Books about Wondrous from Amazon.com

Amazon Best of the Month, September 2007: It's been 11 years since Junot Díaz's critically acclaimed story collection, Drown, landed on bookshelves and from page one of his debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, any worries of a sophomore jinx disappear. The titular Oscar is a 300-pound-plus "lovesick ghetto nerd" with zero game (except for Dungeons & Dragons) who cranks out pages of fantasy fiction with the hopes of becoming a Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien. The book is also the story of a multi-generational family curse that courses through the book, leaving troubles and tragedy in its wake. This was the most dynamic, entertaining, and achingly heartfelt novel I've read in a long time. My head is still buzzing with the memory of dozens of killer passages that I dog-eared throughout the book. The rope-a-dope narrative is funny, hip, tragic, soulful, and bursting with desire. Make some room for Oscar Wao on your bookshelf--you won't be disappointed. --Brad Thomas Parsons.
Price: $14.05 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The great legacy of the ancient Khmer civilization, the temples of Angkor were built between the ninth and 15th centuries and cover an area stretching across 77 square miles in northwest Cambodia. This beautifully illustrated book contains a comprehensive monument-by-monument guide to the sites, detailed maps and plans, plus information about ten newly accessible temple complexes.
• Ten new temple sites; an additional 180 pages with 86 new color images
• Foreword by His Majesty King Norodom Sihamoni of Cambodia
• Extensive accounts of temples and pre-Angkor sites
• Profiles the Phnom Penh National Museum
• The hip town Siem Reap—the base for exploring Angkor
• Unique flora and fauna around the great lake, Tonle Sap
• 158 color photos, 44 maps & plans..
Price: $15.59 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Like its predecessor, this useful, funny, and edifying little volume will give you the right words for any occasion This second collection contains 600 outlandish (and thoroughly useful) words that will help readers, in the words of the author, "more readily assert a fitting ascendancy over their fellows at the traffic lights of life.".
Price: $3.88 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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Price: $1.65 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Two romantic tales of dark forces

and Christmas miracles...

The Twilight Before Christmas

Bestselling novelist Kate Drake, one of seven sisters with amazing powers of witchcraft, wants to open a bookstore in a charming but run-down mill in her California hometown. Decorated former U.S. Army Ranger Matt Granite, now a contractor, doesn't mind helping -- and getting closer to Kate. But when an earthquake exposes a crypt in the mill's foundation, a centuries-old evil threatens to destroy both Christmas and the gift of soul-searing passion Kate's hometown hero wants her to keep forever....

After The Music

Terrified by mysterious threats, Jessica Fitzpatrick takes her twin wards to the island mansion of their estranged father, Dillon Wentworth, a famous musician who shut out the world after a fire claimed his wife's life and left him disfigured. With Christmas approaching, the spark between Dillon and Jessica might light the future, but the evil machinations of those who share his wife's love of the occult may plunge the family into darkness -- unless a Christmas miracle occurs....

Experience the magic!

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Price: $1.30 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The twentieth century was, by any reckoning, the age of the child in America Today, we pay homage at the altar of childhood, heaping endless goods on the young, reveling in memories of a more innocent time, and finding solace in the softly backlit memories of our earliest years. We are, the
proclamation goes, just big kids at heart. And, accordingly, we delight in prolonging and inflating the childhood experiences of our offspring. In images of the naughty but nice Buster Brown and the coquettish but sweet Shirley Temple, Americans at mid-century offered up a fantastic world of
treats, toys, and stories, creating a new image of the child as "cute." Holidays such as Christmas and Halloween became blockbuster affairs, vehicles to fuel the bedazzled and wondrous innocence of the adorable child. All this, Gary Cross illustrates, reflected the preoccupations of a more gentle
and affluent culture, but it also served to liberate adults from their rational and often tedious worlds of work and responsibility. But trouble soon entered paradise. The "cute" turned into "cool" as children, following their parental example, embraced the gift of fantasy and unrestrained desire
to rebel against the saccharine excesses of wondrous innocence in deliberate pursuit of the anti-cute. Movies, comic books, and video games beckoned to children with the allures of an often violent, sexualized, and increasingly harsh worldview. Unwitting and resistant accomplices to this
commercial transformation of childhood, adults sought-over and over again, in repeated and predictable cycles-to rein in these threats in a largely futile jeremiad to preserve the old order. Thus, the cute child-deliberately manufactured and cultivated--has ironically fostered a profoundly troubled
ambivalence toward youth and child rearing today. Expertly weaving his way through the cultural artifacts, commercial currents, and parenting anxieties of the previous century, Gary Cross offers a vibrant and entirely fresh portrait of the forces that have defined American childhood..
Price: $4.24 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Antarctica is a land of extremes: coldest, windiest, highest, driest. The place New Mexico photographer Joan Myers calls the "most hostile continent on Earth" nearly defies capture by film or words. In Wondrous Cold: An Antarctic Journey, Myers achieves both.

Her exquisite photographs of landscapes, wildlife, and the abandoned huts of early explorers are juxtaposed with glimpses of scientists who seek to understand Antarctica's past and future and the support staff who facilitate their work. Myers' journal entries provide a warm introduction to the people and places of this harsh yet surprisingly fragile environment.

Science-related sidebars written by New York Times writer Sandra Blakeslee, literary quotations, and excerpts from historic and contemporary sources contribute additional perspective on the world's most remote frontier.

An award winner at the 2006 American Association of Museums publications competition, Wondrous Cold was praised by the jury for its excellence in graphic design and printing.

And now there came both mist and snow, And it grew wondrous cold: And ice, mast-high, came floating by, As green as emerald. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Price: $11.51 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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Price: $15.48 [Notify me when price goes down.]