House Of Illusions

Pauline Gedge is a master at recreating the golden age in Egypt. Her heroin, Thu, a peasant girl from the village of Aswat, possesses both beauty and intelligence. To her good fortune Thu is found and brought to the center of society. She is chosen and trained for the court of Pharaoh Ramses. Her talent and guile win her a post in the harem. -- Thu rises in favor, is betrayed in a court intrigue that threatens her life and falls from grace. Pharaoh spares her life but banishes her to serve the priests at the lowly temple of Wepwawet near the first cataract. -- House of Illusions opens on Gedge's vividly recreated Egypt, sixteen years after Thu's banishment. During her exile she writes an account of her court life and the betrayal for which she seeks revenge. These events took place three thousand years ago. Daily life and custom are woven into the story. In a world without soap and little water, natron serves quite well. Gedge is able to get into the mind of the courtiers and their attitudes to their servants. While beneath them, these inferior beings are very much a part of the family of the house. -- The mysterious Hathor, Thoth, Amun and Ma'at are part of the Egyptian pantheon. They enter the daily life of the characters and the mystery begins to make sense. Never again will the reader scoff at these queer religious notions. The harmony and truth Ma'at embodies is the guiding principal Thu believes in seeking her revenge.

Taking us back to a time that is half history, half myth and wholly magical, bestselling author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni gives voice to Panchaali, the fire-born heroine of the Mahabharata, as she weaves a vibrant retelling of an ancient epic saga. Married to five royal husbands who have been cheated out of their father's kingdom, Panchaali aids their quest to reclaim their birthright, remaining at their side through years of exile and a terrible civil war. But she cannot deny her complicated friendship with the enigmatic Krishna—or her secret attraction to the mysterious man who is her husbands' most dangerous enemy—as she is caught up in the ever-manipulating hands of fate.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Don’t ever begin a Ludlum novel if you have to go to work the next day.”—Chicago Sun-Times Tyrell Hawthorne was a naval intelligence officer—one of the best—until the rain-swept night in Amsterdam when his wife was murdered, an innocent victim of the games spies play. Now he’s called out of retirement for one last assignment. For Hawthorne is the only man alive who can track down the world’s most dangerous terrorist. Amaya Bajaratt is beautiful, elusive, and deadly—and she has set in motion a chilling conspiracy that a desperate government cannot stop. With his life and the life of the president hanging in the balance, Hawthorne must follow Bajaratt’s serpentine trail, a path of seduction, betrayal, and the looming threat of death. Racing from a millionaire recluse’s fortress to the social whirl of Palm Beach, from the Oval Office to treacherous Caribbean waters, Hawthorne will uncover a sinister network of well-placed men and women who exist to help this consummate killer—and the shattering truth behind the Scorpio Illusion. “Breakneck . . . readability.”—The New York Times Book Review “A high-voltage tale of drama and suspense.”—The Denver Post

For Amy and Jody, living with the carnival for the summer was great fun--until Jody stepped into the House of Illusions. It was there that she saw the clowns, with their large red noses, floppy shoes--and deadly grins. A hellish nightmare was about to begin. For these clowns craved terrified screams--not gleeful laughter--and were hungry for death! Original.

The Book of Illusions, written with breath-taking urgency and precision, plunges the reader into a universe in which the comic and the tragic, the real and the imagined, and the violent and the tender dissolve into one another. One man's obsession with the mysterious life of a silent film star takes him on a journey into a shadow-world of lies, illusions, and unexpected love. After losing his wife and young sons in a plane crash, Vermont professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours mired in grief. Then, watching television one night, he stumbles upon a lost film by silent comedian Hector Mann, and remembers how to laugh . . . Mann was a comic genius, in trademark white suit and fluttering black moustache. But one morning in 1929 he walked out of his house and was never heard from again. Zimmer's obsession with Mann drives him to publish a study of his work; whereupon he receives a letter postmarked New Mexico, supposedly written by Mann's wife, and inviting him to visit the great Mann himself. Can Hector Mann be alive? Zimmer cannot decide - until a strange woman appears on his doorstep and makes the decision for him, changing his life forever. 'A nearly flawless work . . . Auster will be remembered as one of the great writers of our time.' San Francisco Chronicle 'Auster's elegant, finely calibrated The Book of Illusions is a haunting feat of intellectual gamesmanship.' TheNew York Times

What are we not seeing? Our naked eyes see only a thin sliver of reality. We are blind in comparison to the X-rays that peer through skin, and the animals that can see in infrared or ultraviolet or with 360-degree vision. In The Reality Bubble, Ziya Tong illuminates this hidden world and takes us on a journey to examine ten of humanity’s biggest blind spots. What she reveals is not on the things we didn’t evolve to see but, more dangerously, the blindness of modern society. Fast-paced, utterly fascinating and deeply humane, this vitally important book gives voice to the sense we’ve all had – that there is more to the world than meets the eye.

A physician-anthropologist explores how public health practices--from epidemiological modeling to outbreak containment--help perpetuate global inequities. In Epidemic Illusions, Eugene Richardson, a physician and an anthropologist, contends that public health practices--from epidemiological modeling and outbreak containment to Big Data and causal inference--play an essential role in perpetuating a range of global inequities. Drawing on postcolonial theory, medical anthropology, and critical science studies, Richardson demonstrates the ways in which the flagship discipline of epidemiology has been shaped by the colonial, racist, and patriarchal system that had its inception in 1492. Deploying a range of rhetorical tools and drawing on his clinical work in a variety of epidemics, including Ebola in West Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, leishmania in the Sudan, HIV/TB in southern Africa, diphtheria in Bangladesh, and SARS-CoV-2 in the United States, Richardson concludes that the biggest epidemic we currently face is an epidemic of illusions—one that is propagated by the coloniality of knowledge production.