Search results for ""Author Sam"

Sex Trafficking in the United States is a unique exploration of the underlying dynamics of sex trafficking. This comprehensive volume examines the common risk factors for those who become victims, and the barriers they face when they try to leave. It also looks at how and why sex traffickers enter the industry. A chapter on buyers presents what we know about their motivations, the prevalence of bought sex, and criminal justice policies that target them. Sex Trafficking in the United States describes how the justice system, activists, and individuals can engage in advocating for victims of sex trafficking. It also offers recommendations for practice and policy and suggestions for cultural change. Andrea J. Nichols approaches sex-trafficking-related theories, research, policies, and practice from neoliberal, abolitionist, feminist, criminological, and sociological perspectives. She confronts competing views of the relationship between pornography, prostitution, and sex trafficking, as well as the contribution of weak social institutions and safety nets to the spread of sex trafficking. She also explores the link between identity-based oppression, societal marginalization, and the risk of victimization. She clearly accounts for the role of race, ethnicity, immigrant status, LGBTQ identities, age, sex, and intellectual disability in heightening the risk of trafficking and how social services and the criminal justice and healthcare systems can best respond. This textbook is essential for understanding the mechanics of a pervasive industry and curbing its spread among at-risk populations. Please visit our supplemental materials page (https://cup.columbia.edu/extras/supplement/sex-trafficking-united-states) to find teaching aids, including PowerPoints, access to a test bank, and a sample syllabus.

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Buddhist intellectual discourse owes its development to a dynamic interplay between primary source materials and subsequent interpretation, yet scholarship on Indian Buddhism has long neglected to privilege one crucial series of texts. Commentaries on Buddhist scriptures, particularly the sutras, offer rich insights into the complex relationship between Buddhist intellectual practices and the norms that inform--and are informed by--them. Evaluating these commentaries in detail for the first time, Richard F. Nance revisits--and rewrites--the critical history of Buddhist thought, including its unique conception of doctrinal transmission. Attributed to such luminaries as Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu, Dignaga, and Santideva, scriptural commentaries have long played an important role in the monastic and philosophical life of Indian Buddhism. Nance reads these texts against the social and cultural conditions of their making, establishing a solid historical basis for the interpretation of key beliefs and doctrines. He also underscores areas of contention, in which scholars debate what it means to speak for, and as, a Buddha. Throughout these texts, Buddhist commentators struggle to deduce and characterize the speech of Buddhas and teach others how to convey and interpret its meaning. At the same time, they demonstrate the fundamental dilemma of trying to speak on behalf of Buddhas. Nance also investigates the notion of "right speech" as articulated by Buddhist texts and follows ideas about teaching as imagined through the common figure of a Buddhist preacher. He notes the use of epistemological concepts in scriptural interpretation and the protocols guiding the composition of scriptural commentary, and provides translations of three commentarial guides to better clarify the normative assumptions organizing these works.

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Churchill's American Arsenal reveals how the technology, know-how, and production power behind the victorious Allied partnership during World War II extended beyond the battlefront and onto the home-front. Many weapons and inventions were credited with winning World War II, most famously in the assertion that the atomic bomb "ended the war, but radar won the war." What is less well known is that both airborne radar and the atomic bomb were invented in British laboratories, but built by Americans. The same holds true for many other American weapons credited with the Allied victory: the P-51 Mustang fighter, the Liberty ship, the proximity fuze, the Sherman tank, and even penicillin all began with British scientists and planners, but were designed and mass-produced by American engineers and factory workers. Churchill's American Arsenal chronicles this vital but often fraught relationship between British inventiveness and American technical might. At first, leaders in each nation were deeply skeptical that such a relationship could ever be successful. But despite initial misunderstandings, petty jealousies, and continuing differences over priorities, scientists and engineers on both sides of the Atlantic found new and often ingenious ways to work together, jointly creating the weapons that often became the decisive factor in the strategy for victory that Churchill had laid out during the earliest days of the conflict. While no single invention won the war, without any one of them, the war could have been lost.

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What if the stories of trees and people are more closely linked than we ever imagined?Winner of the World Wildlife Fund's 2020 Jan Wolkers PrizeOne of Science News's "Favorite Books of 2020" A New York Times "New and Noteworthy" BookA 2020 Woodland Book of the YearGold Winner of the 2020 Foreword INDIES Award in Ecology & EnvironmentBronze Winner of the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Award in Environment/EcologyPeople across the world know that to tell how old a tree is, you count its rings. Few people, however, know that research into tree rings has also made amazing contributions to our understanding of Earth's climate history and its influences on human civilization over the past 2,000 years. In her captivating book Tree Story, Valerie Trouet reveals how the seemingly simple and relatively familiar concept of counting tree rings has inspired far-reaching scientific breakthroughs that illuminate the complex interactions between nature and people.Trouet, a leading tree-ring scientist, takes us out into the field, from remote African villages to radioactive Russian forests, offering readers an insider's look at tree-ring research, a discipline known as dendrochronology. Tracing her own professional journey while exploring dendrochronology's history and applications, Trouet describes the basics of how tell-tale tree cores are collected and dated with ring-by-ring precision, explaining the unexpected and momentous insights we've gained from the resulting samples.Blending popular science, travelogue, and cultural history, Tree Story highlights exciting findings of tree-ring research, including the fate of lost pirate treasure, successful strategies for surviving California wildfire, the secret to Genghis Khan's victories, the connection between Egyptian pharaohs and volcanoes, and even the role of olives in the fall of Rome. These fascinating tales are deftly woven together to show us how dendrochronology sheds light on global climate dynamics and uncovers the clear links between humans and our leafy neighbors. Trouet delights us with her dedication to the tangible appeal of studying trees, a discipline that has taken her to austere and beautiful landscapes around the globe and has enabled scientists to solve long-pondered mysteries of Earth and its human inhabitants.

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Untested young rulers must cooperate to protect their world from the magical threat of the mysterious kingdom of Norsunder in a new epic fantasy trilogy set in the same world as the popular Inda series.Long-dormant magical forces are moving once again in Sartorias-deles. Agents of Norsunder, a mysterious bastion of incredible dark power, have reappeared in the world, amassing resources and sowing instability.But with numerous nations led by young rulers brought too early to their thrones, the world is hardly ready to defend itself. Atan is still uncomfortable with her new queenship, gained after her country was freed from a Norsundrian enchantment that left it frozen outside time for a century. Senrid strives to establish rule of law, after deposing his brutal and cruel uncle, seeking to exert control over rebellious jarls and a distrustful military academy. Jilo never expected the responsibility of leading his nation, but when its dictator vanishes after a Norsundrian attack, Jilo finds himself stepping into the power void, taking the reins of a country so riddled with dark magic that its citizenry labors for mere survival. Clair and CJ lead a band of misfits against magical threats that overshadow their tiny country, including a direct incursion from the Norsundrians.Those in power are not the only individuals working to subvert the plans of Norsunder. Liere, a young shopkeeper’s daughter, battles her own debilitating insecurities to live up to her reputation as a former savior of the realm. Hibern, a mage’s apprentice, must act as a liaison between national leaders, negotiating politics still foreign to her. Rel, a traveling warrior, stirs powerful allies to action encourages common folk to take up arms.These leaders soon realize that any significant victory against Norsunder will require an alliance between their nations. Yet good intentions may fracture in the face of personal grudges, secrets, and inexperience. As the Norsundrian attacks become bolder, the members of this tenuous alliance must find ways to trust one another and bind themselves together—lest they fail to defend against a host that has crushed entire worlds.

