This is a key text to understand the processes of urban violence in Colombia. It reveals the world of the young people who formed gangs and shook up Colombia with their recklessness. The book also explores the cultural and historical roots of a generation that got caught up in the drug-trafficking phenomenon and created a subculture with odd forms of religiousness, irreverent languages and a defiant attitude towards death. This book is short and entertaining, yet hard to swallow, as the reader is thrust into realities that only a few people live and understand, and many of us want to change.
Archives: Books
Raffles Readers
Raffles Hotel is the best-known, oldest and most elegant hotel in Singapore. When it was first built in 1887, it stood on Beach Road, overlooking the sea. Presently, Beach Road is in the middle of a thriving, modern city. There are many tales of the weird and wonderful happenings at this beautiful hotel-hundreds of famous people have also stayed there.
This book holds the secrets to a century of adventures, including monsters, missing silver, spies, ghost brides and zombies. Spanning the 1920s to 2000s, these imaginative tales will draw readers into the wondrous world of the iconic Raffles Hotel and the escapades of its young guests.
Everyday Ninja
When Kareem and Raffi see an awesome ninja at the park, they go back again and again, wondering if they’ve got what it takes to be super ninjas too. But the boys are in for a big surprise when the ninja does a perfect arabesque.
Horrid High: Back to School
When Granny Grit is called away on a most mysterious mission, twelve-year-old Ferg and his friends are left at the mercy of Cook Fracas’s frenzied food fights, Colonel Craven’s manic panics and Miss Nottynuf’s nervous nail-biting. To make matters worse, the Grand Plan is still missing and the kids must find it before someone truly awful does.
Can Ferg and his friends survive another term at the world’s most horrid school? Return to Horrid High and find out!
Our Sands
No subject, we’re all starting to admit, is as relevant as climate change. Our Sands is set in and around one of the least sustainable projects on the planet-the tar sands in Alberta, Canada. They inspire increasingly militant ‘ecoteurs’ who feel that one big dose of poison is the only way to stop the poisoning of land, water and First Nations peoples.
Seventeen year-old Ocean Janak has grown up the privileged daughter of Blake, a geologist turned oil executive. When she falls for Rory McAllister, a bike courier who secretly scans many of the oil contracts he’s paid to deliver, she finds a lover and comrade-in-green-arms. Together, they say No to help the planet say Yes.
Like Margaret Atwood, Our Sands knows that climate change is in fact ‘everything change’.
The Gurkhas
The Gurkhas – A True Story is a complete book for, to and by a Gurkha. It covers their story from the start to the very present. The book not only documents the Gurkhas’ history but also their influence in the community and the nation as a whole.
Immersed in a 200-year-old history, the Gurkhas is an institution and are known to be the bravest of the braves.
The Gurkhas fought in many countries like Malaysia, Singapore, Borneo, East Timor, Hong Kong, Cyprus, the Falklands, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo for the British. Their famous kukri had no peers in both WWI and WWII, and they are probably the only such force in the world that had won wars by name alone.
An institution that lasted for more than two centuries cannot survive by bravery alone. Outside factors such as political, social, religious, racial, and traditional affected their community. Their inherited virtues such as loyalty, devotion, tenacity, hardworking, adaptability as well as being able to face difficulty with a smile made them tough from the inside. Above all, their upbringing taught them to respect their elders and their masters who made them into a perfect soldier.
The Sea Speaks His Name
In the twilight hours of a day in March, Biru Laut was ambushed by four unknown men. Together with his friends, Daniel, Sunu and Alex, he was taken to an unknown location. For months they were held captive, interrogated, beaten and tortured into answering one sole question: Who stood behind the rebellious student movements at that time?
Biru Laut’s younger sister, who, along with other family members of kidnapped student activists, struggled to put the pieces of the puzzle together and to find answers to their never-ending questions.
While her parents appear to be in denial and remain hopeful that Biru Laut will one day come back to sit at the family table again, Asmara Jati engages alongside the Missing Persons Commission Team led by Aswin Pradana in order to strive to find traces of those who went missing and to record the testimonies of those who returned.
This stirring story of Biru Laut and his friends is the story of the desaparecidos of Indonesia. It is the story of a momentous-and still seldom written about-period of Indonesian history that led to the end of dictatorship in Indonesia.
Winter Blue, Fairy Child – The Gems of Power
Winter Blue is a fairy-child. She leads parallel lives in two worlds – the world of
humans, and another, secret, wondrous world – Magic-Land.
As an ordinary thirteen-year-old girl she attends school every day, does her
homework, and spends time with her friends, none of whom know her secret.
Each night, she turns into a fairy and flies to Magic-Land where she meets other
fairies, dwarflings, wonder-horses, fixit moles, pink babies, and other magic beings.
One day, a series of strange events starts taking place -events that disrupt the
tranquil lives of all Magic-Land dwellers. A wonder-horse falls into the human world,
dangerous pits are torn in the ground, and the fairies’ gems of power begin to
vanish, one after another…
Winter and her friends, other fairy-children, set out to investigate the mystery. They
experience a series of adventures, face numerous dangers, and expose a conspiracy
that threatens the very existence of Magic-Land.
The plot takes place simultaneously in both realms, sweeping readers into a fantastic,
gripping and mysterious story.
The Night of Legends
Keix wakes up in an underground prison-weak, emaciated, and battling partial memory loss. Her rescuers and long-time friends, Zej and Pod, tell her she’s been put in a coma for two years. Her captor: Atros, the organization she had joined as a trainee soldier since she was fourteen. Keix doesn’t want to believe them but the evidence just keeps stacking up. Vile beasts called Odats, engaged by Atros as mercenaries, attack her as she makes her escape from the prison. And she finds out that Atros is also keeping her best friend Vin locked up.
Keix’s ancestry (her father is a Kulcan, a fierce race of warriors) helps her regain her lost memories and strength quickly under her friends’ care. Soon, she gets handed proof that Atros is building a ghost army-the very enemies the organization has been tasked to protect the people from. To make matters even more complicated, Ifarls, a race with mysterious magical powers, try to influence her to attempt a dangerous mission to break Vin out. They also tell Keix they want to close the portal between the living and the dead, to end decades of misery that the underworld has brought.
Swept into the undercurrents of distrust and differing agendas between the races, will Keix, who considers herself as an outsider because of her mixed bloodline, be able to walk her own path?
Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit
Classical Sanskrit literature boasts an exquisite canon of poetry devoted to erotic love. In Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit, noted translator and scholar R. Parthasarathy curates a selection in a new verse translation that introduces readers to Sanskrit poetry in a modern English vernacular. The volume features works by seventy-two poets, including seven women poets and thirty-five anonymous poets, primarily composed between the fourth and seventeenth centuries. It includes a detailed introduction that guides readers through Sanskrit poetic forms and explains how to read and appreciate the poems in English.
Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit seeks to represent the breadth of Sanskrit poetry through the ages and to present a cohesive, thematically unified selection when read as a whole. The works in this volume depict licit and illicit love, speaking to the joys
and sorrows of consummation and separation and a broader cultural celebration of the pleasures of the flesh. Often sexually explicit, they are replete with recurrent scenarios and striking tactile, visual, and olfactory images, whose resonance and
use as motifs across eras are expertly explained. Parthasarathy shows that Sanskrit poets are our contemporaries despite the centuries that separate us, as they speak simply and passionately to a wide range of human experience. Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit offers English-speaking readers an enticing and tantalizing initiation into the riches and beauty of this venerable poetic tradition.