordinary events and conversations and provides a dimension to Maxwell's life which is unknown.

The author presents Maxwell's life as one of greed, self-indulgence and a ruthless determination to succeed. There were also intense love affairs, set against appalling maltreatment of his long-suffering wife and family. His capacity for extortion, theft and utter ruthlessness was even greater than imagined. The author has also written "Diana: A Princess and her Troubled Marriage".

[Daveo]

Crown of Aloes by Norah Lofts

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe..

Presented as a personal chronicle, this novel about Queen Isabella of Spain is based on known fact and detail. Isabella's fortunes were very varied: she knew acute poverty, and faced anxiety and danger.

[Daveo]

1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance by Gavin Menzies. . . .

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe..

The brilliance of the Renaissance laid the foundation of the modern world. Textbooks tell us that it came about as a result of a rediscovery of the ideas and ideals of classical Greece and Rome.

But now bestselling historian Gavin Menzies makes the startling argument that in the year 1434, China - then the world's most technologically advanced civilization - provided the spark that set the European Renaissance ablaze.

From that date onward, Europeans embraced Chinese intellectual ideas, discoveries, and inventions, all of which form the basis of western civilization today. Florence and Venice of the early fifteenth century were hubs of world trade, attracting traders from across the globe. Based on years of research, this marvelous history argues that a Chinese fleet, official ambassadors of the emperor, arrived in Tuscany in 1434, where they were received by Pope Eugenius IV in Florence.

The delegation presented the influential pope with a wealth of Chinese learning from a diverse range of fields: art, geography (including world maps that were passed on to Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan), astronomy, mathematics, printing, architecture, steel manufacturing, military weaponry, and more.

This vast treasure trove of knowledge spread across Europe, igniting the legendary inventiveness of the Renaissance, including the work of such geniuses as da Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo, and more. In 1434, Gavin Menzies combines this long-overdue historical reexamination with the excitement of an investigative adventure. He brings the reader aboard the remarkable Chinese fleet as it sails from China to Cairo and Florence, and then back across the world.

Erudite and brilliantly reasoned, 1434 will change the way we see ourselves, our history, and our world - Author of 1421 offers another stunning reappraisal of history, presenting compelling new evidence that traces the roots of the European Renaissance to Chinese exploration in the fifteenth century

[Daveo]

Murder Unpunished: How the Aryan Brotherhood Murdered Waymond Small and Got Away with It by Thornton W. Price III..

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe..

In November of 1977, Terry Lee Farmer, a white inmate at Arizona State Prison in Florence, walked up to black prisoner Waymond Small in front of sixty witnesses and stabbed him in the heart with a shank.

Small had agreed to testify before the state legislature about gang violence inside Arizona State Prison and was murdered the day before his scheduled appearance. This murder proved the catalyst for an all-out war between the State of Arizona and the Aryan Brotherhood. Through five trials, Farmer claimed self-defense and the jurors acquitted all ten of his co-conspirators. Thornton Price, one of the defense attorneys, now tells how Farmer and Small became cannon fodder in this war to reclaim Arizona’s prisons from rival gangs.

These gangs - the Aryan Brotherhood, the Mau Maus, and the Mexican Mafia - were suspected of committing more than a dozen murders over the previous two years, motivating politicians to crack down after the violence could no longer be ignored or contained.

To reconstruct the case, Price reviewed 16,000 pages of court records and conducted interviews with key participants to piece together an insider’s account of the crime and the politics behind its investigation. Prison murders should be easy to solve, but investigators quickly learned that the convicts’ code of silence makes these cases often impossible to win in court. Price focuses on the special problems posed by prison crime by getting inside the skins of men like murderer Terry "Crazy" Farmer and William "Red Dog" Howard, one of the Florence Eleven and a founder of the Aryan Brotherhood. He also presents the perspectives of state investigators and reveals how they calculated to pit black witnesses against white killers until one black would break the code of silence and provoke feuding within the Brotherhood. Murder Unpunished tells how society’s most outrageous criminals ran the prison through gang violence as outside the walls Arizona struggled to outgrow its Wild West past. Like few other books, it reveals how prisons incubate predatory criminals and gangs, and it exposes the unique difficulties of prosecuting prison crimes. It is a gripping account that cuts to the heart of our penal system and a cautionary tale for citizens who prefer to keep prisons out of sight, out of mind.

[Daveo]

I've Been Watching You: The South Louisiana Serial Killer by Mustafa Susan D. & Tony Clayton.....

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe..

Rigor mortis had set in by the time police arrived, Special Prosecutor Tony Clayton told the jury, watching their eyes as they viewed the photograph of the bloodied arm of Geralyn Barr DeSoto. 

Geralyns clenched fist, frozen in death away from her body, held her secret. 

Geralyn was trying to tell us something. 

She was telling us how hard she fought. 

She was telling us who her killer is. 

Right here, she said. 

Right here I have the killer. 

Just open my hand. 

Just open my hand, and you'll know who did it to me.

[Daveo]

The William Freeman Murder Trial: Insanity, Politics, and Race by Andrew W. Arpey

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Antebellum culture is spectacularly exposed in this book of horrific multiple murder and madness in Upstate New York. Andrew W. Arpey offers insight into subjects that will have broad appeal to historians and scholars of law, journalism, religion, psychiatry, politics, race, and reform. Drawing on newspapers, trial accounts, and private papers, Arpey shows the political machinations surrounding the case and the heated debate the trial set off over the relationship of race and crime, the use of punishment, and the boundaries of legal responsibility.

His superb reconstruction of the trial, the motivations of its many actors, and the trial's status in American history place this book alongside the best crime novels. In 1846 William Freeman, a young man of African and Native American descent, stabbed to death four members of the Van Nest family with no apparent motive.

His victims, all of whom were white, included an elderly woman, her pregnant daughter, and her two-year-old grandson.

Freeman was quickly apprehended, but his mental health soon became a matter of controversy. Led by the future secretary of state William H. Seward, his counsel entered the first insanity plea in the state's history. The Van Nest killings and the trial of William Freeman, though illustrative of many aspects of antebellum society and culture, have never received in-depth scholarly attention.

Arpey's investigation into the case yields a wide range of provocative insights that are invaluable to a critical understanding of New York history, legal debate, and race matters in American history.

[Daveo]

Tales from Q School: Inside Golf's Fifth Major by John Feinstein

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe..

It is the tournament that separates champions from mortals. It is the starting point for the careers of future legends and can be the final stop on the down escalator for fading stars.

The annual PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament is one of the most grueling competitions in any sport. Every fall, veterans and talented hopefuls sweat through six rounds of hell at Q school, as the tournament is universally known, to get a shot at the PGA Tour, vying for the 30 slots available. The grim reality: If you don't make it through Q school, you're not on the PGA tour.

You're out.

And those who make it to the six day finals are the lucky ones: hundreds more players fail to get through the equally grueling first two stages of the event. John Feinstein tells the story of the players who compete for these coveted positions in the 2005 Q school as only he can.

With arresting accounts from the players, established winners, rising stars, the defeated, and the endlessly hopeful, America's favorite sportswriter unearths the inside story behind the PGA Tour's brutal all or nothing competition.

[Daveo]