A young man named Dorian Gray has a portrait painted of himself. The artist and another friend convince Dorian that the only important thing in life is beauty, which causes Dorian great distress as he realises that he must age and therefore lose his beauty. To prevent such a catastrophe he sells his soul in exchange for the ability to remain young and attractive forever. But something sinister is lurking in the portrait which he had painted of himself
"Which of us lives on twenty-four hours a day? And when I say "lives," I do not mean exists, nor "muddles through." Which of us is free from that uneasy feeling that the "great spending departments" of his daily life are not managed as they ought to be? [...] Which of us is not saying to himself -- which of us has not been saying to himself all his life: "I shall alter that when I have a little more time"? We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is."
Colin Powell is the embodiment of the American dream. He was born in Harlem to immigrant parents from Jamaica. He knew the rough life of the streets. He overcame a barely average start at school. Then he joined the Army. The rest is history--Vietnam, the Pentagon, Panama, Desert Storm--but a history that until now has been known only on the surface. Here, for the first time, Colin Powell himself tells us how it happened, in a memoir distinguished by a heartfelt love of country and family, warm good humor, and a soldier's directness.
The Mind's Eye (Audiobook) By Oliver Sacks, Richard Davidson
Sacks, a neurologist and practicing physician at Columbia University Medical Center, and author of ten popular books on the quirks of the human mind (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) focuses here on creative people who have learned to compensate for potentially devastating disabilities. From the concert pianist who progressively lost the ability to recognize objects (including musical scores) yet managed to keep performing from memory, to the writer whose stroke disturbed his ability to read but not his ability to write (he used his experience to write a novel about a detective suffering from amnesia)...
The story of one of the worlds richest and most powerful men, Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, who is on the verge of death and whose only hope is in finding a new body in which to live, and upon surviving the radical surgical procedures involved, finds himself faced with enormous ethical and philosophical dilemas.
