Bøger af Christopher Beck

At 44, New York divorcee, Mel, is not ready to give up on God or the possibility of motherhood. Between running an actors' agency in Hammersmith and rehearsing her role in a rock musical, she agrees to take care of her stepdaughter, Jess's challenging four-year-old son, Billy, two afternoons a week. Writing: Playing Billy's Mom on a strip of paper to place in her Gratitude jar, she prays that her good deed will have a pay off: her own fertility.Meanwhile, prepped with hormone tablets and injection at the ready, she awaits the return of charismatic Royce, who has been filming in Hollywood. But all is not well with Royce. A strange incident on Venice Beach after dark has shifted his world. Can he really be cursed? Desperate, Mel reaches out to her friend, Anto. He's gay but wants to be a parent. Thwarted again, will surrogacy be the answer? Will Mel be locked into taking on more responsibility for Billy as Jess spirals into depression following the loss of her father? Or can Mel make a life with the new man in her life, refugee Hassan, suffering from PTSD and raising his disabled eight-year-old son alone?Or will life take an unexpected turn? As Mel's faith moves towards Buddhism under Anto's influence and a friend steps in to help with a problem deeper than infertility that is gripping her life, will she be able to answer the call when an unlooked for opportunity presents itself?A deeply empathic, humane debut, Gratitude asks how we live now and how we make meaning in lives that rarely work to plan.

Is there no cure for the summertime blues? Maverick medic, Nick Welford, mixes a prescription of ancient wisdom, music and ritual to treat a serious case - with some unexpected results. His reward is an introduction to an ad-libbing game - and the consolation of philosophy. Meanwhile his own summer is going from bad to worse. All this while he wrestles with his nightmare prognosis - doctor-driven plagues and pandemics. These burdens ought to make for a sombre character but humour is often just around the corner - like the theatre, jazz and losing money on the horses.

Elves with blasters!It's all true! Faeries, Elves and Angels; the gods and monsters of myth and legend are real, and living among us. There has been a war going on for a very long time between the Elder races of the Vansadagaadian Corridor and predatory forces of the Annunaki god Enlil and the Pandemonium. Humanity is caught in the middle.Walter Ryan is an agent of the Melkizedek Order who has been given orders to track down an enemy named Graud. The mission leads him into the world of the Vansadagaadians and the Faerie tribes that protect humanity from the Pandemonium. From the Western Front of World War I to Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat, then to 100 years later and a new global war against the ancient enemy, Walter and his family must fight both in the present and in the ancient past to defeat Graud and prevent the enslavement of the world.

One hundred years ago, invention, adventure, honor and duty were the soul of the aviator. Mankind looked at them with wonder, suspicion, fear, and faith. From this intersection in time, a new modern folklore emerged.The Astonished Earth is a revealing, breathtaking journey into the untold story of the legends of early aviation. Fokker, Garros, Strange, Immelmann, Boelcke, Hawker, and Richthofen. Icons all. Legends rise.

Do you need more from a PL/SQL book than just the correct keywords and some pretty syntax diagrams? Have you been searching in vain for real-world examples and genuine strategies for maximizing the benefits of PL/SQL within your organization? You'll find them here in Mastering Oracle PL/SQL: Practical Solutions, the inaugural title of the pioneering OakTable Press series from Apress.This isn't a tutorial on how to code PL/SQL. It's designed to show you how to code PL/SQL well. It shows you how to write code that will run quickly and wont break in high-load, multiuser environments. It covers the vast array of the functionality that PL/SQL provides, including effective handling of relational and abstract data, security, triggers, dynamic web content presentation from within the database, creation of a DBA toolkit, and effective debugging techniques.This book sets out to redress the unjust criticism leveled at PL/SQL in years gone by. It gives you the tools and techniques to ensure that, whatever your needs are, the PL/SQL you build will run as efficiently as possible. The practical solutions provided in this book will help you to realize the true power and functionality PL/SQL can offer your projects.If you're brand-new to PL/SQL, then you'll want to take some time to get familiar with the language before tackling this book. It's not for the total beginner. But once youre up and running, you'll find this book an invaluable guide for ensuring that the PL/SQL solutions you build are robust, perform well, and are easy to maintain.

Why Read This Book? When you opened the cover of this book, you had a notion of what you would find. With a title like Beginning Oracle Programming, it's fairly obvious what this book is all about. Simply put, the purpose of this book is to teach you how to manage data using an Oracle database. The goal of Beginning Oracle Programming is to introduce you to those concepts that are important to understand as a beginning-level Oracle user. You are setting out on the same journey we traveled some years ago. We know the things you are going to run into time and time again. We understand the challenges you are going to meet when you have to develop an application or administer your database. We can guarantee you that the techniques you'll learn in this book are proven and have led us through many successful implementations. So instead of talking about the things we want to teach you in an abstract kind of way, let's talk specifics.