Canterbury Tales Guesthouse

[Daveo]

The First Aid Manual (British Red Cross) by Michael Webb.

 

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This revised edition provides photographically illustrated step by step guidance for all conditions and first aid treatment, brought in line with the upgraded standards of the European Resuscitation Council.

It provides at-a-glance, life-saving action plans for all emergency situations.

To help explain why and how first-aid techniques work, greater emphasis has been placed on how we are structured (anatomy) and how we function (physiology).

A clearer understanding of what is normal should help you to decide what may be wrong or abnormal and enable you to provide the correct treatment.

[Daveo]

The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town

by John Grisham.

 

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In the town of Ada, Oklahoma, Ron Williamson was going to be the next Mickey Mantle.

But on his way to the big leagues, Ron stumbled, his dream broken by drinking, drugs, and women.

 

Then on a winter night in 1982, not far from Ron's home, a young cocktail waitress named Debra Sue Carter was savagely murdered.

The investigation led nowhere.

Until, on the flimsiest evidence, it led to Ron Williamson.

 

The washed up small town hero was charged, tried, and sentenced to death in a trial littered with lying witnesses and tainted evidence that would shatter a man's already broken life and let a true killer go free.

 

Impeccably researched, grippingly told, filled with eleventh-hour drama, John Grisham's first work of nonfiction reads like a page turning legal thriller.

It is a book that will terrify anyone who believes in the presumption of innocence, a book that no American can afford to miss.

[Daveo]

Devil in Disguise by Julian Clary.

 

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They say keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

Simon is Molly's oldest, bitchiest, best friend. Since they high kicked out of university, keen to taste life, Molly has become a jobbing musical theatre actress, while Simon is on the cusp of fame as his caustic, bitter alter ego: Genital Warts, a drag Queen with a talent for abusing audiences.

 

They had always vowed no man would ever come between them, but Simon can't resist his fatal attraction to straight men. When his endless pursuit of Mr Right now leads to a devastating betrayal, Molly is left broken hearted and their friendship seems fractured beyond repair.

 

But sometimes it's hard to tell the difference...

 

Distraught, Molly flees for comfort to her one-time landlady, Lilia, an eccentric ex-cabaret singer with an extraordinary past.

But is Lilia's bungalow, Kit-Kat Cottage, quite the safe refuge it seems?

 

Lilia has plans for her protégée.

She will break Molly down, remake her, and together they will achieve the kind of success that Simon can only dream of.

But exactly how far would Lilia go to realise her ambitions...?

 

With his trademark comedy noir, Julian Clary's second novel is a hilarious riot of camp cabaret and murderous mayhem.

[Daveo]

Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman

by Jamie Reidy.

 

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Jamie Reidy is to the pharmaceutical business what Jerry Maguire was to professional sports and Frank Abagnale (Catch Me If You Can) was to bank fraud.

He's the guy who's been there, done that, and walked away with the insider stories.

You will find yourself rooting for Reidy and at the same time, you'll be shocked by the realities of the world that paid his salary.

Hard Sell is a witty expose of an industry that touches nearly everyone in contemporary America, it reveals the questionable practices of drug reps, nurses, and even physicians.

Reidy traces his ups and downs as a rep for giant drug manufacturer Pfizer, maker of some of the most widely prescribed and used drugs in existence, including Viagra,

with equal parts self confidence and self mockery, Reidy tells it like it is in the drug selling trenches that are our local doctors' offices.

The result is a funny and fascinating book that will appeal to those with pharmaceutical sales experience, medical professionals, those who have tried Viagra, and any American unhappy with rising drug prices.

Hard Sell will be an easy sale this season.

[Daveo]

Jungle Rules: A True Story of Marine Justice in Vietnam

by Charles Henderson.

 

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A true story of murder, justice, and the military from the author of Marine Sniper, the Vietnam classic with more than a million copies in print.

