DAVID CRANE

Vals Blog"A tremendously useful field guide specifically written for developers down in the trenches...waiting for the killer solution..."Web users are getting tired of the traditional web experience. They get frustrated losing their scroll position; they get annoyed waiting for refresh; they struggle to reorient themselves on every new page. And the list goes on. With asynchronous JavaScript and XML, known as "Ajax," you can give them a better experience. Once users have experienced an Ajax interface, they hate to go back. Ajax is new way of thinking that can result in a flowing and intuitive interaction with the user.Ajax in Action helps you implement that thinking--it explains how to distribute the application between the client and the server (hint: use a "nested MVC" design) while retaining the integrity of the system. You will learn how to ensure your app is flexible and maintainable, and how good, structured design can help avoid problems like browser incompatibilities. Along the way it helps you unlearn many old coding habits. Above all, it opens your mind to the many advantages gained by placing much of the processing in the browser. If you are a web developer who has prior experience with web technologies, this book is for you. Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book.

At the dawn of civilization, a prehistoric hunter finds an unusual meteorite that offers him powers of life and death and makes him an immortal. Twelve thousand years later, his descendants, inheriting the gene of immortality, are living in secret among unsuspecting humans. Able to give and take life at will, they struggle for survival across the centuries.When a group of human fanatics and evil immortals each come with their own horrific plan for world domination, other humans and immortals must join forces to stop them regardless of the cost. At stake is the survival of both races as they prepare to face the greatest challenge of their lives.

It was supposed to be a simple mission--deliver six nuclear missiles back to the United States onboard the most advanced Stealth bomber in the world. The B-3 Boomerang is a super weapon that knows no equal. Nearly invisible to radar and lethal, its a paragon of present-day military technology. And Americas enemies want its secrets. What no one expected was an aerial phenomenon that catapults the plane and its crew from the present day to the year 1942 into the heart of Nazi Germany.With their plane disabled and captured by the Nazis, Major Richard Hartman and his copilot, Captain Deana Crown, are forced to fight for survival in a hostile land decades away from home. With the planes superior technology and its nuclear onboard arsenal, the Nazis could win the Second World War. The battle for the future will happen in both past and present. The pilots trapped in time now have a new mission: to save history at any price.

Tanya Gray made a promise to her father on the day the missiles were launched. She promised to survive the unthinkable. Finding refuge inside a high-tech fallout shelter, she, along with hundreds of survivors, tries to cope with unimaginable grief and suffering. Forced to live underground in a sanctuary run by a tyrannical general, Tanya endures death and hardship, but finds love and hope.Implicated in a plot against the sanctuarys military dictatorship, she and her boyfriend are exiled to die on the surface. Suffering from radiation sickness, they encounter a stranger who offers them a chance to live again--but it will come at a price.

HER ACTIONS ARE THE LAST HOPE FOR THE CONTINUED EXISTENCE OF NEW AMERICA. . . .Fifty years have passed since the nuclear war. New America has risen from the ashes and once again becomes the new superpower. But peace and prosperity have come at a great cost. And the new American nation is still divided in the bitter struggle to save it from past sins. New political and religious forces are once again on the move, determined to shape the countrys destiny.Surviving the Armageddon and the savage Second Civil War, Panther warrior-healer Tanya Gray serves as a presidential advisor. She now has a family of her own and is looking forward to a better tomorrow. But the balance of power is changed when a new ruthless and mysterious force from the past lays claim to New Americas remaining resources. And once again, Tanya Gray is forced to fight to extinguish the flames of a new Civil War.

Eugene Francois Vidocq was a thief, an adventurer, and a duelist who searched for his place in life with wit, sword, and passionate love affairs. Hunted by the police agents of revolutionary France and later the agents of Napoleon, he is forced to make the most important decision in his life to survive and become a man of respect. To achieve that, he must transform himself into a new man, an outlaw hunting the outlaws in the name of justice. The road to salvation is hard, but for a man like Vidocq, failure is not an option.

Naoko Kitamura is one of the best cops in the citys police force in Osaka, Japan. However, her human appearance hides a dark secret that must be hidden from humans. Naoko is a demon hybrid, a descendant of a demon and a samurai.Struggling to uphold her mothers legacy as defender of Japan against evil, she faces human and nonhuman enemies determined to alter her countrys destiny. Her powers are both a blessing and a curse, for, by being extraordinary, Naoko can never live an ordinary life.For her, the road to victory will be written in blood.

