Hour By Hour

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the beloved author of the Vampire Chronicles, the first installation of her spellbinding Mayfair Chronicles—the inspiration for the hit television series! “Extraordinary . . . Anne Rice offers more than just a story; she creates myth.”—The Washington Post Book World Rowan Mayfair, a beautiful woman, a brilliant practitioner of neurosurgery—aware that she has special powers but unaware that she comes from an ancient line of witches—finds the drowned body of a man off the coast of California and brings him to life. He is Michael Curry, who was born in New Orleans and orphaned in childhood by fire on Christmas Eve, who pulled himself up from poverty, and who now, in his brief interval of death, has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him. As these two, fiercely drawn to each other, fall in love and—in passionate alliance—set out to solve the mystery of her past and his unwelcome gift, an intricate tale of evil unfolds. Moving through time from today’s New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château in the Louis XIV’s France, and from the coffee plantations of Port au Prince, where the great Mayfair fortune is made and the legacy of their dark power is almost destroyed, to Civil War New Orleans, The Witching Hour is a luminous, deeply enchanting novel. The magic of the Mayfairs continues: THE WITCHING HOUR • LASHER • TALTOS

Horace turns eleven and celebrates with a splendid party! But when the time comes for the birthday banquet, a most bizarre mystery is revealed. Visit graemebase.com

The first full-length history of college teaching in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present, this book sheds new light on the ongoing tension between the modern scholarly ideal—scientific, objective, and dispassionate—and the inevitably subjective nature of day-to-day instruction. American college teaching is in crisis, or so we are told. But we've heard that complaint for the past 150 years, as critics have denounced the poor quality of instruction in undergraduate classrooms. Students daydream in gigantic lecture halls while a professor drones on, or they meet with a teaching assistant for an hour of aimless discussion. The modern university does not reward teaching, so faculty members at every level neglect it in favor of research and publication. In the first book-length history of American college teaching, Jonathan Zimmerman confirms but also contradicts these perennial complaints. Drawing upon a wide range of previously unexamined sources, The Amateur Hour shows how generations of undergraduates indicted the weak instruction they received. But Zimmerman also chronicles institutional efforts to improve it, especially by making teaching more "personal." As higher education grew into a gigantic industry, he writes, American colleges and universities introduced small-group activities and other reforms designed to counter the anonymity of mass instruction. They also experimented with new technologies like television and computers, which promised to "personalize" teaching by tailoring it to the individual interests and abilities of each student. But, Zimmerman reveals, the emphasis on the personal inhibited the professionalization of college teaching, which remains, ultimately, an amateur enterprise. The more that Americans treated teaching as a highly personal endeavor, dependent on the idiosyncrasies of the instructor, the less they could develop shared standards for it. Nor have they rigorously documented college instruction, a highly public activity which has taken place mostly in private. Pushing open the classroom door, The Amateur Hour illuminates American college teaching and frames a fresh case for restoring intimate learning communities, especially for America's least privileged students. Anyone who wants to change college teaching will have to start here.

#1 Speed Reading Book on Amazon for 2 Straight Years This book has quickly become the go to standard for rapidly improving reading speed. It offers simple tips to not only accelerate your reading, but comprehension and memory. Unlike other books that merely teach you to skim & scan, this book taps into your brain and eyes' amazing power to naturally read more words in a shorter time. Please Note There are a growing number of trolls and copycats on Amazon. They copy hard work of legitimate authors and post malicious reviews on their book to boost their own ranking. They don't take the time to understand a topic, only copy what others have written to make money. In fact, much of their content is taken directly from here as I've spent the last 15 years understanding how to optimize performance of the mind to enhance these areas & more. You will see that in the types of tips this book offers and how they are offered. In fact, it is the only speed reading book that presents practice drills at the end of every chapter, so by the time you get to the last page, you will have double or tripled your reading, learning, and memory of written information.

