A personal selection and authoritative guide to the most beautiful bulbs on the earth.

The publication of Anna Pavord's guide to her favorite bulbs, corms, and tubers is an event to be celebrated. Here, the world famous author of The Tulip, selects 540 favorite bulbs, more bulbs than and gardener could grow in a lifetime.

Easy-to-grow, generally inexpensive and highly accessible, bulbs are readily available from many outlets. From acis, anemones and arums to zantedeschia, zephyranthes, and zigadenus, this alphabetical collection provides inspiration, insight, anecdote, and helpful advice. Special photography reveals the glory of each bulb, explaining flowering size, height, planting depth and requires soil and climatic conditions.

This gorgeous book, a complete deluxe package, will appeal to gardeners as the world's most authoritative and affordable reference work on bulbs.

Anna Pavord writes for several magazines in the UK and she has authored eight books, including the internationally acclaimed bestseller, The Tulip.

Identify, mitigate, and respond to network attacks
* Understand the evolution of security technologies that make up the unified ASA device and how to install the ASA hardware
* Examine firewall solutions including network access control, IP routing, AAA, application inspection, virtual firewalls, transparent (Layer 2) firewalls, failover and redundancy, and QoS
* Evaluate Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) solutions including IPS integration and Adaptive Inspection and Prevention Security Services Module (AIP-SSM) configuration
* Deploy VPN solutions including site-to-site IPsec VPNs, remote- access VPNs, and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)
* Learn to manage firewall, IPS, and VPN solutions with Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM)

Achieving maximum network security is a challenge for most organizations. Cisco® ASA, a new unified security device that combines firewall, network antivirus, intrusion prevention, and virtual private network (VPN) capabilities, provides proactive threat defense that stops attacks before they spread through the network.

This new family of adaptive security appliances also controls network activity and application traffic and delivers flexible VPN connectivity. The result is a powerful multifunction network security device that provides the security breadth and depth for protecting your entire network, while reducing the high deployment and operations costs and complexities associated with managing multiple point products.

Cisco ASA: All-in-One Firewall, IPS, and VPN Adaptive Security Appliance is a practitioner’s guide to planning, deploying, and troubleshooting a comprehensive security plan with Cisco ASA. The book provides valuable insight and deployment examples and demonstrates how adaptive identification and mitigation services on Cisco ASA provide a sophisticated security solution for both large and small network environments.

The book contains many useful sample configurations, proven design scenarios, and discussions of debugs that help you understand how to get the most out of Cisco ASA in your own network.

“I have found this book really highlights the practical aspects needed for building real-world security. It offers the insider’s guidance needed to plan, implement, configure, and troubleshoot the Cisco ASA in customer environments and demonstrates the potential and power of Self-Defending Networks.”

This security book is part of the Cisco Press® Networking Technology Series. Security titles from Cisco Press help networking professionals secure critical data and resources, prevent and mitigate network attacks, and build end-to-end self-defending networks.

Jazib Frahim, CCIE® No. 5459, is a senior network security engineer in the Worldwide Security Services Practice of Advanced Services for Network Security at Cisco. He is responsible for guiding customers in the design and implementation of their networks with a focus in network security.

Omar Santos is a senior network security engineer in the Worldwide Security Services Practice of Advanced Services for Network Security at Cisco. He has more than 12 years of experience in secure data communications.

Your guide to project management success in the public sector

There may be no simple formula for success in public-sector projects, but Public-Sector Project Management delivers the next best thing: a complete set of skill-building strategies that puts success well within your reach.

Building on industry standards and best practices as well as almost thirty years of public-sector experience, this definitive sourcebook clearly explains how to manage projects in the public sector and navigate their many challenges. Here is where you'll find all the tools to accomplish your goals for any public-sector project, whether you are overseeing military and security operations, the construction of public infrastructure, improving agency processes, deploying new systems or public programs, or any other public initiative.

The book describes both the obstacles and basic processes of public-sector project management and examines the differences between public-sector and private-sector projects, including the management of the wide array of public-sector stakeholders. Public-Sector Project Management is your comprehensive professional template for making a positive contribution to your agency or organization. Inside, you'll find:

* In-depth coverage of public-sector constraints, including purchasing systems, legal mandates, political and media oversight, and complex rules and processes

* Specific strategies to enhance the management capability of public-sector managers and private-sector project managers working under government contracts

* Emphasis on the role of planning in managing customer, manager, and project team expectations, and coping with the overlapping systems of constraints that impede public-sector projects

* Insightful case studies of notable and historic public-sector projects; chapter-ending discussion questions and exercises; numerous tables and figures; and key terms in the glossary

David W. Wirick, PMP, CMA, is a Visiting Scholar, John Glenn School of Public Affairs, Ohio State University, and is Principal at Kreider-Wirick, LLC.

