Robert M. Brantner

How wonderful it is for those who love Christmas to listen to stories that inspire the happiest of seasons. And no story is as compelling as Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, penned in 1843. But what triggered Dickens' imagination to write a story so unlike anything he had written before? In Eben Kruge, author Richard Barlow Adams delivers a pause-resisting narrative that weaves fact and fiction for a penetrating look inside the life and psyche of Dickens when he and wife Catherine traveled to America in 1842 at the invitation of Washington Irving.

Dirk Struan rose from humble beginnings to build Struan & Company, also known as the Noble House, into the world’s largest Far East trading company. He is now the Tai-Pan—Supreme Leader—of all Tai-Pans in China. Along the way, however, he made a powerful enemy. Tyler Brock, Struan’s rival from their early opium-smuggling days, also heads a large trading fleet, second in size only to Struan’s. But it is not only silks and spices that drive their mutual companies’ wealth—the opium trade is still booming.

One by one, things that Norm and his Japanese American family took for granted are taken away. In a matter of months, they, along with everyone else of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast, are forced by the government to move to internment camps, leaving everything they have known behind.

We were fighting on the wrong side of a war we couldn't win. And that was the good news. The Ruhar hit us on Columbus Day. There we were, innocently drifting along the cosmos on our little blue marble, like the native Americans in 1492. Over the horizon come ships of a technologically advanced, aggressive culture, and BAM! There go the good old days, when humans only got killed by each other. So, Columbus Day. It fits. When the morning sky twinkled again, this time with Kristang starships jumping in to hammer the Ruhar, we thought we were saved.

Richard Blade’s autobiography is much more than a spotlight on any one decade. Instead, he gives you a jaw-dropping, uncensored insider’s look into the world of music, movies, and television and its biggest stars, starting in the '60s and continuing through to the new century. Richard takes you on a journey that few have experienced, from his early days as a student at Oxford to the wild, lascivious nights of being a disco DJ touring the clubs of Europe to coming to America and breaking through into the LA radio scene.