Tom Parker

A mix of folk wisdom, common sense, shared experience, the advice of experts, and the kind of group think that's made websites like Wikipedia so vital, Rules of Thumb is the impulsive compendium of 1,000 general principles that apply to every facet of life. Collected by Tom Parker for over 25 years, these are rules that are practical, quirky, and as entertaining to read as they are relevant to the reader. There's a rule of thumb for just about every...

The one thing you can depend on in Cold Sassy, Georgia, is that word gets around—fast. When Grandpa E. Rucker Blakeslee announces one July morning in 1906 that he's aiming to marry the young and freckledy milliner, Miss Love Simpson—a bare three weeks after Granny Blakeslee has gone to her reward—the news is served up all over town with that afternoon's dinner. And young Will Tweedy suddenly finds himself eyewitness to a major

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The Flintstones: A live-action version of the popular cartoon in which Fred falls for his boss' evil scheme, which ruins his friendship with Barney and makes Fred a hated citizen of Bedrock. Jetsons: The movie: The movie sends the family to a new planet where madness and mayhem ensue in comical Jetson fashion. This animated classic features unforgettable voice talent from the original George and Jane Jetson. Scooby-Doo! Return to Zombie Island:...

This updated edition of a NEW YORK TIMES best seller includes a final chapter, which chronicles the last years of his life and examines his enduring legacy. Included are quotes and tributes from many of golf's greats such as Byron Nelson and a perceptive assessment of the life and legend of the man who may have been the greatest golfer ever-Ben Hogan.

Can life get any worse for Dane the Defiant?

The same villagers who once praised him for his courage in defeating Thidrek the Terrifying now blame him for everything that has gone wrong since then: The torrential downpours. The dwindling food supplies. Even the rampant outbreaks of armpit lice. Dane's deceased father would never have let things get so bad, the village elders say.

But then Dane is summoned to the fortress of King Eldred,

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The life of baseball's grandest figure, told in extraordinary detail Nearly a century has passed since George Herman Ruth made his major league debut, and in that time millions of words have been used to describe baseball's greatest hero. But for a man like the Babe, for whom the phrase "larger than life" seems to have been coined, those millions of words have created a mythologized legacy. Who was the real Babe Ruth?   Relying on exhaustive research...

The 1960 U.S. Open Golf Championship played at Cherry Hills Country Club in Denver, Colorado, remains perhaps the most dramatic, competitive, and passionate of all Open championships. In 1960 the young lions of the game were eager to reach the top tier occupied by venerable players such as Ben Hogan and Sam Snead. In this Open only a single stroke separated the three leaders-Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer, and a young but talented amateur named Jack Nicklaus-on...

Sleeping Beauty plunges detective Lew Archer into a fascinating and intricate case connected to a disastrous oil spill on the Southern California coast. Ross Macdonald's masterful tale leads his investigator into a load of trouble involving ransom, a lethal dose of Nembutal, the death of a stranger found floating off shore, and three generations of the imposing Lennox family, whose offshore oil platform caused the spill. The young Lennox heiress—glimpsed...

The seven stories in Jordan County move backward in time, from 1950 to 1797, and through the lives of diverse characters. With a deep knowledge of the ways in which history shapes human lives, and sometimes warps them beyond repair, Foote gives us a work of fiction that is resolutely unique.

Ernest Hemingway's literary ambitions took root in France in the 1920s among some of the most extravagantly creative artists of the twentieth century. Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Cole Porter, Sergey Diaghilev, and others were drawn to the left bank of the Seine in Paris after World War I. Hemingway joined them and, with the publication of his book, The Sun Also Rises, which...