 

In Vietnam, they are known as "Jungle Rules" those by which the U.S. military tries to keep control, often allowing inconvenient facts and regulations to conveniently slip between the cracks.

This is the battlefield Captain Terry O'Connor of the JAG Corps is stepping onto.

 

There's been a murder.

After a long day on patrol, Private Celestine Anderson returned to base, only to come under fire from a group of racist white marines.

He finally snapped, killing one of his tormentors and now the inexperienced O'Connor must defend him.

But the case pulls O'Connor into the heart of the Vietnam conflict, where bullets overrule books and death is the only judge of men.

[Daveo]

55555

 

Edited May 20, 2017 by Daveo

[Daveo]

How to Win Friends & Influence People

by Dale Carnegie.

 

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For more than sixty years the rock solid, time tested advice in this book has carried thousands of now famous people up the ladder of success in their business and personal lives.

Now this previously revised and updated bestseller is available in trade paperback for the first time to help you achieve your maximum potential throughout the next century? Learn:

 

* Three fundamental techniques in handling people

 

* The six ways to make people like you

 

* The twelve ways to win people to you way of thinking

 

* The nine ways to change people without arousing resentment

[Daveo]

Limitless by Alan Glynn.

 

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A burnout at thirty-five, months behind on his book, low on cash, and something of a loser, Eddie Spinola could use a shot in the arm.

One day he randomly runs into Vernon, his ex wife's brother, and his ex dealer.

Now employed by a shadowy pharmaceutical company, Vernon has something that might help: a new designer drug that stimulates brain function.

One pill and Eddie is hooked.

His book is finished within days; he learns and synthesizes information at a frightening rate; and he can go a long time without sleep or food.

Naturally, he begins to play the stock market, but when Vernon turns up dead, Eddie makes off with the only stash of the drug in existence.

Then come the side effects: black-outs, blinding headaches, and violent outbursts he can't seem to remember.

Alan Glynn's Limitless is a high concept thriller for this Adderall age, and a haunting meditation on the allure and the curse of human potential.

[Daveo]

A Decent Ride by Irvine Welsh.

 

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Shortlisted for the 2015 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction

 

A rampaging force of nature is wreaking havoc on the streets of Edinburgh, but has top shagger, drug dealer, gonzo porn star and taxi-driver, ‘Juice’ Terry Lawson, finally met his match in Hurricane ‘Bawbag’?

 

Can Terry discover the fate of the missing beauty, Jinty Magdalen, and keep her idiot savant lover, the man-child Wee Jonty, out of prison?

 

Will he find out the real motives of unscrupulous American businessman and reality TV star, Ronald Checker?

 

And, crucially, will Terry be able to negotiate life after a terrible event robs him of his sexual virility, and can a new fascination for the game of golf help him to live without…

A DECENT RIDE?

 

A Decent Ride sees Irvine Welsh back on home turf, leaving us in the capable hands of one of his most compelling and popular characters, ‘Juice’ Terry Lawson, and introducing another bound for cult status, Wee Jonty MacKay: a man with the genitals and brain of a donkey.

 

In his funniest, filthiest book yet, Irvine Welsh celebrates an un-reconstructed misogynist hustler, a central character who is shameless but also, oddly, decent and finds new ways of making wild comedy out of fantastically dark material, taking on some of the last taboos.

So fasten your seatbelts, because this is one ride that could certainly get a little bumpy…

[Daveo]

The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

by Andreï Makine, Geoffrey Strachan.

 

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Andreï Makine's third novel begins with a scene lurid enough to headline a ten o'clock news show. On a hot July morning in the summer of 1947, two bodies wash up on a dust-caked riverbank in the provincial village of Villiers-La-Forêt. It is an unlikely pairing. The woman is the princess Olga Arbyelina, a Russian émigré of astonishing beauty. She is barely alive. The man, Sergei Golets, is a retired horse butcher -- ugly as she is gorgeous and very much dead. The sordid spectacle disrupts the tiny village's peacetime torpor and gives its denizens a tantalizing glimpse of the unimaginable. But the story does not end there. For in spite of her repeated confessions, Sergei Golets's death is not Olga Arbyelina's crime.

