Most Popular Books by Rodrigo Garcia

"This is a beautiful farewell to two extraordinary people. It enthralled and moved me, and it will move and enthrall anyone who has ever entered the glorious literary world of Gabriel García Márquez."—Salman Rushdie "In A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes Rodrigo Garcia finds the words that cannot be said, the moments that signal all that is possible to know about the passage from life to death, from what love brings and the loss it leaves. With details as rich as any giant biography, you will find yourself grieving as you read, grateful for the profound art that remains a part of our cultural heritage."—Walter Mosley, New York Times bestselling author of Down the River Unto the Sea "An intensely personal reflection on [Garcia''s] father''s legacy and his family bonds, tender in its treatment and stirring in its brevity."— Booklist (starred review) The son of one of the greatest writers of our time—Nobel Prize winner and internationally bestselling icon Gabriel García Márquez—remembers his beloved father and mother in this tender memoir about love and loss. In March 2014, Gabriel García Márquez, one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century, came down with a cold. The woman who had been beside him for more than fifty years, his wife Mercedes Barcha, was not hopeful; her husband, affectionately known as "Gabo," was then nearly 87 and battling dementia. I don''t think we''ll get out of this one, she told their son Rodrigo. Hearing his mother''s words, Rodrigo wondered, "Is this how the end begins?" To make sense of events as they unfolded, he began to write the story of García Márquez''s final days. The result is this intimate and honest account that not only contemplates his father''s mortality but reveals his remarkable humanity. Both an illuminating memoir and a heartbreaking work of reportage, A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes transforms this towering genius from literary creator to protagonist, and paints a rich and revelatory portrait of a family coping with loss. At its center is a man at his most vulnerable, whose wry humor shines even as his lucidity wanes. Gabo savors affection and attention from those in his orbit, but wrestles with what he will lose—and what is already lost. Throughout his final journey is the charismatic Mercedes, his constant companion and the creative muse who was one of the foremost influences on Gabo''s life and his art. Bittersweet and insightful, surprising and powerful, A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes celebrates the formidable legacy of Rodrigo''s parents, offering an unprecedented look at the private family life of a literary giant. It is at once a gift to Gabriel García Márquez''s readers worldwide, and a grand tribute from a writer who knew him well. "You read this short memoir with a feeling of deep gratitude. Yes, it is a moving homage by a son to his extraordinary parents, but also much more: it is a revelation of the hidden corners of a fascinating life. A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes is generous, unsentimental and wise." —Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling "A warm homage filled with both fond and painful memories." — Kirkus "Garcia''s limpid prose gazes calmly at death, registering pain but not being overcome by it . . . the result is a moving eulogy that will captivate fans of the literary lion." — Publishers Weekly

This IBM® Redbooks® publication highlights IBM Technical Computing as a flexible infrastructure for clients looking to reduce capital and operational expenditures, optimize energy usage, or re-use the infrastructure. This book strengthens IBM SmartCloud® solutions, in particular IBM Technical Computing clouds, with a well-defined and documented deployment model within an IBM System x® or an IBM Flex SystemTM. This provides clients with a cost-effective, highly scalable, robust solution with a planned foundation for scaling, capacity, resilience, optimization, automation, and monitoring. This book is targeted toward technical professionals (consultants, technical support staff, IT Architects, and IT Specialists) responsible for providing cloud-computing solutions and support.

This paper documents stylized facts on the process of structural transformation around the world and empirically analyzes its determinants using data on real value added by sector of economic activity (agriculture, manufacturing and services) for a panel of 168 countries over the period 1970-2010. The analysis points to large differences in sector shares both across and within regions as well as for countries at similar levels of economic development. Using both linear and quantile regression methods, it finds that a large proportion of the cross-country variation in sector shares can be accounted for by country characteristics, such as real GDP per capita, demographic structure, and population size. It also finds that policy and insitutional variables, such as product market reforms, openness to trade, human and physical capital, and finance improve the baseline model’s ability to account for the variation in sectoral shares across countries.

