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Outraged over the mounting Social Security debt, Cassandra Devine, a charismatic 29-year-old blogger and member of Generation Whatever, incites massive cultural warfare when she politely suggests that Baby Boomers be given government incentives to kill themselves by age 75. Her modest proposal catches fire with millions of citizens, chief among them "an ambitious senator seeking the presidency." With the help of Washington's greatest spin doctor, the blogger and the politician try to ride the issue of euthanasia for Boomers (called "transitioning") all the way to the White House,over the objections of the Religious Right, and of course, the Baby Boomers, who are deeply offended by demonstrations on the golf courses of their retirement resorts.
Herb Nutterman, a long-time Trump Organization employee, unexpectedly becomes President Trump's White House chief of staff and finds himself entangled in Russian intrigue and leading the president's reelection campaign.
“I had more or less resolved not to write a book about my parents. But I’m a writer, and when the universe hands you material like this, not writing about it amounts either to waste or a conscious act of evasion.” So begins award-winning satirist Christopher Buckley in the most personal and transcendent work of his life, the tragicomic true story of the year in which both of his parents died. In twelve months between 2007 and 2008, Buckley coped with the passing of his father, William F. Buckley, the father of the modern conservative movement, and his mother, Patricia Taylor Buckley, one of New York’s most glamorous and colorful socialites. He was their only child and their relations...
In 1994, Christopher Buckley published one of the most acclaimed and successful comic novels of the decade, Thank You for Smoking. Now Buckley returns to the strange land of Washington, D.C., in Little Green Men, a millennial comedy of manners about aliens and pundits . . . and how much they have in common. The reluctant hero of this hilarious novel is John Oliver Banion, a stuffy Washington talk-show host, whose privileged life is thrown into upheaval when aliens abduct him from his exclusive country-club golf course. But were his gray-skinned captors aliens . . . or something far more sinister? After Banion is abducted again--this time in Palm Springs--he believes he has been chosen by the...
The latest comic novel from Christopher Buckley, in which a hapless Englishman embarks on a dangerous mission to the New World in pursuit of two judges who helped murder a king. London, 1664. Twenty years after the English revolution, the monarchy has been restored and Charles II sits on the throne. The men who conspired to kill his father are either dead or disappeared. Baltasar “Balty” St. Michel is twenty-four and has no skills and no employment. He gets by on handouts from his brother-in-law Samuel Pepys, an officer in the king’s navy. Fed up with his needy relative, Pepys offers Balty a job in the New World. He is to track down two missing judges who were responsible for the execu...
Christopher Buckley at his best: an extraordinary, wide-ranging selection of essays both hilarious and poignant, irreverent and delightful. In his first book of essays since his 1997 bestseller, Wry Martinis, Buckley delivers a rare combination of big ideas and truly fun writing. Tackling subjects ranging from "How to Teach Your Four-Year-Old to Ski" to "A Short History of the Bug Zapper," and "The Art of Sacking" to literary friendships with Joseph Heller and Christopher Hitchens, he is at once a humorous storyteller, astute cultural critic, adventurous traveler, and irreverent historian.
In an attempt to gain Congressional approval for a top secret weapons system, Washington lobbyist "Bird" McIntyre and sexy Neo-Con wonkette Angel Templeton start a rumour that the Chinese secret service is trying to assassinate the Dalai Lama. Their outrageous scheme provokes a series of crises involving the White House, the CIA, and a strangely sympathetic and vulnerable Chinese president, with both countries veering perilously towards war. Buckley has drawn his most convincing and outrageous characters to date: Bird, failed novelist of amusingly awful Clancy-esque thrillers; Angel, combination Anne Coulter and Ayn Rand; Bird's demanding, equestrian wife, Myndi; Bewks, his feckless but ende...
Tibetans value their painted furniture highly, but their reverence of antiquities for their own sake is not particularly strong. The result is that antique Tibetan furniture is more highly valued outside Tibet than it is within, and it is becoming increasing popular among Western collectors. Tibetan Furniture is an authoritative and comprehensive resource. This book explains the forms and uses of Tibetan furniture, the construction and decoration of the main types, and the history of many designs. Examples illustrate the range of types of furniture in Tibet and the range of decoration, both painted and carved. Also presented are examples with descriptions that expand on themes. In most cases aesthetic considerations have been the primary criterion for inclusion, but the book is more than a catalogue of attractive pieces. Attentive readers will learn to: identify the main types of Tibetan furniture; appreciate their origin and their uses; identify and understand the most common designs; judge the quality of pieces; and derive increased pleasure from Tibetan furniture they have bought.
The first comprehensive treatment of active inference, an integrative perspective on brain, cognition, and behavior used across multiple disciplines. Active inference is a way of understanding sentient behavior—a theory that characterizes perception, planning, and action in terms of probabilistic inference. Developed by theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston over years of groundbreaking research, active inference provides an integrated perspective on brain, cognition, and behavior that is increasingly used across multiple disciplines including neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. Active inference puts the action into perception. This book offers the first comprehensive treatment of a...
It's two decades since Chris Stewart moved to his farm on the wrong side of a river in the mountains of southern Spain and his daughter Chlöe is preparing to fly the nest for university. In this latest, typically hilarious dispatch from El Valero we find Chris, now a local literary celebrity, using his fame to help his old sheep-shearing partner find work on a raucous road trip; cooking a TV lunch for visiting British chef, Rick Stein; discovering the pitfalls of Spanish public speaking; and recalling his own first foray into the adult world of work. Yet it's at El Valero, his beloved sheep farm, that Chris remains in his element as he, his wife Ana and their assorted dogs, cats and sheep weather a near calamitous flood and emerge as newly certified organic farmers. His cash crop? The lemons and oranges he once so blithely drove over, of course.