 

 

With Proustian relish, The Crime of Olga Arbyelina works backward in time, peeling away history like so many layers of onion skin to reveal Olga's true crime. Like Makine's celebrated previous novels, Dreams of My Russian Summer and Once, Upon a River Love, the events recounted here are seen through the gauzy film of memory. Olga is a casualty of history: Her father was killed in the Russo-Japanese war; her mother thereafter consumed by grief. Olga barely survives her teenage years and is brutally raped during the First World War. She emerges an adult, yet a cultural refugee. Despite a fortuitous marriage to a dashing prince and a new life in Paris, she will always feel that life is to "be a solemn and melancholy wake for the past." (Makine, who is Russian and now lives in France and writes in French, powerfully evokes what it means to be caught between two cultures.)

 

 

War strikes in 1939, and Olga, abandoned by her husband, flees Paris. She settles in Villies-La-Forêt, and gradually falls into a rhythm of daily rituals to salve the wounds of her past. She works at a local library and delights in "delicious idleness." She quells her nightmares with a special herbal tea. She becomes so lost in these rituals, though, that she neglects her son -- a hemophiliac remarkable, at the time, by surviving into his teenage years. He is her symbolic center, embodying both her receding past and a future that seems, like his imminent death, a foregone conclusion. One day, Olga realizes that he is no longer a boy but a young man. Looking up into her grim apartment she notices him standing over her cooling tea with the air of someone committing a crime. Gradually, Olga makes the connection between his gesturing and the druglike efficiency of the tisane. She conducts a vigil to learn the purpose of his curious behavior and winds up accomplice to a trespass no culture would allow.

 

 

At first, Olga is paralyzed by the strangeness of it all. After a few nights, however, she finds herself looking forward to his nocturnal visits and willingly plays along. She is lonely, and this is perhaps the last winter of her son's life. It could be his only chance for love, and with her beauty fading, perhaps hers as well. Each night she brushes the drug off her tea and awaits his shadow in the doorway, feigning sleep during his furtive lovemaking. The shame of it is crushing. "Criminal was the silence she had kept. Her acceptance. Her resignation." Through the long winter she enacts a role perversely analogous to that of the goddess Demeter's: "sleeping" away the winter so that her son can have the spring of his sexual awakening. When winter turns to spring, though, their stolen season is brought to light. Olga, terrified by the prospect of their secret spreading, submits to her blackmailing neighbor, Sergei Golets.

 

 

Were it not for Makine's delicate treatment of Olga's past or his masterful evocation of her reeling mind, this would be a tawdry tale. But Makine is an alchemist of memory and here distills the elements necessary to render this story potent. His lyricism, sumptuously rendered into English by Geoffrey Strachan, is never cloying or airy. It redeems. It makes Olga's unthinkable communion seem not only plausible, but inevitable, necessary. It is an act of grace.

[Daveo]

Dead I Well May Be by Adrian McKinty.

 

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This is a riveting, muscular thriller set amid the gang violence of early 90s New York.

The reader guns unswervingly for McKinty's hero, the green eyed, quick-witted Michael Forsyth, during his brief career as henchman to a crime boss, his fall from grace and subsequent imprisonment.

Michael?s escape from a Mexican jail and tortuous return to New York is an exhilarating, unforgettable sequence that culminates in a clinical and bloody denouement.

A masterclass in revenge narrative, Dead I Well May Be delivers explosive action with gallows humour and a poet's touch.

[Daveo]

Conclave by Robert Harris.

 

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The Pope is dead.

 

Behind the locked doors of the Sistine Chapel, one hundred and eighteen cardinals from all over the globe will cast their votes in the world’s most secretive election.

 

They are holy men.

But they have ambition.

And they have rivals.

