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Data and Safety Monitoring Committees in Clinical Trials
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Praise for the first edition: "Given the author's years of experience as a statistician and as a...
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Japanese Gardening: An Inspirational Guide to Designing and Creating an Authentic Japanese Garden with Over 260 Exquisite Photographs
Alex Ramsay and Charles Chesshire
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The timeless and unique Japanese garden, with its spiritual and philosophical dimensions, has for...
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The Assault on International Law
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International law presents a conceptual riddle. Why comply with it when there is no world government...
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After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism
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In his Berlin lectures on fine art, Hegel argued that art involves a unique form of aesthetic...
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Everything Is Combustible: Television, CBGB's and Five Decades of Rock and Roll: The Memoirs of an Alchemical Guitarist
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Legendary Rock and Roll guitarist. Founding member of Television. Masterful storyteller. ...
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Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
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Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was an architect, engineer, geometrician, cartographer, philosopher,...
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The Greatest Love Story Ever Told
Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally
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At last, the full story behind Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman's epic romance, including stories,...
memoir biography celebrity
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Goddess in the Stacks (553 KP) rated Cinnamon and Gunpowder: A Novel in Books
Sep 19, 2018
The formatting is set up as a kind of personal ship's log, each part dated and written down after the events happen. Wedgwood (or "Spoons," as the crew calls him) even mentions how he hides it and leaves out a decoy log, since he also writes down his dreams (and plans!) of escaping the pirates.
Some of the events in the book are incredibly predictable, but there are still a few surprises. I was a little disappointed when one thing in particular happened; I saw it coming but hoped that wasn't where the author was going with it. I know that's vague, but I don't want to spoil anything!
I enjoyed learning about Mad Hannah's background and why she's a pirate; she's fighting against the opium trade, and she actually gives Wedgwood a pretty accurate summary of the terrible things the opium trade was responsible for.
Any book that can combine sumptuous description of exotic meals with action and cannonballs will have my attention. And Brown does not shy away from proper action scenes. These are pirates, and fights get brutal. Men lose limbs if not their lives to storms and Navy bombardments. Keeping order on a pirate ship involves lashings and brute force. The book doesn't shrink from those, but it also gets philosophical with Wedgwood's description of flavors, and almost comedic with the images of using cannonballs as pestles for grinding herbs. It's that contrast and variety that makes this book so much fun to read.
You can find all my reviews at http://goddessinthestacks.com
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The Hardware Hacker: Adventures in Making and Breaking Hardware
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"Hardware, says Bunnie Huang, is a world without secrets: if you go deep enough, even the most...
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Nudging Health: Health Law and Behavioral Economics
I. Glenn Cohen, Christopher T. Robertson and Cass R. Sunstein
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Behavioral nudges are everywhere: calorie counts on menus, automated text reminders to encourage...