Falling Glass

Richard Coulter is a man who has everything. His beautiful new wife is pregnant, his upstart airline is undercutting the competition and moving from strength to strength, his diversification into the casino business in Macau has been successful, and his fabulous Art Deco house on an Irish cliff top has just been featured in Architectural Digest. But then, for some reason, his ex-wife Rachel doesn’t keep her side of the custody agreement and vanishes off the face of the earth with Richard’s two daughters. Richard hires Killian, a formidable ex-enforcer for the IRA, to track her down before Rachel, a recovering drug addict, harms herself or the girls. As Killian follows Rachel’s trail, he begins to see that there is a lot more to this case than first meets the eye and that a thirty-year-old secret is going to put all of them in terrible danger. McKinty is at his continent-hopping, well-paced, evocative best in this thriller, moving between his native Ireland and distant cities within a skin-of-his-teeth timeframe.

The weatherman was always right: Temperature, 59; humidity, 47%; occasional light showers—but of what?

Emmi Maeda comes into possession of an antique and plunges through time—into feudal Japan and the world of samurai. Los Angles, present day Emiko &‘Emmi' Maeda set aside her studies following the sudden death of her father. Estranged from her mother and brother and burdened with guilt over her role in the tragic accident, she moves in with her godfather Jake and comes into possession of an antique mirror. While accompanying Jake to Japan on a film shoot, Emmi is caught in a freak storm and plunged through time—into the land of her ancestors. Kyoto, 1864 The city of Kyoto is ablaze with violence and on the brink of civil war. Nakagawa Kaemon is a young samurai with a secret. He gathers information on those who claim to revere the emperor but harbor their own agenda to control the country. Kae is honor-bound to execute anyone who poses a threat to the throne—even if it is Emmi, the unusual young woman he has come to love.

We all have dreams for love and happiness, a life full of purpose and family, and the means to enjoy it. This sounds simple, but how do we get it? Meghan Rogers had ambition. She had plans, which she assumed would work, but when all her plans fell flat, she found herself in the shower asking God for help. Let the Glass Fall is a story of a challenged love. Meghan is trying to do all the right things, but life never goes as planned, and true love is not easy to find.

For readers of Hillbilly Elegy and Strangers in Their Own Land WINNER OF THE OHIOANA BOOK AWARDS AND FINALIST FOR THE 87TH CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARDS | NAMED A BEST/MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2017 BY: New York Post • Newsweek • The Week • Bustle • Books by the Banks Book Festival • Bookauthority.com The Wall Street Journal: "A devastating portrait...For anyone wondering why swing-state America voted against the establishment in 2016, Mr. Alexander supplies plenty of answers." Laura Miller, Slate: "This book hunts bigger game. Reads like an odd?and oddly satisfying?fusion of George Packer’s The Unwinding and one of Michael Lewis’ real-life financial thrillers." The New Yorker : "Does a remarkable job." Beth Macy, author of Factory Man: "This book should be required reading for people trying to understand Trumpism, inequality, and the sad state of a needlessly wrecked rural America. I wish I had written it." In 1947, Forbes magazine declared Lancaster, Ohio the epitome of the all-American town. Today it is damaged, discouraged, and fighting for its future. In Glass House, journalist Brian Alexander uses the story of one town to show how seeds sown 35 years ago have sprouted to give us Trumpism, inequality, and an eroding national cohesion. The Anchor Hocking Glass Company, once the world’s largest maker of glass tableware, was the base on which Lancaster’s society was built. As Glass House unfolds, bankruptcy looms. With access to the company and its leaders, and Lancaster’s citizens, Alexander shows how financial engineering took hold in the 1980s, accelerated in the 21st Century, and wrecked the company. We follow CEO Sam Solomon, an African-American leading the nearly all-white town’s biggest private employer, as he tries to rescue the company from the New York private equity firm that hired him. Meanwhile, Alexander goes behind the scenes, entwined with the lives of residents as they wrestle with heroin, politics, high-interest lenders, low wage jobs, technology, and the new demands of American life: people like Brian Gossett, the fourth generation to work at Anchor Hocking; Joe Piccolo, first-time director of the annual music festival who discovers the town relies on him, and it, for salvation; Jason Roach, who police believed may have been Lancaster’s biggest drug dealer; and Eric Brown, a local football hero-turned-cop who comes to realize that he can never arrest Lancaster’s real problems.

Problems in construction have existed for as long as architecture itself has enclosed our spaces. Particularly in glass structures there have been some catastrophic problems in recent years. It would seem that modern architecture with its complex technologies and ingenious details is especially prone to defects. For this very reason, this selection of examples includes such renowned projects as John Hancock Tower in Boston, Galeries Lafayette in Berlin, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Bibliothèque de France in Paris. The book can be seen as a catalogue of facade failure modes, examining defects due to water leakage, corrosion, incompatibility of materials, insufficient redundancy, climatic influences, wear and tear of materials etc. Each chapter is devoted to a particular form of damage, illustrating it with examples, and concluding with strategies to avoid repetition of defects. Patrick Loughran, architect and engineer, has been working in the design of building facades in Chicago since 1994.