Books with author Richard Hamm

I wrote this book for my niece years ago. She is very smart and needs scientific explanations for everything. I tried to make it complicated enough to keep her interested in it. Reviews tend to think it is confusing. I feel it teaches your child to question things and be aware of their environment and to be safer in a dangerous world. I reworked the text.

In precisely the same spirit as Abelard and Heloise and Romeo and Juliet, Paul and Juliana are a fresh young couple who embody the near-impossible notion of perfect love. In this elegant, timeless, and lyrical love story, they walk the fine line between forbidden romance and tragic disaster that is the stuff of ageless myths.Mr. Lawrence is a guidance counselor relegated to the mind-numbing task of proctoring standardized tests at his Chicago-area high school, then analyzing the results. Over-educated and over-cultured for his station, Lawrence is emotionally stifled, an island unto himself—until chance circumstance throws him into the lives of two high school students, Paul Berrisford and Juliana Franck.Paul is a sloppy genius who would rather sing and play his guitar on a street corner than take the SATs and have his pick of Ivy League schools. Juliana is a lovely musical prodigy kept under the thumb of her old-fashioned, Viennese-born parents. Through Lawrence’s furtive but well-intentioned design, Paul and Juliana meet one another, then fall in love, almost at first glance.Together, the two are a picture of courtly love brought to modern life. Lawrence’s guidance sessions with them begin to grow into a friendship between the three, and slowly, his own admiration and affection for the couple begins to develop into love. But is he in love with Paul, or with Juliana? Or is he in love with their love?The situation takes an ill-fated turn when Juliana’s parents catch her in a clandestine, prohibited moment with Paul. The couple’s respective parents, concerned about each child’s welfare, forbid them to see one other. Lawrence, like the friar in Romeo and Juliet, is caught in the middle, struggling between emotion and professionalism. At the climax, Paul and Juliana come to a fork in the road, one route that could kill their love—and another that could kill them.Author Richard Hawley revives the classical romance in order to ask age-old questions: Is true adolescent love possible? What is perfect love? And what is perfection? Paul and Juliana leaves the answers up to you, while promising to take you on a magical journey of both personal and epic proportions.

365 Reasons to Look on the Bright Side is full to the brim with good fortune arisen out of the flames of history’s biggest and smallest errors, blunders and miscalculations – one for every day of the year, on the day it happened. This brilliantly quirky book demonstrates that while the old adage of ‘Everyone makes mistakes’ may be true, some gaffes are so monumental that they can end up improving life for everyone else (if not for themselves!).365 Reasons to Look on the Bright Side has many magical moments of looking on the bright side of history’s most hopeless moments. Here a few to whet your whistle: Thanking Atilla the Hun for creating Venice, crediting Alexander Graham Bell’s mum’s deafness for inventing the telephone, praising Pope Clement VIII for blessing coffee, realizing that without the bubonic plague Newton may never had invented calculus and believing how one particularly big-boobed woman helped invent the stethoscope.

An absorbing tale of fame, changing fortunes, and music, set in an alternative Victorian world, from the striking creator of Worldshaker What if they'd invented rock 'n roll way back in the 19th century? What if it could take over the world and change the course of history? In the slums of Brummingham, the outcast gangs are making a new kind of music, with pounding rhythms and wild guitars. Astor Vance has been trained in refined classical music. But when her life plummets from riches to rags, the only way she can survive is to play the music the slum gangs want. Charismatic Verrol, once her servant, is now her partner in crime—and he could be so much more if only he'd come clean about his mysterious past.

The dreaded Norse pillage Avalon. The goddesses of the Tor reach out across time for a messenger to summon Arthur and his knights. They pull fifteen year-old Katherine (now Catriona), the 25th generation granddaughter of Rhiannon from the twenty first century.Arthur, a small king at the time, resists the summons He threatens Catriona with Excalibur. A small king with a gadfly

From the first ridiculous stunts on his tricycle to his increasing and near obsessive attraction to speed and the smell of gas, this is the high-octane life of TV personality Richard Hammond. A lively and intelligent communicator, TV soon beckoned for Hammond. He became one of the daredevil trio—along with Jeremy Clarkson and James May—who have made an enormous, world-wide success of the revamped BBC TV program Top Gear. Hammond describes the personalities, the camaraderie, and the stunts with which the trio entertains their weekly audiences, including the day of his 300 MPH crash that took his show off the air, put him into a coma, and plunged a nation into mourning. The stages of recovery as his shattered mind reformed are covered, as are the milestones in his slow recovery to full health and his return to Top Gear.