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“Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply? Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind”—from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer—Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways. Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic—a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption—and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection. Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes—Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive—even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.

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Racial divides. Political strife. Uncertain futures. This is the story of our day. But it is also the story of the exiles in Persia. The Jewish people had been taken from their homeland. They were being pressured to conform to foreign customs. They were facing discrimination. Now, an edict was being issued that would stamp out the Jewish race forever. Everything seemed to be falling apart for God’s people. But then two figures emerge on the scene . . . and everything changes.As Max Lucado relates in this five-session study, Esther and Mordecai are these unlikely heroes of the tale. Both had spent their lives trying to fit in and conform. But both experience a turning point—a crucial moment where they choose to step up and stand out for the God they served. As a result of their courageous actions, winter turned to springtime for God’s people. They emerged from the crisis stronger, more unified, and more committed to serving the God of their forefathers, even in their exile.The promise for God’s people in the book of Esther is the same promise that we have today. Our God triumphs in troubled times. When it seems as if everything is falling into pieces, he is working in our midst, causing everything to fall into place. The very one who seeks to destroy us will be destroyed. Even when it appears that evil has won, and that there is no hope for our future, we can know God’s throne is still occupied. We will triumph in the end.The question for you today is not whether God will show up on the scene. Rather, it is whether you will choose to be a part of it when he does. Will you, like Mordacai and Esther, realize you are a position “for such a time as this” (Esther 4:14)? God is calling you to rise up in these chaotic times. You were made for this moment.Sessions include: The Problem of Conformity (Esther 1:1–2:18) A Moment of Decision (Esther 2:19–4:14) Heaven Set in Motion (Esther 4:15–6:14) The God of Great Turnarounds (Esther 7:1–8:17) Remembering God’s Faithfulness (Esther 9:1–10:3) This pack contains one study guide and one DVD.

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The Official, Full-Color Guide to Developing Interactive Visualizations, Animations, and Renderings with Unreal Engine 4 Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) was created to develop video games, but it has gone viral among architecture, science, engineering, and medical visualization communities. UE4’s stunning visual quality, cutting-edge toolset, unbeatable price (free!), and unprecedented ease of use redefines the state of the art and has turned the gaming, film, and visualization industries on their heads. Unreal Engine 4 for Design Visualization delivers the knowledge visualization professionals need to leverage UE4’s immense power. World-class UE4 expert Tom Shannon introduces Unreal Engine 4’s components and technical concepts, mentoring you through the entire process of building outstanding visualization content–all with realistic, carefully documented, step-by-step sample projects. Shannon answers the questions most often asked about UE4 visualization, addressing issues ranging from data import and processing to lighting, advanced materials, and rendering. He reveals important ways in which UE4 works differently from traditional rendering systems, even when it uses similar terminology. Throughout, he writes from the perspective of visualization professionals in architecture, engineering, or science–not gaming. Understand UE4’s components and development environment Master UE4’s pipeline from source data to delivered application Recognize and adapt to the differences between UE4 and traditional visualization and rendering techniques Achieve staggering realism with UE4’s Physically Based Rendering (PBR) Materials, Lighting, and Post-Processing pipelines Create production-ready Materials with the interactive real-time Material Editor Quickly set up projects, import massive datasets, and populate worlds with accurate visualization data Develop bright, warm lighting for architectural visualizations Create pre-rendered animations with Sequencer Use Blueprints Visual Scripting to create complex interactions without writing a single line of code Work with (and around) UE4’s limitations and leveraging its advantages to achieve your vision All UE4 project files and 3ds Max source files, plus additional resources and links, are available at the book's companion website.

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"A must read."—Margaret AtwoodA vital, necessary playbook for navigating and defending free speech today by the CEO of PEN America, Dare To Speak provides a pathway for promoting free expression while also cultivating a more inclusive public culture.Online trolls and fascist chat groups. Controversies over campus lectures. Cancel culture versus censorship. The daily hazards and debates surrounding free speech dominate headlines and fuel social media storms. In an era where one tweet can launch—or end—your career, and where free speech is often invoked as a principle but rarely understood, learning to maneuver the fast-changing, treacherous landscape of public discourse has never been more urgent. In Dare To Speak, Suzanne Nossel, a leading voice in support of free expression, delivers a vital, necessary guide to maintaining democratic debate that is open, free-wheeling but at the same time respectful of the rich diversity of backgrounds and opinions in a changing country. Centered on practical principles, Nossel’s primer equips readers with the tools needed to speak one’s mind in today’s diverse, digitized, and highly-divided society without resorting to curbs on free expression.At a time when free speech is often pitted against other progressive axioms—namely diversity and equality—Dare To Speak presents a clear-eyed argument that the drive to create a more inclusive society need not, and must not, compromise robust protections for free speech. Nossel provides concrete guidance on how to reconcile these two sets of core values within universities, on social media, and in daily life. She advises readers how to: Use language conscientiously without self-censoring ideas; Defend the right to express unpopular views; And protest without silencing speech. Nossel warns against the increasingly fashionable embrace of expanded government and corporate controls over speech, warning that such strictures can reinforce the marginalization of lesser-heard voices. She argues that creating an open market of ideas demands aggressive steps to remedy exclusion and ensure equal participation. Replete with insightful arguments, colorful examples, and salient advice, Dare To Speak brings much-needed clarity and guidance to this pressing—and often misunderstood—debate.

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Other animals are driven to spend essentially their whole lives just trying to get fed, stay alive, and get laid. That’s about it. The same was true for our proto-human ancestors. And modern humans of course also require a Survival Drive and a Sex Drive in order to leave descendants. But today we spend most of our lives mainly just trying to convince ourselves that our existence is not absurd. In What We Are, Queen’s University biologist, Lonnie Aarssen, traces how our biocultural evolution has shaped Homo sapiens into the only creature that refuses to be what it is — the only creature preoccupied with a deeply ingrained, and absurd sentiment: I have a distinct ‘mental life’—an ‘inner self’—that exists separately and apart from ‘material life’, and so, unlike the latter, need not come to an end. This delusion conceivably gave our distant ancestors some wishful thinking for finding some measure of relief from the terrifying, uniquely human knowledge of the eventual loss of corporeal survival. But this came with an impulsive, nagging doubt — an obsessive underlying uncertainty: ‘self-impermanence anxiety’. Biocultural evolution, however, was not finished. It also gave us two additional, uniquely human, primal drives, both serving to help quell the burden of this anxiety. Legacy Drive generates delusional cultural domains for ‘extension’ of self; and Leisure Drive generates pleasurable cultural domains for distraction – ‘escape’ – from self. Legacy Drive and Leisure Drive, Aarssen argues, represent two of the most profound consequences of human cognitive and cultural evolution. What We Are advances propositions regarding how a visceral susceptibility to self-impermanence anxiety has — paradoxically — played a pivotal role in rewarding the reproductive success of our ancestors, and has thus been a driving force in shaping fundamental motivations and cultural norms of modern humans. More than any other milestone in the evolution of human minds, self-impermanence anxiety, and its mitigating Drives for Legacy and Leisure, account for not just the advance of civilization over the past many thousands of years, but also now, its impending collapse. Effective management of this crisis, Aarssen insists, will require a deeper and more broadly public understanding of its Darwinian evolutionary roots — as laid out in What We Are.

