Even Higher

Young Reuven has a problem. Every year, on the day before Rosh Hashanah, the beloved rabbi of the village of Nemirov disappears until nightfall and no one knows where he goes. The villagers suspect that he ascends to heaven to beg forgiveness for their sins, but Reuven’s friends want the truth. They appoint him to solve the mystery — after all, he is the smallest and fastest of the group — but how? That evening, when Reuven watches the rabbi through the synagogue window, he gets an idea. Determined to follow him at daybreak, Reuven is baffled as the rabbi, disguised as a simple woodcutter, passes the synagogue, the cheder, and Beryl the Baker’s house — his usual stops — only to enter the great forest. Where could the rabbi of Nemirov possibly be going? Adapted from a beloved story by I.L. Peretz, Richard Ungar once again captures the joyous spirit of the Jewish folktale with lighthearted humor and a rich palette of colors as vibrant as the story he tells.

In the village of Nemirov, young Reuven investigates the annual disappearance of his beloved rabbi who is rumored to ascend to heaven on the day before Rosh Hashanah to beg forgiveness for the people of Nemirov.

Aiming to inform and entertain a broad readership, the tale follows Garland, a young American journalist, as she acts as PA to a notorious heiress Lucy Houston. On the steam yacht Liberty, Garland’s romances intrigue her employer who agrees to sponsor a team of prestigious aviators and five aircraft. They will fly to India and stay with a Maharaja during their three visits the world’s highest mountains. Chock-full of colorful aristocrats, pilots, engineers and supernumeraries from the British and Indian elite, the expedition is set up in Mayfair. After tests in the West Country the crews fly to Purnea. Despite many bizarre setbacks, the pilots take their open-cockpit biplanes into dangerous freezing gales over the Himalayas. Everest is conquered by air and an Oscar is awarded to the film for its sheer audacity. Lucy Houston DBE was the extraordinary woman, a talented dancer and charmer of men, who had the vision and the means to dispatch her own expedition to fly even higher than Everest. Drawn to stories of an epic nature, the author was inspired by a chance meeting with Sherpa Tenzing and Lord Hunt, 1953 expedition leader. From them he learned how the aerial photos taken by Lady Houston’s pilots had been studied carefully in their assault planning. This work is his personal outcome of that long distant meeting. In researching this story, the author offers gratitude and acknowledgment to the many sources including family members, mountaineers, engineers and pilots who all provided valuable input about the true events of the flight. The Flight Expedition was successful because highly experienced men and women were involved. All had survived the horrendous years of the Great War and were by nature, confident, bold and determined in their various roles for the expedition. With such colourful characters involved, it seemed logical to relate events from different points of view, taking the reader along the many paths that any expedition must follow towards achieving its ultimate goal. Revised for the the 90th Anniversary of the first flight.

Vols. 24, no. 3-v. 34, no. 3 include: International industrial digest.

Performance is critical to the success of any web site, and yet today's web applications push browsers to their limits with increasing amounts of rich content and heavy use of Ajax. In this book, Steve Souders, web performance evangelist at Google and former Chief Performance Yahoo!, provides valuable techniques to help you optimize your site's performance. Souders' previous book, the bestselling High Performance Web Sites, shocked the web development world by revealing that 80% of the time it takes for a web page to load is on the client side. In Even Faster Web Sites, Souders and eight expert contributors provide best practices and pragmatic advice for improving your site's performance in three critical categories: JavaScript—Get advice for understanding Ajax performance, writing efficient JavaScript, creating responsive applications, loading scripts without blocking other components, and more. Network—Learn to share resources across multiple domains, reduce image size without loss of quality, and use chunked encoding to render pages faster. Browser—Discover alternatives to iframes, how to simplify CSS selectors, and other techniques. Speed is essential for today's rich media web sites and Web 2.0 applications. With this book, you'll learn how to shave precious seconds off your sites' load times and make them respond even faster. This book contains six guest chapters contributed by Dion Almaer, Doug Crockford, Ben Galbraith, Tony Gentilcore, Dylan Schiemann, Stoyan Stefanov, Nicole Sullivan, and Nicholas C. Zakas.

THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER IS NOW A MAJOR-MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY RON HOWARD AND STARRING AMY ADAMS, GLENN CLOSE, AND GABRIEL BASSO "You will not read a more important book about America this year."—The Economist "A riveting book."—The Wall Street Journal "Essential reading."—David Brooks, New York Times Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.