Pinacle Books

• First Edition. Signed  and inscribed by Kurt Vonnegut.  (incribed "Happy rest of your lives!" 1993 ) Hard cover with dust jacket in a fine condition.      Fates Worse than Death, subtitled An Autobiographical Collage, is a 1990 collection of essays, speeches & other previously uncollected writings by author Kurt Vonnegut Jr.. In the introduction to the book, he acknowledges the book is similar to an earlier book, Palm Sunday. In it he discusses his attempted suicide.
  This book includes a "humanist requiem" that Vonnegut wrote as a reaction to the Roman Catholic Requiem, which he'd heard in Andrew Lloyd Webber's setting & whose text he found offensive. His own text was then set as a "Cosmos Cantata" by the composer Seymour Barab, of whom he said, "Barab's music is full of magic. He proved to an atheist that God exists. What an honor to have worked with him." The ending of this text is: "Let not eternal light disturb our sleep, O Cosmos, for Thou art merciful. Deliver me, O Cosmos, from everlasting wakefulness. On that dread day when the heavens & earth shall quake, when we shall dissolve the world into glowing ashes in the name of gods unknowable, I am seized with trembling & I am afraid until that day of reckoning shall arrive. Hence I pray, Deliver me, O Cosmos, from everlasting wakefulness on that day of wrath, calamity & misery. Rest grant us, O Cosmos, & let not light perpetual disturb our sleep
  
  

• Nicholas II: Last of the Tsars

  One of the world's preeminent historians, Marc Ferro is a leading member of the Annales School of France and a recognized authority on early twentieth-century European history.
  
  
   For well over two decades, in volumes such as The February Revolution of 1917 and October 1917, he has demonstrated an unsurpassed skill in capturing the social and political forces that led to the Russian Revolution. Now Ferro turns his considerable talents to the biography of one of the pivotal figures of that era, Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia.

• Hockey that changed the world-- and Me

  
  
  
  Both a player and a fan, Anderson mixes opinions and observations of the modern game with stories of his own hockey experiences, in western Canada, Spokane and Alaska. Much on the personalities of the WIHL
  

• Maya, the Riddle and Rediscovery of a Lost Civilization

  
  

  
  
  This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process.
  
  Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

• The Royal Tour 1901 - or the Cruise of HMS Ophir

  The Royal Tour is a facsimile of Petty Officer Harry Price's handwritten and illustrated account of the cruise of HMS Ophir in 1901, when the Duke and Duchess of York, later King George V and Queen Mary, toured almost the whole of the British Empire with the exception of India. They travelled via Gibraltar and Malta down the Red Sea to Colombo and Singapore, going on to Australia and New Zealand, across the Indian Ocean to South Africa via Mauritius and finally to Canada via St Vincent before returning to England. The whole trip took nearly nine months and was enormously popular with the countries visited. It was a time when teh British Empire was immensely strong, and the reception of the royal party at each port of call highlighted the success of the tour as a diplomatic exercise
  
  

• Title Living History Chronicles

  Thirty-three veterans of the Second World War and Korean War share their memories and make history come to life for us. The vignettes are varied and range from tragic to comic.
  
  
   Gwilym Jones says, "Choosing my most memorable wartime experience is, to me, like attempting to select the most palatable strawberry in a basket. . . . I accumulated many memories some were precious, some were unforgettable, others I would much rather forget."
  
  
  
   Here you will read about how it felt to liberate Holland, to entertain the troops, to be torpedoed, to thread your way through a minefield, to lose your best friend in an instant. You will read about the D-Day Landing at Juno Beach, the Italian Campaign, the Korean War. You will follow an RAF pilot as he is shot down, taken prisoner, and then exercising considerable ingenuity attempts to escape six times! All of these veterans are members of the Royal Canadian Legion Branch 258 Living History Speakers Bureau, an organization whose primary objective is to ensure that today s history students become aware of, and take pride in, their Canadian heritage.

• Race Without Rules

  Helping a friend becomes a life-or-death matter in Race Without Rules, a thrilling one-thing-leads-to-another tale of robbery, neo-Nazism, murder and terrorism in the quiet, everyday life of Megan Brodie, a woman whose dedication to uncovering the truth is both refreshing and endearing, Beginning writers are often told to "write what they know." If Grant had followed this maxim, we would have missed this thriller about a neo-Nazi biotechnology conspiracy that moves rapidly from WW II Berlin to modern-day Westmount, with a stop in the jungles of Brazil along the way.
  
  It would be a shame to give away too much of the plot, but the major characters include Karl Treiger, an unwilling member of a group of neo-Nazis who hatch a plan to conquer the world through genetic engineering, and Megan Brodie, a Cree-Scottish woman who had been on trial for murder after killing the biker who raped her and threatened her daughter. Megan's friend Fiona is attacked by a thief who is hell-bent on getting some old plans of her Westmount neighbourhood and is willing to commit murder and arson to get them. In the meantime, Trieger is escaping a trap set by Stoltz and Higler, two young Aryans who are the results of genetic engineering. Race Without Rules has a complex plot unfolded by a natural storyteller.

• French explorator Alexandra David-Neel

  Who was Alexandra David-Neel ?
  

• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

  J. K. Rowling unveils in spectacular fashion the answers to the many questions that have been so eagerly awaited.
  
   The spellbinding, richly woven narrative, which plunges, twists and turns at a breathtaking pace, confirms the author as a mistress of storytelling, whose books will be read, reread and read again.

• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

  The majority of the novel takes place in December 1949. The story commences with Holden Caulfield describing encounters he has had with students and faculty of Pencey Prep (scholars often compare Pencey Prep to Valley Forge Military Academy, which Salinger attended from the ages of 15 to 17) in Agerstown, Pennsylvania . He criticizes them for being superficial, as he would say, "phony." After being expelled from the school for his poor academic performance, Holden packs up and leaves the school in the middle of the night after a physical altercation with his roommate. He takes a train to New York but does not want to return to his family and instead checks into the dilapidated Edmont Hotel. There, he spends an evening dancing with three tourist girls and has a clumsy encounter with a young prostitute named Sunny, His attitude toward the prostitute changes the minute she enters the room, because she seems to be about the same age as Holden. Holden becomes uncomfortable with the situation, and when he tells her that all he wants to do is talk, she becomes annoyed with him and leaves. However, he still pays her for her time. Sunny and Maurice, her pimp, later return to Holden's hotel room and demand more money than was originally agreed upon. Despite the fact that Sunny takes five dollars from Holden's wallet, Maurice punches Holden in the stomach......http://www.pinaclebooks.com/?page=shop/flypage&product_id=15668&keyword=the catcher&searchby=title&offset=0&fs=1