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Since the turn of the twentieth century, human trafficking has animated public discourses, policy debates, and moral panics in the United States. Though some nuances of these conversations have shifted, the role of the criminal legal system (police officers, investigators, lawyers, and connected service providers) in anti-trafficking interventions has remained firmly in place. Policing Victimhood explores how frontline workers in direct contact with vulnerable, exploited, and trafficked persons—however those groups are defined at personal, organizational, or legal levels—defer to the tools of the carceral state and ideologies of punishment when navigating their clients’ needs. In Policing Victimhood, Corinne Schwarz interviewed with service providers in the Midwestern US, a region that, though colloquially understood as “flyover country,” regularly positions itself as a leader in state-level anti-trafficking policies and collaborative networks. These frontline workers’ perceptions and narratives are informed by their interpersonal, day-to-day encounters with exploited or trafficked persons. Their insights underscore how anti-trafficking policies are put into practice and influenced by specific ideologies and stereotypes. Extending the reach of street-level bureaucracy theory to anti-trafficking initiatives, Schwarz demonstrates how frontline workers are uniquely positioned to perpetuate or radically counter punitive anti-trafficking efforts. Taking a cue from anti-carceral feminist critiques and critical trafficking studies, Schwarz argues that ongoing anti-trafficking efforts in the US expand the punitive arm of the state without addressing the role of systemic oppression in perpetuating violence. The violence inherent to the carceral state—and required for its continued expansion—is the same violence that perpetuates the exploitation of human trafficking. In order to solve the “problem” of human trafficking, advocates, activists, and scholars must divest from systems that center punishment and radically reinvest their efforts in dismantling the structural violence that perpetuates social exclusion and vulnerability, what she calls the “-isms” and “-phobias” that harm some at the expense of others’ empowerment. Policing Victimhood encourages readers to imagine a world without carceral violence in any of its forms.

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When the body of a bushman with puzzlingly young organs is stolen from the morgue and a local witch doctor goes missing, Detective Kubu becomes involved in a life-threatening case. ‘Richly atmospheric … a gritty depiction of corruption and deception’ Publishers Weekly ‘The African Columbo … a smart satisfyingly complex mystery’ Entertainment Weekly ‘A wonderful, original voice – McCall Smith with a dark edge and even darker underbelly’ Peter James _______________ When the body of a Bushman is discovered near the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, the death is written off as an accident. But all is not as it seems. An autopsy reveals that, although he’s clearly very old, his internal organs are puzzlingly young. What’s more, an old bullet is lodged in one of his muscles … but where is the entry wound? When the body is stolen from the morgue and a local witch doctor is reported missing, Detective ‘Kubu’ Bengu gets involved. Kubu and his brilliant young colleague, Detective Samantha Khama, follow the twisting trail through a confusion of rhino-horn smugglers, foreign gangsters and drugs manufacturers. And the deeper they dig, the wider and more dangerous the case becomes… A fresh, new slice of ‘Sunshine Noir’, Dying to Live is a classic tale of greed, corruption and ruthless thuggery, set in one of the world’s most beautiful landscapes, and featuring one of crime fiction’s most endearing and humane heroes. _______________ ‘Detective David “Kubu” Bengu is a wonderful creation, complex and beguiling. Compelling and deceptively written’ New York Journal of Books ‘My favourite writing duo since Ellery Queen’ Ragnar Jónasson ‘Dying to Live is a skilfully plotted story of greed and its consequences; making the case for Detective Kubu absorbing, like the Botswana backdrop' ShotsMag ‘Under the African sun, Michael Stanley’s Detective Kubu investigates crimes as dark as the darkest of Nordic Noir. Call it Sunshine Noir, if you will – a must read’ Yrsa Sigurðardóttir ‘Intelligent, dark and compelling - among the best of today’s crime fiction’ Quentin Bates ‘Fascinating, dark and beautifully written … Kubu is a detective worth knowing. More please!’ Northern Crime

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WebAssembly fulfills the long-awaited promise of web technologies: fast code, type-safe at compile time, execution in the browser, on embedded devices, or anywhere else. Rust delivers the power of C in a language that strictly enforces type safety. Combine both languages and you can write for the web like never before! Learn how to integrate with JavaScript, run code on platforms other than the browser, and take a step into IoT. Discover the easy way to build cross-platform applications without sacrificing power, and change the way you write code for the web. WebAssembly is more than just a revolutionary new technology. It's reshaping how we build applications for the web and beyond. Where technologies like ActiveX and Flash have failed, you can now write code in whatever language you prefer and compile to WebAssembly for fast, type-safe code that runs in the browser, on mobile devices, embedded devices, and more. Combining WebAssembly's portable, high-performance modules with Rust's safety and power is a perfect development combination. Learn how WebAssembly's stack machine architecture works, install low-level wasm tools, and discover the dark art of writing raw wast code. Build on that foundation and learn how to compile WebAssembly modules from Rust by implementing the logic for a checkers game. Create wasm modules in Rust to interoperate with JavaScript in many compelling ways. Apply your new skills to the world of non-web hosts, and create everything from an app running on a Raspberry Pi that controls a lighting system, to a fully-functioning online multiplayer game engine where developers upload their own arena-bound WebAssembly combat modules. Get started with WebAssembly today, and change the way you think about the web. What You Need: You'll need a Linux, Mac, or Windows workstation with an Internet connection. You'll need an up-to-date web browser that supports WebAssembly. To work with the sample code, you can use your favorite text editor or IDE. The book will guide you through installing the Rust and WebAssembly tools needed for each chapter.

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**A Jennette McCurdy book club pick** **Cosmopolitan, The 20 best books to look forward to in 2024** **An Independent Book of the Month** 'I loved it: the fast pace, the wry protagonist, and how Brody painfully examines the measures we take to find closure' Jennette McCurdy 'A brilliant, dark debut about grief and the way in which the internet can magnify mania' Mail on Sunday 'I fell down Rabbit Hole in an obsessive spiral' Kate Reed Petty 'A twisty, pacy crime thriller' independent.co.uk 'A mindblowing debut' Heather Darwent 'A gritty tale of grief, family secrets and addiction' Observer ________________________________ A deliciously dark and twisted debut about family secrets, true crime, and destructive obsession – by a striking new talent Teddy Angstrom is no stranger to morbid public interest in her family’s tragedies. And when her father dies suddenly, ten years to the day after her sister Angie’s disappearance, she intends to maintain as much privacy as she always has. Clearing out her father’s office, however, Teddy discovers her father’s double life: a decade-long investigation into wild conspiracies from a Reddit community of true crime fans fixated on Angie. Repelled and compelled in equal measure by this new online dimension, Teddy finds herself falling down that same rabbit hole. So when nineteen-year-old Mickey, a charming amateur internet sleuth, materialises in real life, Teddy determines that the two of them are going to team up to find out what really happened to Angie – and whether there’s any chance she might still be alive. But as she struggles to reconcile new information with old memories, Teddy doesn’t notice that her obsession is making her increasingly self-destructive. And she’s in way over her head before she’s realises that Mickey, too, is not all she seems… Noirish, haunting and razor-sharp, as compulsive as a late-night Reddit binge, Rabbit Hole is an unforgettable debut about violence, family and grief. 'A smart and edgy mystery that kept me turning pages from start to finish' Alexis Schaitkin ‘I absolutely loved this book … I couldn't put it down’ Ainslie Hogarth 'An unputdownable debut from a writer I would follow anywhere' Allie Rowbottom

