The Importance of Living

The Importance of Living is a wry, witty antidote to the dizzying pace of the modern world. Lin Yutang's prescription is the classic Chinese philosophy of life: Revere inaction as much as action, invoke humor to maintain a healthy attitude, and never forget that there will always be plenty of fools around who are willing-indeed, eager-to be busy, to make themselves useful, and to exercise power while you bask in the simple joy of existence.At a time when we're overwhelmed with wake-up calls, here is a refreshing, playful reminder to savor life's simple pleasures.

Wine and Conversation

The vocabulary of wine is large and exceptionally vibrant -- from straight-forward descriptive words like "sweet" and "fragrant", colorful metaphors like "ostentatious" and "brash", to the more technical lexicon of biochemistry. The world of wine vocabulary is growing alongside the current popularity of wine itself, particularly as new words are employed by professional wine writers, who not only want to write interesting prose, but avoid repetition and cliche. The question is, what do these words mean? Can they actually reflect the objective characteristics of wine, and can two drinkers really use and understand these words in the same way?

Wolf to the Slaughter

Anita Margolis had vanished. There was no body, no crime - nothing more concrete than an anonymous letter and the intriguing name of Smith. According to headquarters, it wasn't to be considered a murder enquiry at all. Chief Inspector Wexford, however, had other ideas.

The Best Man to Die

A Detective Chief Inspector Wexford novel. The fatal car accident involving the stockbroker Fanshawe couldn't possibly be connected with the murder of a cocky little lorry driver. But was it a coincidence that the latter died the day after Mrs Fanshawe regained consciousness?

Why Men Die First - How to Lengthen Your Lifespan

Legato, a physician and one of the founders of gender specific medicine, provides a broad-brush look at the relative fragility of men who "at every point of their lives die an average of seven years earlier than women." Much of the book will be familiar to anyone who read John Gray's Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (or, indeed, Legato's own Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget), emphasizing the debatable notions that men and boys are aggressive where most women are team players, and that women value "the ambiance of the workplace and their relationship with other workers" over attaining power within a corporate structure.