3,500 A.D.--LET THE GAME BEGIN . . .Professor Peter Blackwood, a former Space Marine turned scientist, looks forward to retirement on a paradise resort planet.A powerful alien intelligence in the form of a vast red energy cloud cuts Blackwoods plans short, snatching him from the hyperspace highway, and catapulting him light years away to a remote planet in an unexplored region of space.With his ship damaged and unable to escape, Blackwood encounters a distant human colony on planet Enigma, a world controlled by the red cloud and populated by mortals and powerful overlords--immortal human beings with godlike powers.When Blackwoods desire to escape is replaced by his intense scientific curiosity, he becomes a player in a dangerous socio-political game designed by the red cloud. Its a game Blackwood cannot afford to lose--for on his shoulders rests the destiny of millions of people.

A groundbreaking work of Romantic biography; David Cranes book is an astonishingly original examination of Byron, and a radical approach to biography. Crane focuses on the lifelong feud between Augusta Byrons half-sister with whom he had a passionate affair and Annabella, his society wife. Recreating a meeting between the two, years after Byrons death the Romantic High Noon he explores the emotional and sexual truth and the human vulnerability that lie at the heart of the Byron story. The Kindness of Sisters is not only rigorous in its scholarship, but also superbly compelling drama. Cranes book combines passion, revenge and recrimination in 19th-century Britain with all the intensity of a Greek tragedy. Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.

[Previously published as Went The Day Well] A sweeping political, social, military and cultural overview of the United Kingdom on the eve, and then the day, of the greatest battle fought by British arms. Midnight, Sunday, 17 June 1815. There was no town in England that had not sent its soldiers, hardly a household that was not holding its breath, not a family, as Byron put it, that would escape havocs tender mercies at Waterloo, and yet at the same time life inevitably went on as normal. As Wellingtons rain-sodden army retreated for the final, decisive battle, men and women in England were still going to the theatre and science lectures, still working in the fields and the factories, still reading and writing books and sermons, still painting their pictures and sitting in front of Lord Elgins marbles as if almost five thousand did not already lie dead. After ten hours of savage fighting, Waterloo would be littered with the bodies of something like 47,000 dead and wounded. Meanwhile, as the day unfolded, a whole nation, countryside and town, artisan and aristocrat, was brought together by war. From Samuel Johnson Prize shortlisted author David Crane, Went the Day Well is a breathtaking portrait of Britain in those moments. Moving from England to the battle and back again this vivid, stunning freeze-frame of a country on the single most celebrated day in its modern history shows Cranes full range in tracing the endless, overlapping connections between peoples lives. From private tragedies, disappointed political hopes, and public discontents to grandiloquent public celebrations and monuments, it answers Wellingtons call as he rallied his troops to Think what England is thinking of us now.

Escaping the wrath of powerful godlike overlords, Peter Blackwood finds a temporary place of safety on Freedom Island, the only place on planet Enigma where overlords cannot touch him.But the game designed by the alien red cloud is far from over. Once only a myth sustained for centuries, Blackwood is now a living symbol of rebellion against the tyrannical supermen.The islanders have their own war to fight against an imminent invasion by the overlord imperial forces. To end the war and win the game, Blackwood must discover and activate an ancient super weapon called The Heart of the Sun.But every victory has a price...