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To develop a theory of world literature, this book demands that the theory of the novel can no longer ignore literary forms other than realism.Winner of the Donald Murphy Prize for a Distinguished First Book by the American Conference on Irish Studies, and the Waclaw Lednicki Award in the Humanities by the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of AmericaFor centuries, the standard account of the development of the novel focused on the rise of realism in English literature. Studies of early novels connected the form to various aspects of British life across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the burgeoning middle class, the growth of individualism, and the emergence of democracy and the nation-state. But as the push for teaching and learning global literature grows, this narrative is insufficient for studying novel forms outside of a predominately English-speaking British and American realm.In Estranging the Novel, Katarzyna Bartoszynska explores how the emergence and growth of world literature studies has challenged the centrality of British fiction to theories of the novel's rise. She argues that a historicist approach frequently reinforces the realist paradigm that has cast other traditions as "minor," conceding a normative vision of the novel as it seeks to explain why historical forces produced different forms elsewhere. Recasting the standard narrative by looking at different novelistic literary forms, including the Gothic, travel writing, and queer fiction, Bartoszynska offers a compelling comparative study of Polish and Irish works published across the long nineteenth century that emphasize fictionality, or the problem of world-building in literature.Reading works by Ignacy Krasicki, Jan Potocki, Narcyza Zmichowska, and Witold Gombrowicz alongside others by Jonathan Swift, Charles Maturin, Oscar Wilde, and Samuel Beckett, Bartoszynska shows that the history of the novel's rise demands a more capacious and rigorous approach to form as well as a reconceptualization of the relationship between fiction and its cultural contexts. By modeling such a heterogeneous account of the novel form, Estranging the Novel paves the way for a bracing and diverse understanding of the makeup of contemporary world literature and the many texts it encompasses—and a new perspective on the British novel as well.

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RSPB Spotlight: Eagles is packed with eye-catching, informative colour photos and features succinct, detailed text written by a knowledgeable naturalist. Eagles are among the most impressive hunters of the animal world. Their predatory prowess and flying skills have imbued them with a romance and mystique that runs deep in our culture and has elevated them to emblems of freedom and power across the globe. At the same time, however, people have long seen eagles as competitors. Reviled by farmers and gamekeepers as snatchers of livestock, many species have been driven into decline by persecution and disturbance. Two species of eagle occur in Britain - among 60 worldwide - and are the focus of this book. The regal Golden Eagle is the definitive ‘true’ eagle and occurs in wilderness areas across the northern hemisphere; the even larger White-tailed Eagle, reintroduced to the UK after historic extinction, belongs to the separate ‘sea eagles’ genus. These two spectacular birds are both very rare – confined largely to the remote Scottish Highlands – and a sighting of either is one of the UK's most exciting and sought-after wildlife experiences. This highly readable study looks separately at both UK eagles, exploring how each is adapted as an apex predator in its own environment, and explores the relationship between the two. Separate chapters cover all aspects of the birds’ biology and lifestyle, from defending their vast territories to raising their young. Fascinating secrets are revealed, including the brutal truth behind ‘Cain and Abel’ syndrome. The book also takes a look at other eagles around the world, placing the two UK species within this broader context. Finally, it examines the complex relationship that humans have enjoyed with eagles since time immemorial, spanning both culture and conservation, and offers expert tips on where and how you can watch these magnificent birds for yourself. The Spotlight series introduces readers to the lives and behaviours of our favourite animals with eye-catching, colour photography and informative expert text.

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Revitalize your architectural visualizations by bringing new levels of realism to your day and night interior scenes. This book features full-color, step-by-step tutorials to develop a firm understanding of the processes and techniques involved in creating jaw-dropping 3d visualizations for top marketing agencies.This second volume includes day and night lighting of an atrium scene using seasoned tools and techniques to deploy V-Ray 5 and 3ds Max 2020. It has never been quicker and easier to create the industry’s top-of-the-range 3d marketing visuals.The book starts with an overview of the best techniques to approach clients via emails, calls, meetings, and social media. There are also key insights into the best practices of handling projects, pricing, contracts, invoices, pre-production, production, post-production, etc.The subsequent step takes users through the installation of V-Ray 5 and the process of accessing the V-Ray Material browser dialog. Throughout the book, users are taken through VRayMtl functions such as Diffuse, Roughness, Reflect, Glossiness, Metalness, Refract, IOR, Abbe number, Fog color, Translucency, BRDF, Coat, Sheen and Bump.Users will also learn how to use procedural maps such as VRayBitmap, VRayTriplanarTex, Bricks, Metals, Carpaint, VRayDisplacementMod, VRayUVWRandomizer, VRayMultiSubTex, VRayPointCloudColor, VRayDirt, VRayAerialPersepective, VRayLightMtl, VRayMtlWrapper, VRayOverrideMtl, VRay2SidedMtl, VRayBlendMtl and VRayEdgesTex.Users will have a rare insight into all functionalities of a V-Ray camera, VRayLight objects, Render settings, Frame buffer, Global switches, IPR options, Bucket and Progressive image samplers, Image filters, Global DMC, Color mapping, Brute force GI, Light cache, Color management, Distributed rendering, Render elements, V-Ray image file format, VFB History settings, VFB Lens Effects, LightMix, Film tonemap, Hue/Saturation, Lookup Table and much more. Finally, users will embark on the amazing journey of utilizing the previous chapters to create eye-catching 3d marketing visuals through the meticulous process of pre-production, production and post-production of both day and night scenes/lighting. The tips and tricks section will extensively cover key sections about Verified views for planning applications, Parametric modeling with AdvArray, anima®, project manager plug-in, Verge3d, Webrotate 360, Accucities 3d city models and much more.

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Arguing that pop music turns on moments rather than movements, the essays in Listen Again pinpoint magic moments from a century of pop eclecticism, looking at artists who fall between genre lines, songs that sponge up influences from everywhere, and studio accidents with unforeseen consequences. Listen Again collects some of the finest presentations from the celebrated Experience Music Project Pop Conference, where journalists, musicians, academics, and other culturemongers come together once each year to stretch the boundaries of pop music culture, criticism, and scholarship.Building a history of pop music out of unexpected instances, critics and musicians delve into topics from the early-twentieth-century black performer Bert Williams’s use of blackface, to the invention of the Delta blues category by a forgotten record collector named James McKune, to an ER cast member’s performance as the Germs’ front man Darby Crash at a Germs reunion show. Cuban music historian Ned Sublette zeroes in on the signature riff of the garage-band staple “Louie, Louie.” David Thomas of the pioneering punk band Pere Ubu honors one of his forebears: Ghoulardi, a late-night monster-movie host on Cleveland-area TV in the 1960s. Benjamin Melendez discusses playing in a band, the Ghetto Brothers, that Latinized the Beatles, while leading a South Bronx gang, also called the Ghetto Brothers. Michaelangelo Matos traces the lineage of the hip-hop sample “Apache” to a Burt Lancaster film. Whether reflecting on the ringing freedom of an E chord or the significance of Bill Tate, who performed once in 1981 as Buddy Holocaust and was never heard from again, the essays reveal why Robert Christgau, a founder of rock criticism, has called the EMP Pop Conference “the best thing that’s ever happened to serious consideration of pop music.”Contributors. David Brackett, Franklin Bruno, Daphne Carr, Henry Chalfant, Jeff Chang, Drew Daniel, Robert Fink, Holly George-Warren, Lavinia Greenlaw, Marybeth Hamilton, Jason King, Josh Kun, W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Greil Marcus, Michaelangelo Matos, Benjamin Melendez, Mark Anthony Neal, Ned Sublette, David Thomas, Steve Waksman, Eric Weisbard

