Böcker av 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.

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.

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.