We explore the relationship of recessions and tourism cycles on the economic performance of tourism-dependent Small Developing States (SDS). Using local projections regressions, we examine how these cycles affect potential output growth and its drivers—investment and employment—and estimate the short-run elasticity of tourism growth to economic activity. Our findings reveal that the long-term influence of recessions are less persistent in SDS than in larger emerging markets, as tourist-dependent economies experience faster recoveries from recessions. Moreover, we use Cabo Verde as a natural experiment to assess the short-term relation of tourism on growth and found that tourism''s short-run elasticity to growth is around 0.4 over 12 months, with limited spillovers to non-tourism areas.

Hiking along the Welsh border of England while on holiday, modern-day American executive Roby Stafford encounters a handsome young man on horseback who identifies himself as Edward Plantagenet, Earl of March. Soon Robyn is swept back to the 15th century--the time of the War of the Roses.

The son of one of the greatest writers of our time—Nobel Prize winner and internationally best-selling icon Gabriel García Márquez—remembers his beloved father and mother in this tender memoir about love and loss.

This IBM® Platform Computing Solutions Redbooks® publication is the first book to describe each of the available offerings that are part of the IBM portfolio of Cloud, analytics, and High Performance Computing (HPC) solutions for our clients. This IBM Redbooks publication delivers descriptions of the available offerings from IBM Platform Computing that address challenges for our clients in each industry. We include a few implementation and testing scenarios with selected solutions. This publication helps strengthen the position of IBM Platform Computing solutions with a well-defined and documented deployment model within an IBM System x® environment. This deployment model offers clients a planned foundation for dynamic cloud infrastructure, provisioning, large-scale parallel HPC application development, cluster management, and grid applications. This IBM publication is targeted to IT specialists, IT architects, support personnel, and clients. This book is intended for anyone who wants information about how IBM Platform Computing solutions use IBM to provide a wide array of client solutions.

This IBM® Redbooks® publication contains information about the IBM Power SystemsTM 775 Supercomputer solution for AIX® and Linux HPC customers. This publication provides details about how to plan, configure, maintain, and run HPC workloads in this environment. This IBM Redbooks document is targeted to current and future users of the IBM Power Systems 775 Supercomputer (consultants, IT architects, support staff, and IT specialists) responsible for delivering and implementing IBM Power Systems 775 clustering solutions for their enterprise high-performance computing applications.

This paper estimates agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) in 162 countries between 1991 and 2015 and aims to understand sources of cross-country variations in agricultural TFP levels and its growth rates. Two factors affecting agricultural TFP are analyzed in detail – imported intermediate inputs and climate. We first show that these two factors are independently important in explaining agricultural TFP – imported inputs raise agricultural TFP; and higher temperatures and rainfall shortages impede TFP growth, particularly in low-income countries (LICs). We also provide a new evidence that, within LICs, those with a higher import component of intermediate inputs seem to be more shielded from the negative impacts of weather shocks.

Despite sustained economic growth and rapid poverty reductions, income inequality remains stubbornly high in many low-income developing countries. This pattern is a concern as high levels of inequality can impair the sustainability of growth and macroeconomic stability, thereby also limiting countries’ ability to reach the Sustainable Development Goals. This underscores the importance of understanding how policies aimed at boosting economic growth affect income inequality. Using empirical and modeling techniques, the note confirms that macro-structural policies aimed at raising growth payoffs in low-income developing countries can have important distributional consequences, with the impact dependent on both the design of reforms and on country-specific economic characteristics. While there is no one-size-fits-all recipe, the note explores how governments can address adverse distributional consequences of reforms by designing reform packages to make pro-growth policies also more inclusive.