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Planning a trip to Central America? Studying abroad in Spain? Then you need an authentic guide to Spanish as it's spoken in everyday situations! Whether ordering a meal, bargaining for clothes in a shop, or impressing an attractive member of the opposite sex, Making Out in Spanish covers it all. Te adoro! Cuando puedo volver a verte? (I adore you! When can I see you next time?). Answer this correctly in Spanish and you may be going on a hot date. Incorrectly, and you could hurt someone's feelings! Spanish classes and textbooks tend to spend a lot of time rehearsing for the same fictitious scenarios, but Making Out in Spanish prepares you for real encounters that you may not be prepared for. If you are a student, business traveller, or tourist traveling to Latin America or Spain and would like to have an authentic and meaningful experience, the key is being able to speak like a local. This friendly and easy-to-use Spanish phrasebook makes this possible. Making Out in Spanish has been carefully designed to act as a guide to modern colloquial Spanish for use in everyday informal interactions giving access to the sort of catchy Spanish expressions that aren't covered in traditional language materials. As well as the Latin script, each expression is now given phonetically, making pronunciation a breeze. This Spanish phrasebook includes: Information about Latin American Spanish vs. Spain Spanish as well as regional dialects. A guide to pronouncing Spanish words correctly. Explanations of basic Spanish grammar, such as question forms, male vs. female, formal vs. informal, and vowel stress. Complete Spanish translations including phonetic script. Useful and interesting notes on Spanish language and culture. Lots of colourful, fun and useful expressions not covered in other phrasebooks. Titles in this unique series of bestselling books include: Making Out in Chinese, Making Out in Indonesian, Making Out in Thai, Making Out in Korean, Making Out in Hindi, Making Out in Japanese, Making Out in Vietnamese, Making Out in Burmese, Making Out in Tagalog, Making Out in Hindi, Making Out in Arabic, Making Out in English, More Making Out in Korean, and More Making Out in Japanese.

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The history of consumerism is about much more than just shopping. Ever since the eighteenth century, citizen-consumers have protested against the abuses of the market by boycotting products and promoting fair instead of free trade. In recent decades, consumer activism has responded to the challenges of affluence by helping to guide consumers through an increasingly complex and alien marketplace. In doing so, it has challenged the very meaning of consumer society and tackled some of the key economic, social, and political issues associated with the era of globalization. In Prosperity for All, the first international history of consumer activism, Matthew Hilton shows that modern consumer advocacy reached the peak of its influence in the decades after World War II. Growing out of the product-testing activities of Consumer Reports and its international counterparts (including Which? in the United Kingdom, Que Choisir in France, and Test in Germany), consumerism evolved into a truly global social movement. Consumer unions, NGOs, and individual activists like Ralph Nader emerged in countries around the world—including developing countries in Southeast Asia and Latin America—concerned with creating a more equitable marketplace and articulating a politics of consumption that addressed the needs of both individuals and society as a whole. Consumer activists achieved many victories, from making cars safer to highlighting the dangers of using baby formula instead of breast milk in countries with no access to clean water. The 1980s saw a reversal in the consumer movement's fortunes, thanks in large part to the rise of an antiregulatory agenda both in the United States and internationally. In the process, the definition of consumerism changed, focusing more on choice than on access. As Hilton shows, this change reflects more broadly on the dilemmas we all face as consumers: Do we want more stuff and more prosperity for ourselves, or do we want others less fortunate to be able to enjoy the same opportunities and standard of living that we do? Prosperity for All makes clear that by abandoning a more idealistic vision for consumer society we reduce consumers to little more than shoppers, and we deny the vast majority of the world's population the fruits of affluence.

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Slow down, calm down, and come together with this complete guide to meditation for the whole family—featuring targeted practices for parents, teens, and kids of all ages. As a certified yoga teacher, meditation teacher, and host of the chart-topping podcast Mindful in Minutes, Kelly Smith is no stranger to the wide-ranging health benefits of meditation. And she discovered she needed them more than ever when she became a mom for the first time. Suddenly finding herself coping with sleepless nights, disheartening physical changes, uncontrollable worries, and near constant sensory overload, Kelly found solace in the same thing she always had: her daily meditation practice. In doing so, she discovered how meditation could help not only moms cope with common family challenges, but every other member of the family as well. Kelly shares her hard-won wisdom with listeners across the country in her second podcast Meditation Mama, and now, in this fully illustrated book. Mindful in Minutes: Meditation for the Modern Family helps families of all kinds learn how to use meditation to cope with the everyday struggles of being a person who is also part of a family. Covering topics ranging from quieting the mind and managing stress to handling resentment and cultivating compassion, this book offers specialized practices for each family member by age—adults, teens and older kids, and small children. Topics include: Being Present Finding Joy Anxiety Hyperactivity Worthiness Empathy Burnout Insomnia Self-Confidence Overstimulation Connecting with the True Self And much more With three distinct, age-appropriate practices for each topic, Kelly ensures that every member of the family has access to a practical, focused meditation “toolkit” to draw on when they need a little extra help. The book also includes a series of dedicated meditations for expectant parents, a series of meditations to promote a healthy, loving relationship between partners, and over 250 mantras to help you focus your mind and go deeper into your practice. Whether you are a meditation beginner or a long-term practitioner, this book will help you and your family feel calmer, happier, and more connected.

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At the dawn of the new millennium, Western culture is marked by various fantasies that imagine our future selves and their forms of embodiment. These fantasies form part of a rapidly growing cultural discourse about the future of the human form, the disappearing boundary between the human and the technological and the cultural consequences of greater human-technological integration. This book is about those cultural fantasies of fetishism, the different forms they take and the various ways in which the transformative processes they depict can reaffirm accepted definitions of identity or reconfigure them in an entirely new fashion. But what exactly is fetishism? At one level fetish club subcultures spectacularize fetishism as a celebration of difference in which the transformation of the self is paramount and 'mainstream' categories, including beliefs about gender, sexuality and the body, are transgressed. However, in film, feminist and post-colonial criticism, fetishism's meaning owes much to Freud's interpretation that the fetish stands in for the mother's missing phallus and disavows her sexual difference. At the level of critical theory, fetishism is almost always regarded as being synonymous with 'the reproduction of the same' - the disavowal rather than the pursuit of otherness. This book argues that the orthodox interpretation of 'classical' fetishism is not and never has been up to the task of explaining all cultural fetishisms. It identifies several different forms of fetishism - decadent fetishism, magical fetishism, matrix fetishism and immortality fetishism - and accounts for its sometimes radical and productive edge. Ranging widely over texts and cultures, Amanda Fernbach skilfully deploys these concepts of fetishism to topics in cultural studies, such as sexual difference, queer identities, computer culture and the 'post-human' and as well as to her objects of study: cross-cultural dressers, technofetishists, cyberspace cowboys, cyborgs, geekgirls and SM/fetish cultures. This book argues that fetishism can contest postmodern malaise and provide utopian tools for a post-human existence. It urges that we embrace the new fetishism emerging from the fringes of the fetish scene and that we begin to classify fetishism in a manner that does justice to its multiplicity.