The first book of the seminal residential works of Frank Gehry, from his earliest architectural ideas to today.

One of the great architects of our time, Frank Gehry has revolutionized the use of materials in design and redefined how architects use computers as a design tool to advance form-making as we know it. He has achieved worldwide fame for such large-scale public projects as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, California, but it was in private houses that Gehry first explored and interrogated the principles of modern architecture. In these houses—most notably his own, in Santa Monica, California—Gehry distorted, expanded, and collapsed the modernist box, exploring everyday materials (corrugated metal, unfinished plywood, and chain link), experimenting with color, and challenging accepted notions about geometry and structure. In houses such as the Schnabel House in Brentwood, California, and the Winton Guest House in Wayzata, Minnesota, he experimented with collage and assemblage. More recently, Gehry’s work has taken on sculptural forms, aided by new structural and geometric potentials of digital design, as in the near-legendary Lewis House in Lyndhurst, Ohio. Color photographs, sketches, and plans create an illuminating visual record of some of the most groundbreaking, seminal projects of Gehry’s oeuvre.

Alexander M. Orlov carefully picked his moment to defect. With a letter from the Canadian Consul General, he disappeared with his family in Paris on the afternoon of July 13, 1938. They sailed to Canada and established himself in Montréal.

Soviet Intelligence jealously guards its secrets despite the flood of details published after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The historical facts that Moscow has revealed are not simply incomplete but are selected and structured to impress and to hide activities, past as well as ongoing, that remain classified. The true history of the Orlov defection offers a unique path to understand Soviet secret intelligence, its development, and its objectives from Lenin and Stalin to the present Russia of Putin and Medvedev.

Orlov defected in a specific context. On November 25, 1938, Lavrenti Beria was appointed as the new People’s Commissar of the Interior. His first task was to purge the NKVD of both Yehzov appointees and the remnants of Yagoda’s men. From September 1938 to February 1939, ninety-seven top NKVD functionaries were arrested, as many as in the whole two years of Yehzov’s rule. Most were shot in 1939, well before Yehzov, but some were interrogated for two years to collect material for future arrests.

In examining the true history of the Orlov defection, the author, Boris Volodarsky, himself a former GRU officer, takes the reader on a journey deep into the secrets of the KGB and piles one startling revelation over another, all the way to the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.

Boris Volodarsky is a former officer of the GRU (Soviet and Russian)--military espionage. He is now living in England.

Amazon Best of the Month, May 2009: Committed to a quiet life in little Enniscorthy, Ireland, the industrious young Eilis Lacey reluctantly finds herself swept up in an unplanned adventure to America, engineered by the family priest and her glamorous, "ready for life" sister, Rose. Eilis's determination to embrace the spirit of the journey despite her trepidation--especially on behalf of Rose, who has sacrificed her own chance of leaving--makes a bittersweet center for Brooklyn. Colm Tóibín's spare portrayal of this contemplative girl is achingly lovely, and every sentence rings with truth. Readers will find themselves swept across the Atlantic with Eilis to a boarding house in Brooklyn where she painstakingly adapts to a new life, reinventing herself and her surroundings in the letters she writes home. Just as she begins to settle in with the help of a new love, tragedy calls her home to Enniscorthy, and her separate lives suddenly and painfully merge into one. Tóibín's haunted heroine glows on the page, unforgettably and lovingly rendered, and her story reflects the lives of so many others exiled from home. --Daphne Durham