 

Over the next seventy-two hours one of them will become the most powerful spiritual figure on earth.

[Daveo]

The Frontline by John Theone.

 

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Steel made Teeside and Teeside made steel. For decades its blast furnaces forged both metal and men and earned the area the nickname "the infant hercules." Many of those tough steel men were united on Saturday afternoons on the terraces of Middlesbrough Football Club.

Some of the hardest of all became the forerunners of one of football's most notorious hooligan gangs: The Frontline.

The Frontline came together in the late sixties, when its founders went to matches wearing pit boots, mining helmets and donkey jackets and fought equally tough dockers from places like Millwall and Everton.

Soon young men were bolstering their numbers in Doc Marten boots, skinhead haircuts and Crombie coats.

Terrace culture had arrived and football would never be the same again.

The Frontline went on to become one of the most active soccer mobs, their reputation built not on weapons or numbers but on their courage and grit in toe to toe battles. Their loyalty was unsurpassed and they would travel through the night to take on the London and south coast firms, thought their bitterest rivals remained the 'Mackems' of Sunderland and the Geordies of Newcastle.

From the club's dog days of the 1980's, spectacular reinvestment has brought dramatic on field success and a huge expansion of support but The Frontline have never gone away.

[Daveo]

Brief Guide to Greek Myth (Brief History of)

by Stephen Kershaw.

 

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The book leads the reader through these vibrant stories, from the origins of the gods through to the homecomings of the Trojan heroes.

All the familiar narratives are here, along with some less familiar characters and motifs.

In addition to the tales, the book explains key issues arising from the narratives, and discusses the myths and their wider relevance.

This long-overdue book crystallises three key areas of interest: the nature of the tales; the stories themselves; and how they have and might be interpreted.

For the first time, it brings together aspects of Greek mythology only usually available in disparate forms namely children's books and academic works.

There will be much here that is interesting, surprising, and strange as well as familiar.

Experts and non-experts, adults, students and schoolchildren alike will gain entertainment and insight from this fascinating and important volume.

As inhuman fire sweeps on in fury through the deep angles of a drywood mountain and sets ablaze the depth of the timber and the blustering wind lashes the flame along, so Achilleus swept everywhere with his spear like something more than a mortal harrying them as they died, and the black earth ran blood.

Homer "Iliad" 20. 490-4 - On the surface the recent Hollywood blockbuster "Troy", directed by Wolfgang Petersen, tries to read the "Iliad" rightly, but makes a number of interesting modifications to the story, presumably in the interests of commercial success & In searching for a contemporary Achilles there are those who look towards the action heroes played by the likes of Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean-Claude van Damme.

But Rambo does not die young, the Terminator does not weep, and the Universal Soldier does not eat with the father of his victims.

[Daveo]

Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China Hardcover by Jung Chang.

 

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Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908) is the most important woman in Chinese history. She ruled China for decades and brought a medieval empire into the modern age.

At the age of sixteen, in a nationwide selection for royal consorts, Cixi was chosen as one of the emperor’s numerous concubines. When he died in 1861, their five-year-old son succeeded to the throne. Cixi at once launched a Palace coup against the regents appointed by her husband and made herself the real ruler of China, behind the throne, literally, with a silk screen separating her from her officials who were all male.

 

In this groundbreaking biography, Jung Chang vividly describes how Cixi fought against monumental obstacles to change China.

Under her the ancient country attained virtually all the attributes of a modern state: industries, railways, electricity, the telegraph and an army and navy with up-to-date weaponry.

It was she who abolished gruesome punishments like “death by a thousand cuts” and put an end to foot-binding.

She inaugurated women’s liberation and embarked on the path to introduce parliamentary elections to China.

Chang comprehensively overturns the conventional view of Cixi as a diehard conservative and cruel despot.

 

Cixi reigned during extraordinary times and had to deal with a host of major national crises: the Taiping and Boxer rebellions, wars with France and Japan and an invasion by eight allied powers including Britain, Germany, Russia and the United States.