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If you're using PHP 4, then chances are good that an upgrade to PHP 5 is in your future. The more you've heard about the exciting new features in PHP 5, the sooner that upgrade is probably going to be. Although an in-depth, soup-to-nuts reference guide to the language is good to have on hand, it's not the book an experienced PHP programmer needs to get started with the latest release. What you need is a lean and focused guide that answers your most pressing questions: what's new with the technology, what's different, and how do I make the best use of it? In other words, you need a copy of Upgrading to PHP 5. This new book is targeted toward PHP developers who are already familiar with PHP 4. Rather than serve as a definitive guide to the entire language, the book zeroes in on PHP 5's new features, and covers these features definitively. You'll find a concise appraisal of the differences between PHP 4 and PHP 5, a detailed look at what's new in this latest version, and you'll see how PHP 5 improves on PHP 4 code. See PHP 4 and PHP 5 code side-by-side, to learn how the new features make it easier to solve common PHP problems. Each new feature is shown in code, helping you understand why it's there, when to use it, and how it's better than PHP 4. Short, sample programs are included throughout the book. Topics covered in Upgrading to PHP 5 include: The new set of robust object-oriented programming features; An improved MySQL extension, supporting MySQL 4.1, prepared statements, and bound parameters; Completely rewritten support for XML: DOM, XSLT, SAX, and SimpleXML; Easy web services with SOAP; SQLite, an embedded database library bundled with PHP 5; Cleaner error handling with exceptions; Other new language features, such as iterators, streams, and more. Upgrading to PHP 5 won't make you wade through information you've covered before. Written by Adam Trachtenberg, coauthor of the popular PHP Cookbook, this book will take you straight into the heart of all that's new in PHP 5. By the time you've finished, you'll know PHP 5 in practice as well as in theory.

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The biggest, most successful businesses you can think of all started small and grew their way to massive success. What was their secret? Is there something those companies have in common—from Microsoft to McDonald's to U.S. Steel—that helped them grow from small businesses to globe-spanning corporations? The answer is "yes," and it's right here. The common thread between all big-growth companies is their reliance on the art of what online business pioneer Mark Joyner calls Integration Marketing to spur methodical, reliable growth from one level to the next. Joyner's Integration Marketing theory is a radically new business approach that has already built a fanatical base of tens of thousands of entrepreneurs who are using it to pull off what some are referring to as "business miracles" with a zero-dollar ad budget. Now, Mark Joyner finally puts this amazing business-transforming methodology down on paper and shows you how to apply it to your own business, no matter its size. Integration Marketing is a simple, innovative, and effective system that helps you find hidden marketing opportunities, bring in a limitless supply of new customers, and grow your business steadily, predictably, and strategically. Most importantly, it takes the guesswork out of marketing by using predictive math to gauge the likelihood of success for any new marketing opportunity—before you commit time and resources to it. Even better, once you put Integration Marketing to work in your business, the methodology will continue to work without any additional effort. No longer will you miss out on profit opportunities that are right under your nose. You'll be able to see your competitive battlefield clearly and develop a flexible, intelligent strategy that will keep your business in the black. This isn't just some new buzzword for the same old ideas—it's a complete suite of strategic tools that make marketing accountable, reliable, predictable, and effective. It's not complicated and it's not a magic bullet; it's a straightforward, proven system for getting exactly what you and your business need to grow—more profit faster.

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Bayesian methods combine the evidence from the data at hand with previous quantitative knowledge to analyse practical problems in a wide range of areas. The calculations were previously complex, but it is now possible to routinely apply Bayesian methods due to advances in computing technology and the use of new sampling methods for estimating parameters. Such developments together with the availability of freeware such as WINBUGS and R have facilitated a rapid growth in the use of Bayesian methods, allowing their application in many scientific disciplines, including applied statistics, public health research, medical science, the social sciences and economics. Following the success of the first edition, this reworked and updated book provides an accessible approach to Bayesian computing and analysis, with an emphasis on the principles of prior selection, identification and the interpretation of real data sets. The second edition: Provides an integrated presentation of theory, examples, applications and computer algorithms. Discusses the role of Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods in computing and estimation. Includes a wide range of interdisciplinary applications, and a large selection of worked examples from the health and social sciences. Features a comprehensive range of methodologies and modelling techniques, and examines model fitting in practice using Bayesian principles. Provides exercises designed to help reinforce the reader's knowledge and a supplementary website containing data sets and relevant programs. Bayesian Statistical Modelling is ideal for researchers in applied statistics, medical science, public health and the social sciences, who will benefit greatly from the examples and applications featured. The book will also appeal to graduate students of applied statistics, data analysis and Bayesian methods, and will provide a great source of reference for both researchers and students. Praise for the First Edition: "It is a remarkable achievement to have carried out such a range of analysis on such a range of data sets. I found this book comprehensive and stimulating, and was thoroughly impressed with both the depth and the range of the discussions it contains."—ISI - Short Book Reviews "This is an excellent introductory book on Bayesian modelling techniques and data analysis."—Biometrics "The book fills an important niche in the statistical literature and should be a very valuable resource for students and professionals who are utilizing Bayesian methods."—Journal of Mathematical Psychology

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In Fierce Enigmas, prize-winning historian Srinath Raghavan argues that we cannot understand the US's entanglement in South Asia without first understanding the long sweep of American interaction with the nations and peoples who comprise it. Starting with the first attempts by Americans in the late eighteenth century to gain a foothold in the India trade, Raghavan narrates the forgotten role of American merchants, missionaries, and travelers in the history of region. For these early adventurers and exploiters, South Asia came to be seen not just as an arena of trade and commerce, but also as a site for American efforts-religious and secular-to remake the world in its own image. By the 1930s, American economic interests and ideals had converged in support for decolonization; not only should the peoples of the region be free to determine their own governments and futures, but they should be fully integrated into a liberal capitalist global order. These dreams were partially realized after the Second World War, with Indian Independence and Partition in 1947-and with Britain no longer in the picture, US involvement in the region steadily increased, in the form of short-sighted and ultimately counterproductive policies. In the 1950s, the Truman administration centered its approach to South Asia on the containment of communism, thereby helping split the region in two: while Pakistan was eager for American weapons and military support, India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru refused to align with either the US or the Soviet Union. In the 1970s, the US chose to support Islamists in Afghanistan, seeing them as a bulwark against communist advance. Yet Pakistan would become a formidable adversary for the US, while the militants in Afghanistan would eventually be using their arms against American troops. Time and time again, India, Pakistan, and to a lesser extent Afghanistan have each managed to extract commitments and concessions from the US that have served mostly to fuel the fires of nationalism and sectarianism, even as signs of liberalization have continued to entice American policymakers. Drawing on a vast and diverse array of official documents and private correspondence, Raghavan has written a sweeping, definitive history of the US in South Asia that at the same time suggests the many challenges ahead.

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How much do the English really care about their stately homes? In this pathbreaking and wide-ranging account of the changing fortunes and status of the stately homes of England over the past two centuries, Peter Mandler melds social, cultural, artistic, and political perspectives and reveals much about the relationship of the nation to its past and its traditional ruling elite. Challenging the prevailing view of a modern English culture besotted with its history and its aristocracy, Mandler portrays instead a continuously changing and modernizing society in which both popular and intellectual attitudes toward the aristocracy—and its stately homes—have veered from selective appreciation to outright hostility and only recently to thoroughgoing admiration.With great panache, Mandler adds the missing pieces to the story of the country house. Going beyond its architects and its owners, he brings to center stage a much wider cast of characters—aristocratic entrepreneurs, anti-aristocratic politicians, campaigning conservationists, ordinary sightseers and voters—and a scenario full of incident and local and national color. He traces attitudes toward the stately homes, beginning in the first half of the nineteenth century when public feeling about the aristocracy was mixed and divided. Criticism of the "foreign" and "exclusive" image of the typical aristocratic country house was widespread. At the same time, interest grew in those older houses that symbolized an olden time of imagined national harmony. The Victorian period also saw the first mass tourist industry, and a strong popular demand emerged for the right to visit all the stately homes. By the 1880s, however, hostility toward the aristocracy made appreciation of any country house politically treacherous, and interest in aristocratic heritage declined steadily for sixty years. Only after 1945, when the aristocracy was no longer seen as a threat, was a gentle revival of the stately homes possible, Mandler contends, and only since the 1970s has that revival become a triumphant appreciation. He enters today's debate with a discussion of how far people today—and tomorrow—are willing to see the aristocracy's heritage as their own.

