Today our world is in turmoil, but it's all happened before. This Gilded Age saw sumptuous wealth, great scientific discoveries, dizzying technological progress, revolutionary art, tectonic changes in society, bitter - even deadly - clashes in politics, and the cataclysm of war.

If you liked Downton Abby and The Gilded Age, Serene is the story for you.

“Resplendent in a shimmering gown of golden silk by Paquin and a fortune in jewels, the stately brown-haired woman paused in the high arched doorway and swept her eyes over the scene in the chandelier-lit dining room of the Paris Ritz: elegantly-dressed women and substantial men in white tie and tails gathered at tables filled with glinting crystal glasses and shining silver service.

“She glanced to her right...”

A year abroad in Paris for three American college girls turns deadly in May 1968 when the Sorbonne explodes, workers revolt and France hurdles toward chaos. Danger tracks the girls at the barricades, in a château on the Loire, even in the Dordogne's prehistoric caves—but so does love, from perverse to sublime.

For Paris Girls Secret Society, life and love will never be the same.

"...she stopped to visit the elf, a little clay statuette of a man with bushy eyebrows and ab undant moustaches wearing a conical hat, seatedmwith his hands on his knees. He looked just like a cartoon elf—but he was real, and thousands of years old...."

"They were sitting in the morning sun at a sidewalk table of the afé Aux Tours de Notre-dame on a warm late-April day in 1968.

"Charity Cabot picked up her warm croissant, broke off a morsel, popped it in her mouth, lifted her cup of café au lait and took a sip as she listened to her two apartment mates reminisce about their soon-to-end college year abroad in Paris...."

It's 1968 and the world is on fire, with war in Vietnam and riots in the Western world, but Istanbul seems peaceful: Turks go about their lives while carefree hippies smoke dope, make love, and set out on a hilarious journey toward Kathmandu in a VW van—the Love Bus.

A student traveler and a US Peace Corps Volunteer fall in and out of love, and ask a Sufi mystic to show them their future. Hidden from view, a gorgeous Scandinavian hired to manage a nightclub discovers she is captive in a drug lord's harem as the mafia and government agents fight a fierce clandestine battle over opium, and Soviet spies carry out their mission to detonate a US atom bomb beneath Turkey's most iconic mosque.

The story is about to go nuclear....

"The author of this unusual volume is an unstoppable pro, the man behind three dozen guide books from Guatemala to New England.... Tom Brosnahan has now crafted a charming, witty personal memoir of exactly what Turkey was like in the late 1960s as he broke out of English teaching into travel writing." —Hugh Pope, author of Sons of the Conquerors: the Rise of the Turkic World.

"Imagine that you have the author of the world's best-selling travel guide to Turkey sitting with you after dinner telling you stories of his adventures there—humorous, moving, always interesting—and you will have an idea of what it is to read Tom Brosnahan's new book, Turkey: Bright Sun, Strong Tea."—Allan Adasiak, Turkish Daily News.

"Brosnahan starred in a movie, sipped champagne with 'fat capitalists' in the sultan's gilded palace, fell in love at a circumcision party, almost got eaten by wolves on the Iranian border, drank endless glasses of strong tea...and discovered the meaning of life."

Foreign-language phrasebooks and lessons promise miracles: "Speak a foreign language fluently in only weeks!" Possible? No! Come on, it takes months or years to learn a foreign language.

But anyone can learn 100 words™. You just need to know which 100 words—the 100 Travel Words!™— and have them presented in the best possible way for quick and easy learning. Words like hello, money, how much, hotel room, hot water, laundry, metro station, ticket, Wifi password.

Dictionaries, language courses, phrasebooks and foreign language apps give you way too many words. They discourage you with overwhelming lessons that would take weeks or months to finish. And those complicated 300-page phrasebooks and apps don’t do the job when you need a word instantly. Only your memory does.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about the best and quickest way to learn 100 travel words...and I think I've found it. 100 Travel Words™ e-books teach you the words one-by-one in flash-card fashion on your smartphone or tablet! Ten days, 100 words. Easy!