Vera

"Meet Vera Johnson, fifteen-year-old illegitimate daughter of Rose, notorious proprietor of San Francisco's most legendary bordello. Vera has grown up straddling two worlds-the madam's alluring sphere, replete with tickets to the opera, surly henchmen, and scant morality, and the quiet domestic life of the family paid to raise her. On the morning of the great quake, Vera's worlds collide. As the city burns and looters vie with the injured, orphaned, and starving, Vera and her guileless sister, Pie, are cast adrift. Disregarding societal norms and prejudices, Vera begins to imagine a new kind of life. She collaborates with Tan, her former rival, and forges an unlikely family of survivors, navigating through the disaster together. In Vera, Carol Edgarian creates a cinematic, deeply entertaining world, in which honor and fates are tested; notions of sex, class, and justice are turned upside down; and love is hard-won. A ravishing, heartbreaking, and profound affirmation of youth and tenacity, Vera's story brings to life legendary characters-tenor Enrico Caruso, indicted mayor Eugene Schmitz and boss Abe Ruef, tabloid celebrity Alma Spreckels. This richly imagined, timely tale of improbable outcomes and alliances takes hold from the first page, with remarkable scenes of devastation, renewal, and joy. Vera celebrates the audacious fortitude of its young heroine, who discovers an unexpected strength in unprecedented times"--

This is Alasdair Barcroft's third book on the subject of aloe vera and he believes the aloe vera topic will run and run as more and more people, both lay people and professional healthcare specialists and therapists alike, begin fully to understand the powerful healing and health-giving properties of this amazing plant. He believes that 'we are still scratching the surface' in terms of aloe vera's vast potential. Aloe vera has been around for over 4,000 years - it has stood the test of time - and it still continues to confound and very often baffle the medical profession and scientific researchers with its complex, silent actions, potent properties and powerful healing benefits. Aloe vera truly is nature's silent healer. Aloe vera has been known for its wide-ranging healing properties for over 4,000 years, but it is only in the last few decades that scientists have really begun both to realise and understand the enormous scope of this amazing plant's actions and benefits. Medical practitioners, vets, dentists, therapists, nutritionists and many others involved in healthcare throughout the world are finally realising that the anecdotal evidence of the powers of this ancient plant th

Biography of well-known designer Vera Wang.

Introducing Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope. The Crow Trap is the first book in Ann Cleeves’ Vera Stanhope series – which is now a major ITV detective drama starring Brenda Blethyn, Vera. Everyone has something to hide . . . Three very different women come together at an isolated cottage on the North Pennines to complete an environmental survey. Three women who each know the meaning of betrayal . . . Rachael, the team leader, is still reeling after a double betrayal by her lover and boss. Anne, a botanist, sees the survey as a chance to indulge in a little deception of her own. And then there is Grace, a strange, uncommunicative young woman, hiding plenty of her own secrets. Rachael is the first to arrive at the cottage, but when she gets there she is shocked to discover an apparent suicide. But then another death occurs, and a fourth woman enters the picture – the unconventional Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope, who must piece together the truth from these women’s tangled lives . . . Enjoy more of Vera Stanhope’s investigations with Telling Tales, Hidden Depths, and Silent Voices.

Vera Wang is a top fashion designer whose name is known around the world. Working first at Vogue magazine and then for Ralph Lauren, Wang opened her own business in 1990. Bridal gowns, put Vera Wang on the map, but her collection has since grown t

1980 for more than 3,000 years, Aloe Vera has been used to treat human ills. its miraculous properties have been re-discovered time after time, but it was not until the advent of the electron microscope that science recognized Aloe Vera as on of the mos.

Both a sculptor and a photographer, German-born Vera Röhm is best known for her unorthodox approach to visual art. Using a repertoire of only elementary geometrical shapes, Röhm's incisions, mutilations, and cross-sections of various materials evoke the very real challenges of restoration and reconstruction. Vera Röhm is the first comprehensive collection of this contemporary artist's work to be presented to an English-speaking public. It explores the changing shape of Röhm's art in such installations as Integrations and Shadow Objects, as her photographs of the Jaipur Observatory, and works such as the cube series bearing the inscription "Night is the Earth's Shadow," which form part of a significant corpus of work connected with language. Accompanied by essays from renowned poet and critic Eugen Gomringer and the art historian Stephen Bann, Vera Röhm is lavishly illustrated with images from her exhibitions.

Vera and the Ambassador is a book to be savored and enjoyed on many levels. Both a behind-the-scenes peek at the operations of a U.S. embassy in a post–Cold War former Soviet satellite and a personal story of a refugee's escape and triumphant return, Vera and Donald Blinken's dual memoir openly details their challenges, setbacks, and victories as they worked in tandem to advance America's interests in Eastern Europe and to restore a former Soviet satellite state to a pre-communist level of prosperity. Hungary in all its cultural glory and historical anguish lies at the heart of this dramatic and deeply personal story. Born in Budapest just prior to World War II, Vera was only five years old when the Germans invaded in 1944. In a harrowing account, she describes how she and her mother managed to survive the atrocities of the war and, in 1950, narrowly escape Soviet-occupied Hungary for the freedom and opportunity of America. Making their way to New York, Vera settled into her adopted country with an indomitable spirit, a vow to become the best American she could be, and a hope of finding some way to give back as a show of gratitude for her good fortune in surviving the destruction of the war. That opportunity came in 1994 when her husband was appointed ambassador to Hungary by President Clinton, just five years into the country's tentative transformation from a command economy and totalitarian government into a market economy and fledgling republic based upon democratic ideals. A former investment banker, Donald might have lacked foreign service experience, but his skills as an administrator and his willingness to try innovative ideas, combined with Vera's knowledge of Hungarian language and culture and her outreach to the Hungarian community, helped them deal head-on with a variety of challenges, including a collapsing economy and the threat of a slide back toward the old ways of communism, and a brutal civil war that raged across the country's southern border in the former Yugoslavia. Replete with colorful characters from the streets of Budapest, humorous scenes at the ambassadorial residence, and accounts of tense high-level diplomatic negotiations in the run-up to Hungary's vote to join NATO, Vera and the Ambassador shows how the Blinkens helped chart a new course for American diplomacy in the mid-1990s. Ultimately, it is also the story of how Hungarians came to see them personally, and memorably, as their Vera and their ambassador.