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In a 2001 poll, Turks ranked the United States highest when asked: "Which country is Turkey's best friend in international relations?" When the pollsters reversed the question-"Which country is Turkey's number one enemy in international relations?"-the United States came in second. How did Turkey's citizens come to hold such opposing views simultaneously? In The Limits of Westernization, Perin E. Gurel explains this unique split and its echoes in contemporary U.S.-Turkey relations. Using Turkish and English sources, Gurel maps the reaction of Turks to the rise of the United States as a world-ordering power in the twentieth century. As Turkey transitioned from an empire to a nation-state, the country's ruling elite projected "westernization" as a necessary and desirable force but also feared its cultural damage. Turkish stock figures and figures of speech represented America both as a good model for selective westernization and as a dangerous source of degeneration. At the same time, U.S. policy makers imagined Turkey from within their own civilization templates, first as the main figure of Oriental barbarism (i.e., "the terrible Turk"), then, during the Cold War, as good pupils of modernization theory. As the Cold War transitioned to the War on Terror, Turks rebelled against the new U.S.-made trope of the "moderate Muslim." Local artifacts of westernization-folk culture crossed with American cultural exports-and alternate projections of modernity became tinder for both Turkish anti-Americanism and resistance to state-led modernization projects. The Limits of Westernization analyzes the complex local uses of "the West" to explain how the United States could become both the best and the worst in the Turkish political imagination. Gurel traces how ideas about westernization and America have influenced national history writing and policy making, as well as everyday affects and identities. Foregrounding shifting tropes about and from Turkey-a regional power that continues to dominate American visions for the "modernization" of the Middle East-Gurel also illuminates the transnational development of powerful political tropes, from "the Terrible Turk" to "the Islamic Terrorist."

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Martyrs are produced, Elizabeth Castelli suggests, not by the lived experience of particular historical individuals but by the stories that are later told about them. And the formulaic character of stories about past suffering paradoxically serves specific theological, cultural, or political ends in the present. Martyrdom and Memory explores the central role of persecution in the early development of Christian ideas, institutions, and cultural forms and shows how the legacy of Christian martyrdom plays out in today's world. In the pre-Constantinian imperial period, the conflict between Roman imperial powers and the subject Christian population hinged on competing interpretations of power, submission, resistance, and victory. This book highlights how both Roman and Christian notions of law and piety deployed the same forms of censure and critique, each accusing the other of deviations from governing conventions of gender, reason, and religion. Using Maurice Halbwachs's theoretical framework of collective memory and a wide range of Christian sources-autobiographical writings, martyrologies and saints'lives, sermons, art objects, pilgrimage souvenirs, and polemics about spectacle-Castelli shows that the writings of early Christians aimed to create public and ideologically potent accounts of martyrdom. The martyr's story becomes a "usable past" and a "living tradition" for Christian communities and an especially effective vehicle for transmitting ideas about gender, power, and sanctity. An unlikely legacy of early Christian martyrdom is the emergence of modern "martyr cults" in the wake of the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School. Focusing specifically on the martyr cult associated with one of the victims, Martyrdom and Memory argues that the Columbine story dramatically expresses the ongoing power of collective memory constructed around a process of rendering tragic suffering redemptive and meaningful. In the wake of Columbine and other contemporary legacies of martyrdom's ethical ambivalence, the global impact of Christian culture making in the early twenty-first century cannot be ignored. For as the last century's secularist hypothesis sits in the wings, "religion" returns to center stage with one of this drama's most contentious yet riveting stars: the martyr.

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Poland in the 1980s was filled with shuttered restaurants and shops that bore such imaginative names as "bread," "shoes," and "milk products," from which lines could stretch for days on the mere rumor there was something worth buying. But you'd be hard-pressed to recognize the same squares buzzing with bars and cafes today. In the years since the collapse of communism, Poland's GDP has almost tripled, making it the eight-largest economy in the European Union, with a wealth of well-educated and highly skilled workers and a buoyant private sector that competes in international markets. Many consider it one of the only European countries to have truly weathered the financial crisis. As the Warsaw bureau chief for the Financial Times, Jan Cienski spent more than a decade talking with the people who did something that had never been done before: recreating a market economy out of a socialist one. Poland had always lagged behind wealthier Western Europe, but in the 1980s the gap had grown to its widest in centuries. But the corrupt Polish version of communism also created the conditions for its eventual revitalization, bringing forth a remarkably resilient and entrepreneurial people prepared to brave red tape and limited access to capital. In the 1990s, more than a million Polish people opened their own businesses, selling everything from bicycles to leather jackets, Japanese VCRs, and romance novels. The most business-savvy turned those primitive operations into complex corporations that now have global reach. Well researched and accessibly and entertainingly written, Start-Up Poland tells the story of the opening bell in the East, painting lively portraits of the men and women who built successful businesses there, what their lives were like, and what they did to catapult their ideas to incredible success. At a time when Poland's new right-wing government plays on past grievances and forms part of the populist and nationalist revolution sweeping the Western world, Cienski's book also serves as a reminder that the past century has been the most successful in Poland's history.

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE ‘Gripping and at times ineffably sad, this book would be poetic even without the poetry. It will be the standard biography of Ted Hughes for a long time to come’ Sunday Times ‘Seldom has the life of a writer rattled along with such furious activity … A moving, fascinating biography’ The Times Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He is one of Britain’s most important poets, a poet of claws and cages: Jaguar, Hawk and Crow. Event and animal are turned to myth in his work. Yet he is also a poet of deep tenderness, of restorative memory steeped in the English literary tradition. A poet of motion and force, of rivers, light and redemption, of beasts in brooding landscapes. With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet who has lived, he was also a prolific children’s writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter-writer since John Keats. With his magnetic personality and an insatiable appetite for friendship, for love and for life, he also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. At the centre of the book is Hughes’s lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, the saddest and most infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry. Ted Hughes left behind him a more complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes’s inner life, preserved by him for posterity. Renowned scholar Sir Jonathan Bate has spent five years in his archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. His book offers for the first time the full story of Ted Hughes's life as it was lived, remembered and reshaped in his art. It is a book that honours, though not uncritically, Ted Hughes’s poetry and the art of life-writing, approached by his biographer with an honesty answerable to Hughes’s own.

