Livre

The world's greatest bodybuilder. The world's highest-paid movie star. The leader of the world's sixth-largest economy. That these are the same person sounds like the setup to a joke, but this is no joke. This is Arnold Schwarzenegger. And this did not happen by accident. Success is the result of clear vision, hard work, curiosity, and a commitment to giving back. For Arnold, all of it is guided by the one lesson his father hammered into him above all : be useful. Distilling his hard-earned wisdom into seven essential rules for realising your true purpose, Be Useful is an indispensable guide to building the life you want, from a master of ceaseless reinvention.

Beyond the main street of Les Laveuses runs the Loire, smooth and brown as a sunning snake - but hiding a deadly undertow beneath its moving surface. This is where Framboise, a secretive widow named after a raspberry liqueur, plies her culinary trade at the crêperie - and lets her memory play strange games. Into this world comes the threat of revelation as Framboise's nephew - a profiteering Parisian - attempts to exploit the growing success of the country recipes she has inherited from her mother, a woman remembered with contempt by the villagers of Les Laveuses. As the spilt blood of a tragic wartime childhood flows again, exposure beckons for Framboise, the widow with an invented past.

For fourteen years, Steve and Meredith Whitman have sustained a marriage of passion and friendship, despite the demands of two all-consuming careers. Meredith is a top investment baker, Steve a gifted physician - the only thing missing in their life is children. Steve longs for them. But Meredith keeps putting off motherhood, and now she has been offered an extraordinary job opportunity in San Francisco, there thousand miles away. Steve urges her to accept, saying that he 's more than happy to uproot himself and will join her as soon as he can fond a new job himself. Perhaps in California, he hopes, they can begin a family at last. Neither Steve or Meredith had reckoned on a prolonged separation, but Steve's job keeps him on New York for months longer than planned. Weekends together fall prey to their hectic schedules. Alone in San Francisco, Meredith is spending long hours at the office with her boss, charismatic entrepreneur Callan Dow. Steve is working late shifts at the hospital, grabbing an occasional dinner with a new female colleague. Almost unnoticed, Steve and Meredith have begun living separate lives, and irresistible forces to tear their lives and hearts apart. With unerring insight, Danielle Steel explores what happens when lives fit together like delicately balanced puzzles are shifted, changer and drift apart. Who survives, and if love survives, is at the core of Irresistible Forces.

Set among the apple orchards of rural Maine, it is a peverse world in which Homer Wells' odyssey begins. As the oldest unadopted offspring at St Cloud's orphanage, he learns about the skills which, one way or another, help young and not-so-young women, from Wilbur Larch, the orphanage's founder -- a man of rare compassion and an addiction to ether.