SignatureReviewed by Maureen HowardColm Tóibín's engaging new novel, Brooklyn, will not bring to mind the fashionable borough of recent years nor Bed-Stuy beleaguered with the troubles of a Saturday night. Tóibín has revived the Brooklyn of an Irish-Catholic parish in the '50s, a setting appropriate to the narrow life of Eilis Lacey. Before Eilis ships out for a decent job in America, her village life is sketched in detail. The shops, pub, the hoity-toity and plainspoken people of Enniscorthy have such appeal on the page, it does seem a shame to leave. But how will we share the girl's longing for home, if home is not a gabby presence in her émigré tale? Tóibín's maneuvers draw us to the bright girl with a gift for numbers. With a keen eye, Eilis surveys her lonely, steady-on life: her job in the dry goods store, the rules and regulations of her rooming house—ladies only. The competitive hustle at the parish dances are so like the ones back home—it's something of a wonder I did not give up on the gentle tattle of her story, run a Netflix of the feline power struggle in Claire Booth Luce's The Women. Tóibín rescues his homesick shopgirl from narrow concerns, gives her a stop-by at Brooklyn College, a night course in commercial law. Her instructor is Joshua Rosenblum. Buying his book, the shopkeeper informs her, At least we did that, we got Rosenblum out.You mean in the war?His reply when she asks again: In the holocaust, in the churben.The scene is eerie, falsely naïve. We may accept what a village girl from Ireland, which remained neutral during the war, may not have known, but Tóibín's delivery of the racial and ethnic discoveries of a clueless young woman are disconcerting. Eilis wonders if she should write home about the Jews, the Poles, the Italians she encounters, but shouldn't the novelist in pursuing those postwar years in Brooklyn, in the Irish enclave of the generous Father Flood, take the mike? The Irish vets I knew when I came to New York in the early '50s had been to that war; at least two I raised a glass with at the White Horse were from Brooklyn. When the stage is set for the love story, slowly and carefully as befits his serious girl, Tóibín is splendidly in control of Eilis's and Tony's courtship. He's Italian, you see, of a poor, caring family. I wanted to cast Brooklyn, with Rosalind Russell perfect for Rose, the sporty elder sister left to her career in Ireland. Can we get Philip Seymour Hoffman into that cassock again? J. Carol Naish, he played homeboy Italian, not the mob. I give away nothing in telling that the possibility of Eilis reclaiming an authentic and spirited life in Ireland turns Brooklyn into a stirring and satisfying moral tale. Tóibín, author of The Master, a fine-tuned novel on the lonely last years of Henry James, revisits, diminuendo, the wrenching finale of The Portrait of a Lady. What the future holds for Eilis in America is nothing like Isabel Archer's return to the morally corrupt Osmond. The decent fellow awaits. Will she be doomed to a tract house of the soul on Long Island? I hear John McCormick take the high note—alone in the gloaming with the shadows of the past—as Tóibín's good girl contemplates the lost promise of Brooklyn.Maureen Howard's The Rags of Time, the last season of her quartet of novels based on the four seasons, will be published by Viking in October.

Conditioned hypereating is a biological challenge, not a character flaw, says Kessler, former FDA commissioner under presidents Bush and Clinton). Here Kessler (A Question of Intent) describes how, since the 1980s, the food industry, in collusion with the advertising industry, and lifestyle changes have short-circuited the body's self-regulating mechanisms, leaving many at the mercy of reward-driven eating. Through the evidence of research, personal stories (including candid accounts of his own struggles) and examinations of specific foods produced by giant food corporations and restaurant chains, Kessler explains how the desire to eat—as distinct from eating itself—is stimulated in the brain by an almost infinite variety of diabolical combinations of salt, fat and sugar. Although not everyone succumbs, more people of all ages are being set up for a lifetime of food obsession due to the ever-present availability of foods laden with salt, fat and sugar. A gentle though urgent plea for reform, Kessler's book provides a simple food rehab program to fight back against the industry's relentless quest for profits while an entire country of people gain weight and get sick. According to Kessler, persistence is all that is needed to make the perceptual shifts and find new sources of rewards to regain control. (May)

Kessler surveys the world of modern industrial food production and distribution as reflected in both restaurants and grocery stores. To his chagrin, he finds that the system foists on the American public foods overloaded with fats, sugars, and salt. Each of these elements, consumed in excess, has been linked to serious long-term health problems. Kessler examines iconic foods such as Cinnabon and Big Macs, all of which have skilled marketing machines promoting consumption. Such nutritionally unbalanced foods propel people who already tend to eat more than mere physical need might otherwise warrant into uncontrolled behavior patterns of irrational eating. These persistent psychological and sensory stimuli lead to what Kessler terms “conditioned hypereating,” which he believes is a disease rather than a failure of willpower. There is hope, however. Kessler identifies the cues that lead to overeating and offers some simple, practical tools to help control one’s impulses. --Mark Knoblauch --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.