Through the lives of three outstanding naval officers each considered the most brilliant commander of his generation David Crane offers a unique portrait of the Royal Navy at a time when it held unchallenged dominion over the worlds oceans. Although all three died young, their careers covered virtually every war of significance in which the navy was involved during the nineteenth century. They fought against French and Americans, Russians, Turks, Egyptians, Indians and Chinese, in fleet engagements and naval bombardments, on the walls of Canton and the banks of the Mississippi, against Malay pirates and sepoy mutineers. As an eleven-year-old volunteer, Frank Hastings saw action at Trafalgar, and he went on to be revered as a hero of the Greek War of Independence. Yet, as the architect and captain of the first successful steam warship and the champion of gunnery and total war, he unwittingly prepared the way for much that would be bloodiest in the century ahead. Nobody who saw him in the trenches of the Crimea would ever forget William Peels air of inviolable self-mastery under fire, and it was the same in India, where he could ride through a landscape of decomposing corpses as if it were some mythological world conjured up to try his knightly resolve. What was it that enabled a man of his intelligence, temperament, piety and background to fight with such brilliance in defence of an Ottoman Empire that was repugnant to every tenet he held most strongly? If James Goodenough chased Glory as assiduously as Hastings and Peel had done, it was the Glory of the next world, and not this. Throughout his career he strove to reconcile the demands of his faith and his profession, but when he finally met his martyrdom at the hands of the savages of the Pacific islands, a shocked nation was left to face up to the inconsistencies, hypocrisies and self-deceptions on which floated its vision of divine election. Combining thrilling scenes of battle with acute psychological insight, Men of War provides a remarkable picture of the nature of courage, command and warfare. Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.

David Crane has given us the definitive biography of one of Britains greatest heroes and explorers. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write moreFor Gods sake look after our people. These were the final words written in Scotts diary on 29 March 1912, as he lay dying in his tent with Birdie Bowers and Edward Wilson. Oates had taken himself into a blizzard a few days before, and the fifth member of the Polar party, Edgar Evans, had died some ten days previously, worn out by the cold and physical effort of the journey across Antarctica. Since then Scott has been the subject of many books many hagiographical, others dismissive and scathing. Yet in all the pages that have been written about him, the personality behind the legend has been forgotten or distorted beyond all recognition. David Cranes magisterial biography, based on years of close and detailed research with the original documents, redresses this completely. By reassessing Scotts life and his substantial scientific achievements, Crane is able to provide a fresh and exciting perspective on both the Discovery expedition of 1901-4 and the Terra Nova expedition of 1910-12. The courage and tragedy of Scotts last journey are only one part of the process, for the scientific enquiry that led up to it transformed the whole nature and ambition of Antarctic exploration. Scotts own voice echoes through the pages. His descriptions of the monumental landscape of Antarctica in all its fatal and icy beauty are breathtaking; his honest, heartfelt letters and diaries give the reader an unforgettable account of the challenges he faced both in his personal life and as a superlative leader of men in possibly the harshest environment on the planet. Written with the full support of Scotts surviving relatives, this definitive biography sets out to reconcile the very private struggles of the man with the very public life of extremes that he led. Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.

Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction.The extraordinary and forgotten story of the building of the World War One cemeteries, due to the efforts of one remarkable man, Fabian Ware. Before WWI, little provision was made for the burial of the war dead. Soldiers were often unceremoniously dumped in a mass grave; officers shipped home for burial. The great cemeteries of WWI came about as a result of the efforts of one inspired visionary. In 1914, Fabian Ware joined the Red Cross, working on the frontline in France. Horrified by the hasty burials, he recorded the identity and position of the graves. His work was officially recognised, with a Graves Registration Commission being set up. As reports of their work became public, the Commission was flooded with letters from grieving relatives around the world. Critically acclaimed author David Crane gives a profoundly moving account of the creation of the great citadels to the dead, which involved leading figures of the day, including Rudyard Kipling. It is the story of cynical politicking, as governments sought to justify the sacrifice, as well as the grief of nations, following the war to end all wars.

There is a mad chap come here whose name is Trelawny He comes on the friend of Shelley, great, glowing, and rich in romance But tell me who is this odd fish? They talk of him here as a camelion who went mad on reading Lord Byrons Corsair. JOSEPH SEVERN David Cranes brilliant first book investigates the life and phenomenon of Edward John Trelawny writer, adventurer, romantic and friend to Shelley and Byron. Very reminiscent of YoungHusband in its mix of biography, history and travel writing it is a sparkling debut. Trelawny was, unquestionably, one of the great Victorians. He made a career from his friendship with Byron and Shelley and with his tales of glory from the Greek War of Independence. His story is one of betrayal and greed, of deluded idealism and physical courage played out against one of the most ferocious wars even the Balkans has seen. There has been no general biography of Trelawny for nearly twenty years, no history of the philhellene role in the Greek War of Independence for even longer.