Dollarization—the use of foreign currencies as a medium of exchange, store of value, or unit of account—is a notable feature of financial development under macroeconomically fragile conditions. It has emerged as a key factor explaining vulnerabilities and currency crises, which have long been observed in Latin America, parts of Asia, and Eastern Europe. Dollarization is also present, prominently, in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) where it remains significant and persistent at over 30 percent rates for both bank loans and deposits—although it has not increased significantly since 2001. However, progress in reducing dollarization has lagged behind other regions and, in this regard, it is legitimate to ask whether this phenomenon is an important concern in SSA. This study fills a gap in the literature by analyzing these issues with specific reference to the SSA region on the basis of the evidence for the past decade.

The formal launch of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) sets the global development agenda through 2030, placing significant emphasis on promoting social and environmental sustainability alongside economic growth and poverty reduction. Meeting the SDGs will require actions across a wide range of areas by both national governments and the international community. This paper examines the types of policies that developing countries will need to implement to foster economic transformation, to promote economic and social inclusion, and to meet key environmental objectives. Reducing inequality, achieving gender equity, and pricing energy and water resources appropriately receive particular attention.

During the past three years the frontier markets of sub-Saharan Africa have received growing amounts of portfolio capital flows, with heightened interest from foreign investors. Compared with foreign direct investment, portfolio capital flows tend to be more volatile, and thus pose challenges for sub-Saharan African frontier markets. This study examines the evolution of capital flows since 2010 and discusses the policies these countries have designed to reduce risks from the inherent volatility of these flows.

The author of "The Spiral Dance" and "American Woman, " Robertson returns with a charming time-travel romance. Robyn Stafford, a young American woman swept back in time to the 1460s England, finds her fantasy of courtly romance comes up against the politics of murder, warfare, and betrayal.

Blo has a girlfriend, a colorful imagination, a certain favorite record by Petula Clark that he carries with him everywhere, and a unique perspective on life. Blo also has Down syndrome, but he doesn''t let a little chromosome keep him from living large. This charming story of Blo and his extraordinary group of friends welcomes readers into the distinctly special outlooks and anecdotes of special needs individuals. Based on the author''s uncle with Down syndrome, the delightful illustrations and story offer an entertaining read as well as an educational resource--providing insight into a sometimes misunderstood social group and contributing to the normalization of individuals troubled with the negative connotations of "disability" surrounding them. This work is in association with Diabolo Ediciones.

Electric Vehicle Integration into Modern Power Networks provides coverage of the challenges and opportunities posed by the progressive integration of electric drive vehicles. Starting with a thorough overview of the current electric vehicle and battery state-of-the-art, this work describes dynamic software tools to assess the impacts resulting from the electric vehicles deployment on the steady state and dynamic operation of electricity grids, identifies strategies to mitigate them and the possibility to support simultaneously large-scale integration of renewable energy sources. New business models and control management architectures, as well as the communication infrastructure required to integrate electric vehicles as active demand are presented. Finally, regulatory issues of integrating electric vehicles into modern power systems are addressed. Inspired by two courses held under the EES-UETP umbrella in 2010 and 2011, this contributed volume consists of nine chapters written by leading researchers and professionals from the industry as well as academia.

Romance policial escrito nos moldes de grandes narradores como Conan Doyle, criador de Sherlock Holmes, O Trovador nos leva à Londrina dos anos 1930, cidade criada à imagem da capital inglesa. É lá que o tradutor Adam Blake e lorde Lovat, presidente da companhia de terras britânica Parana Plantations, buscarão a chave dos mistérios que se escondem nas entrelinhas de uma canção medieval. Rodrigo Garcia Lopes dá vida a aventureiros, estrangeiros de passado obscuro, trabalhadores sujos de serragem, fazendeiros engravatados e empresárias da noite, personagens que nos ajudam a desvendar uma série de assassinatos tem como pista a poesia. Um dos poetas mais consistentes de sua geração, Garcia Lopes prova, em sua estreia na ficção, ser um narrador completo.

After rebelling against the oppressive Protestantism of Queen Elizabeth, Countess Anne of Northumberland, a devout Catholic, is driven across the border into the wilds of Scotland on a fantastic odyssey, accompanied by a werewolf and powerful magic