Jung Chang not only records the Empress Dowager’s conduct of domestic and foreign affairs, but also takes the reader into the depths of her splendid Summer Palace and the harem of Beijing’s Forbidden City, where she lived surrounded by eunuchs one of whom she fell in love, with tragic consequences.

The world Chang describes here, in fascinating detail, seems almost unbelievable in its extraordinary mixture of the very old and the very new.

 

Based on newly available, mostly Chinese, historical documents such as court records, official and private correspondence, diaries and eyewitness accounts, this biography will revolutionize historical thinking about a crucial period in China’s and the world’s history.

Packed with drama, fast paced and gripping, it is both a panoramic depiction of the birth of modern China and an intimate portrait of a woman: as the concubine to a monarch, as the absolute ruler of a third of the world’s population, and as a unique stateswoman.

[Daveo]

The Final Solution by Michael Chabon,

 

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In deep retirement in the English countryside, an eighty nine year old man, vaguely recollected by locals as a once famous detective, is more concerned with his beekeeping than with his fellow man.

Into his life wanders Linus Steinman, nine years old and mute, who has escaped from Nazi Germany with his sole companion: an African gray parrot.

 

What is the meaning of the mysterious string of German numbers the bird spews out, a top secret SS code?

The keys to a series of Swiss bank accounts perhaps?

Or something more sinister?

Is the solution to this last case, the real explanation of the mysterious boy and his parrot, beyond even the reach of the once famed sleuth?

 

A short, suspenseful tale of compassion and wit that reimagines the classic nineteenth century detective story.

[Daveo]

Fletch's Fortune by Gregory McDonald.

 

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Fletch’s Fortune;

He hadn’t been a practicing journalist for years, although people remembered him and he still has a few contacts.

And he’s pretty sure he hasn’t paid his dues to the American Journalism Alliance anytime recently, but somebody has.

 

Enjoying himself on the French Riviera, developing a killer tan, and sleeping with the neighbor’s wife, Fletch is feeling pretty flush.

But when agents Eggers and Fabens show up with a little more information about Fletch than is comfortable and an invitation to the A.J.A. convention, how could he refuse?

 

So he finds himself enlisted as a spy among his peers.

But before he can even set up his surveillance, there’s a murder.

And almost everybody’s a suspect, because a lot of people were employed by Walter March, and most of them had a reason to hate him.

[Daveo]

The Harmony Silk Factory by Tash Aw.

 

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Joseph Conrad, W. Somerset Maugham, and Anthony Burgess have shaped our perceptions of Malaysia.

In Tash Aw, we now have an authentic Malaysian voice that remaps this literary landscape.

 

The Harmony Silk Factory traces the story of textile merchant Johnny Lim, a Chinese peasant living in British Malaya in the first half of the twentieth century.

Johnny's factory is the most impressive structure in the region, and to the inhabitants of the Kinta Valley Johnny is a hero, a Communist who fought the Japanese when they invaded, ready to sacrifice his life for the welfare of his people.

But to his son, Jasper, Johnny is a crook and a collaborator who betrayed the very people he pretended to serve, and the Harmony Silk Factory is merely a front for his father's illegal businesses.

This debut novel from Tash Aw gives us an exquisitely written look into another culture at a moment of crisis.

 

The Harmony Silk Factory won the 2005 Whitbread First Novel Award and also made it to the 2005 Man Booker longlist.

[Daveo]

by Richard Templar.

 

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A new edition of one of the world’s bestselling success at work guides.

The brand new edition of this highly regarded, timeless and unforgettable book will bring you the empowering and life changing guidance of Richard Templar.

Packed with common sense advice, thought provoking ideas, practical strategies and down to earth wisdom, together with a big dash of humour and honesty, Rules of Work simply and clearly explains the 100 tenets of a happy, successful and fulfilling life at work.

[Daveo]

Jumper: Griffin’s Story by Steven Gould.