An enchanting, hypnotic trilogy of witchcraft, adventure, and romance from the beloved author of Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat, The Mayfair Witches is a wondrous journey through the centuries, across the globe, and between the human and demonic worlds. Now all three novels in Anne Rice’s spellbinding series have been collected for the first time in this stunning eBook bundle: THE WITCHING HOUR LASHER TALTOS On the screened porch of a great New Orleans house, now faded, a mute and fragile woman sits rocking. She belongs to a legendary dynasty of witches—a family that is itself haunted over the ages by a dangerous and seductive being named Lasher. Their story begins in our time, with a rescue at sea. Rowan Mayfair, a brilliant neurosurgeon aware of her abilities but oblivious to her ancient line, finds the drowned body of Michael Curry off the coast of California and brings him to life. In his brief interval of death, he has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him. Fiercely drawn to each other, Rowan and Michael set out to solve the mystery of her past and his unwelcome gift, and an intricate tale of evil unfolds: an evil unleashed in seventeenth-century Scotland, where the first “witch,” Suzanne of the Mayfair, conjures up the spirit that spells her own destruction and torments each of her descendants in turn. Praise for Anne Rice and The Mayfair Witches “Behind all the velvet drapes and the gossamer winding sheets, this is an old-fashioned family saga. . . . Rice’s descriptive writing is so opulent that it almost begs to be read [by] candlelight.”—The Washington Post Book World “[A] huge and sprawling tale of horror.”—The New York Times Book Review “Lush prose, dense atmosphere, steamy sex, Gothic tension . . . Rice stages her scenes in a wide variety of times and locales, tapping deeply into the richest veins of mythology and history.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Spellbinding . . . mythical . . . Rice is a pure storyteller.”—Cosmopolitan “Rice sees things on a grand scale. . . . There is a wide-screen historical sweep to the tale as it moves from one generation of witches to the other.”—The Boston Globe “An intricate, stunning imagination.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “It is hard to praise sufficiently the originality of Miss Rice. . . . She has made a masterpiece of the morbid, worthy of Poe’s daughter.”—The Wall Street Journal

A 12-year-old smuggler who was outside the Warsaw ghetto walls when the ghetto uprising began in the spring of 1943. With little hope that his family would survive, he fled to the countryside with false identification papers and worked on a farm where he was considered part of the family. Forced to return to Warsaw, where he realized once and for all that his family was gone, he came under the protection of the Salesian Fathers and spent much of the next year in one of their orphanages. This is where he struggled with the loss of his family and his loneliness, guilt, fear and indecision regarding his "dual identity." When the Warsaw Uprising began on August 1, 1944, then 14-year-old Arthur Ney joined the barricades and fought the Germans - W Hour is the code name for the Uprising. During the rebels capitulation, he escaped and remained with the Salesians until he was found by an aunt and uncle and ulitmately taken to Canada.

When Rebecca Weller’s pounding, dehydrated head woke her at 3am, yet again, she stared at the ceiling, wondering why the hell she kept doing this to herself. At 39 years of age – and a Health Coach, no less – she knew better than to down several bottles of wine per week. Her increasingly dysfunctional relationship with alcohol had to stop, but after decades of social drinking, she was terrified of what that might mean. How could she live a joyful existence, without alcohol? How would she relax, socialise, or celebrate – without wine? In sheer frustration, on a morning filled with regret and tears, she embarks on a 3-month sobriety experiment that becomes a quest for self-discovery, and ultimately, transforms her entire world. A Happier Hour is a heartfelt, moving, and inspiring story for anyone who has ever had to give up something they loved in order to get what they truly wanted.

Yu-Rhee, a young Korean girl, wants to know how to tell time using a clock. Her mother tells her a tale from her childhood based on the traditional Korean practice of timekeeping, where the 12 animals of the zodiac are assigned to 2-hour sections of the 24-hour clock. Told from the point of view of a mountain, the story follows a child as they climb the mountainside in search of a plant to heal their ailing mother. The climb is steep, the path wild and the way difficult. The mountain watches the child struggle and calls on the animals that live on the mountainside to help the child, but as sunlight turns to moonlight, each animal claims to be too busy. Ultimately, Once Upon an Hour is a story about determination and teamwork that shows young readers the importance of helping others.