Lawrence L. Allen

Where were you in the roaring 80s? Sam Khost was nearing the end of a five-year round-the-world pilgrimage to the university of life: immersed in the alcohol, lechery and camaraderie of the purgatory culture of misfits and runaways in Taipei's Combat Zone.Ensconced in this grungy, smoke-grimed bar-street backwater, among the littering of this bizarre collection of castaways, Sam finally achieves his own personal nirvana while giving the most astounding and authentic musical performance of his life. His body seemed to fade away and his raw emotions became one and the same with his instrument, manifesting in music all his sadness and joy, his pain and lust, fear and triumph, and rhapsodizing the attainment of his complete emancipation. It was now time to go home.But fate intervenes to force one last stop on his journey: Hamburger Heaven. Trapped in its Sisyphean tangles, will he ever escape the menagerie of Taipei's Hamburger Heaven?

"When the State declares that the people are "Enemies of the State" they are admitting that the State is the enemy of the people" 1 FAMILY, 2 GENERATIONS, 3 REVOLUTIONS AGAINST TYRANNY. From the deck of the USS Hornet in 1942, to the mountains of Afghanistan in 2001, to the streets of Washington D.C. in 2020 the Bradley family has fought against tyranny in all its forms. One family's dedication to preserving freedom for future generations is told through this epic novel.Who will lead America's second revolution against tyranny? Who among us will dare to rise up against the tyrants in D.C. who squabble for dominion over the rights, fortunes and lives of the America people?Curtiss Bradley is one of those revolutionaries.The only child of a Doolittle Raider, orphaned then weaned at the Milton Hershey School for Orphaned Boys, Curtiss comes of age on Wall Street's fast track during America's roaring 1980s. That is until a love obsession for an enchanting foreign student entices Curtiss on a global journey where he discovers himself and his father's love of country.He returns 30 years later to find the America he knew gone after the bill comes due for decades of debt-driven economics in the Great Depression of the Twenty Teens, when in desperation Americans embrace defunct communist-style statism, and in the process lose their most precious inheritance: their freedom.Will Curtiss live up to his father's war-hero legacy? Can he preserve the American dream for his son by launching the shot heard 'round the world in 2020 and rescue America from its post-constitutional dystopia?The Tree of Liberty is a 30-year sweeping epic that takes readers on a journey around the world and across the spectrum of the human spirit.

Is it possible that until a few decades ago a billion people had never even tasted...chocolate? This book is the story of East meeting West through the introduction into China-once a xenophobic land of austerity and deprivation-of an icon of the Western world's decadence and self-indulgence: CHOCOLATE Success or failure hinged on combinations of savvy and circumstance, of perseverance and flexibility, and of textbook business excellence and sheer luck It is the inside story of the five global titans of chocolate-Hershey, Mars, Cadbury, Ferrero and Nestl -that battled to capture a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to establish their brands with one-fifth of the world's population. "A scintillating glimpse inside one of the most hard-fought cross-cultural indulgence battles since the Opium War."--Global Times