 

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Jumper: Griffin’s Story was written by Gould to compliment the 2008 film Jumper starring Samuel L Jackson.

 

The novel explores the life of Griffin O’Connor as he uses his teleportation powers to hunt his parents’ murderers.

 

Rule One: Never jump where someone can see you.

Rule Two: Never jump near home.

Rule Three: Never jump to or from the same place twice.

Rule Four: Only jump if you have, only if they find you.

 

The first time it happened, Griffin O’Connor was only five years old; he jumped from the steps of the Martyr’s Memorial in Oxford, in front of a busload of tourists.

The second time it happened his family had to cross an ocean to protect his secret.

 

But four years later Griff accidentally broke his parent’s rules and jumped again.

That night the men from Oxford found them, and by morning his parents had been murdered, leaving Griff alone, wounded and only nine years old.

 

Griffin grows up with only two goals: to survive, and to kill the people who want him dead.

And a Jumper bent on revenge is not going to let anything stand in his way.

[Daveo]

Patpong Sisters: An American Woman's View of the Bangkok Sex World; by Cleo Odzer.

 

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Patpong, in the heart of Bangkok, teems with bars and sex shows, catering mainly to farangs, foreigners.

Cleo Odzer, a young anthropologist, spent three years studying the area.

Gaining the confidence of the bar girls and bar boys, she interviewed them at length, lived among them, accompanied several back to their families in remote villages.

She also got to know their customers, those in for a night or in forever (many fell in love and stayed on in Patpong).

From Odzer's account emerges a far different picture from the cliched image of the prostitute.

Many of the Patpong girls, smart and enterprising, use their profession for self-liberation and to support their impoverished families back home.

Warm and personal, Patpong Sisters reveals the truth about the Bangkok economy of sex.

[Daveo]

When The Wind Changed : The Life and Death of Tony Hancock by Cliff Goodwin.

 

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Reader review;

Full of facts and information but never boring, it details the life of a remarkable yet tragic man who could be endearing and appalling in equal measure.

John Sessions once said that Hancock could never accept that he was a player (and, in my view, an exceptionally talented one, up there with Ronnie Barker and David Jason among comic actors) and not a composer, and he was right. Highly recommended.

[Daveo]

Essex Boys: A Terrifying Expose of the British Drugs Scene

by Bernard O'Mahoney.

 

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A new edition of a book formerly known as So This is Ecstasy?

This is the true story of the rise of one of the most violent and successful criminal gangs of the 1990's.

The author of the book was a key member of that gang, and this is his inside account of their violent ways.

Their reign ended when the three leaders were murdered.

[Daveo]

Sex Tips For Girls by Cynthia Heimel.

 

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Cynthia Heimel is the author of seven books and numerous columns and articles.

She lives in Oakland, California, with her boyfriend, his son and too many dogs.

[Daveo]

State of the Union by Douglas Kennedy.

 

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Douglas Kennedy’s riveting new novel bears his trademark genius for writing serious popular fiction.

 

Hannah Buchan leads an orderly life in a small town in Maine a schoolteacher, married to a doctor, with two grown up children.

However, her past conceals a dark secret.

Thirty years ago she had a brief, dangerous fling with Tobias Judson, a high profile student activist, which she had reconciled to that internal, off-limits attic room marked “Ancient History.”

But when Tobias suddenly pops up out of nowhere with a book about his radical years, her life goes into free-fall.

And before she knows it, Hannah discovers that a long ago transgression is never really forgotten.

 

Set amid two wildly contrasting periods of recent American life the militant 60's and 70's, and the newfound conservatism of today, State of the Union is a remarkable portrait of one woman’s attempts to find her own way in the shifting political currents of her time.

But it is also an intriguing portrait of the complexities of a long marriage, the ongoing guilt of parenthood, the perpetual tension between familial responsibility and personal freedom, and the divisive debate between liberal and conservative values that so engulfs the United States today.