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Literature on the civil rights movement has long highlighted the leadership of ministerial men and young black revolutionaries, such as Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Stokely Carmichael, and Malcolm X. Recent studies have begun to explore female participation in the struggle for racial justice, but women continue to be relegated to the margins of civil rights history. In Our Minds on Freedom, Shannon Frystak explores the organizational and leadership roles female civil rights activists in Louisiana played from the 1920s to the 1960s. She highlights a diverse group of courageous women who fought alongside their brothers and fathers, uncles and cousins, to achieve a more racially just Louisiana.From the Depression through World War II and the postwar years, Frystak shows, black women in Louisiana joined and led local unions and civil rights organizations, agitating for voting rights and equal treatment in the public arena, in employment, and in admission to the state's institutions of higher learning. At the same time, black and white women began to find common ground in organizations such as the YWCA, the NAACP, and the National Urban League. Frystak explores how women of both races worked together to organize the 1953 Baton Rouge bus boycott, which served as inspiration for the more famous Montgomery bus boycott two years later; to alter the system of unequal education throughout the state; and to integrate New Orleans schools after the 1954 Brown decision.In the early 1960s, a new generation of female activists joined their older counterparts to work with the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality, and a number of local grassroots civil rights organizations. Frystak vividly describes the very real dangers they faced canvassing for voter registration in Louisiana's rural areas, teaching in Freedom Schools, and hosting out-of-town civil rights workers in their homes.As Frystak shows, the civil rights movement allowed women to step out of their prescribed roles as wives, mothers, and daughters and become significant actors, indeed leaders, in a social-change structure largely dominated by men. Our Minds on Freedom is a welcome addition to the literature of the civil rights movement and will intrigue those interested in African American history, women's history, Louisiana, or the U.S. South.

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The Kama Sutra gives detailed instructions on how to spank it. Contemporary Italians touch it for luck before placing a bet. Americans are having it cosmetically enhanced at rates approaching breast enlargement surgery. The female butt, tush, culo, or derrière has always inspired awe, fantasy, and slavish devotion.Curiously, its primary purpose is functional rather than aesthetic: butts balance our bodies while running, according to biologists. But ask any pygophiliac—as fundament fans are clinically termed—and you’ll get the same answer: female hindquarters exist to please the eye, the hands, and parts south. A pert posterior causes instant arousal, as Zora Neale Hurston observed in Their Eyes Were Watching God: "The men noticed her firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her hip pockets." Or, as rapper Sir Mix-a-lot proclaimed, "My anaconda don’t want none, unless you’ve got buns, hun."Having all but disappeared from western culture in the breast-obsessed second half of the 20th century, the fully formed fanny is currently enjoying a massive resurgence, attributed by some to American actress Jennifer Lopez, by others to the rise of booty-centric hip hop culture. Yet this rage for shapely butts is nothing new. The ancient Greeks worshipped at the temple of Aphrodite Kallipygos, Goddess of the Beautiful Buttocks, while a womanly rump has always been an object of worship in most of the southern hemisphere.The Big Butt Book explores this perennial fascination with female booty—from small and taut to large and sumptuous—in the fourth installment of Dian Hanson’s critically acclaimed body parts series. Over 400 photos from 1900 to the present day, including works by Elmer Batters, Ellen von Unwerth, Jean-Paul Goude, Ralph Gibson, Richard Kern, Jan Saudek, Ed Fox, Terry Richardson and Sante D’Orazio, of butts ranging from petite Pam Anderson’s to sumptuous Serena Williams’, are contextualized by interviews with porn icon John (Buttman) Stagliano, filmmaker Tinto Brass, artist Robert Crumb, bootylicious butt queens Buffie The Body, Coco and Brazil’s Watermelon Woman, plus Eve Howard and her life-long spanking obsession.

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Text in German & English. When the stadium for a "Workers Olympiad" -- one of the most beautiful complexes in Europe, as the daily press put it -- was opened in 1931 on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Republic of Austria on the Prater site in Vienna, Otto Ernst Schweizer, the architect, was suddenly catapulted into the ranks of internationally acclaimed architects. The stadium, which can seat 60,000, was built as an amphitheatre on the model of its ancient predecessors, in particular the Colosseum in Rome, which Schweizer had studied intensively; the Viennese stadium seen as a reinterpretation of the enormous Roman structure on the basis of the constancy of things that were valid, which was one of the basic premises of his architecture. Otto Ernst Schweizer, born in 1890, and thus of the same generation as Le Corbusier, Hans Scharoun, Erich Mendelsohn and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, had attracted attention even as a young architect with some outstanding competition entries, and was acclaimed for his planetarium on the periphery of the old town in Nuremberg and for the stands and the two cafés of the stadium complex there. He had left municipal service as an Oberbaurat to dedicate himself to planning and realizing the Milchhof in Nuremberg and also the stadium in Vienna. For thirty years he worked as one of the great teachers and researchers in the architecture faculty of the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe. He built -- after a long break forced upon him by National Socialist culture policy -- the II. Kollegiengebäude for Freiburg University. This was his last building, and once again Schweizer's approach to form and function was concentrated in it, almost as the quintessence of a rich creative life. And what remains of the stadium, this most beautiful complex in Europe, as has been said? The landscape around it has been wrecked and allowed to fray into randomness and Schweizer's reflecting lake in front of the arena has been filled in. The arena itself has been enlarged by almost double its appropriate cubature and its height increased, so generally it has changed to such an extent that the original is unrecognisable; hence this book.

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Text in English and German. The Neues Haus, the new building for the Munchner Kammerspiele, is not a big building in any sense. The plot of land not far from Maximilian-strasse, whose greatest advantage is its proximity to Richard Riemerschmied's Schauspielhaus, is only about 1000 m2 in area. The most important quality of the design is in fact that it accepts the modesty of its role. The new building subordinates itself to the main Kammerspiele building, and manages without lavish foyers and extensive prestigious areas. The Neues Haus is a servant building, a place where work is done. A hasty passer-by would see the building simply as a white cube, reticent and introverted. Given the serene mastery of the brief and the architectural resources, one is almost inclined to call it a work of Peichl's old age, combining his love of clear volumes with a sovereign grasp of technical requirements. Like the silvery-sparkling ORF studios, the ground radio station in Styria and the liner-like phosphate elimination plant in Berlin before it, the Neues Haus is also crammed full of technology. It contains three stages, and two of them can be used at the same time. The largest playing area is elaborately equipped with gallery and under-stage; it is therefore intended as the main rehearsal area in future. The two large auditoriums are stacked one above the other like shoe-boxes and form a massive hollow core surrounded by all the service functions. The interior is dominated by a plainness that oscillates between poverty and asceticism. The corridors and foyers are narrow, the stairs simple, the interval areas positively sparse. The only opulent feature is the splendid technical equipment. Peichl's handwriting can be seen in the treatment of the details and his ingenious practice of self-quotation. Many of the motifs are reminiscent of earlier projects, and of course the typical portholes, spiral staircases and railings made of steel hawsers crop up again, all Peichl's usual maritime metaphors. In this way he has produced a building whose cool elegance reveals scarcely anything of its inner values.

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Elwes takes a journey through the twin histories of landscape art and experimental moving image and discovers how they coalesce in the work of artists from the 1970s to the present day. Drawing on a wide geographical sampling, Elwes considers issues that have preoccupied film and video artists over the years, ranging from ecology, gender, race, performativity, conflict, colonialism and our relationship to the nonhuman creatures with whom we share our world. The book is informed by the belief that artists can provide an embodied, emotional response to landscape, which is an essential driver in the urgent task of combating the environmental crisis we now face. The book comprises a series of essays that explore how the moving image mediates our relationship to and understanding of landscapes. The focus is on artists’ film and video and draws on work from the 1970s to the present day. Early chapters map the theoretical terrain for both landscape and artists’ moving image creating a foundation for the chapters that follow devoted to practice. These address themes of identity politics, performativity and animals and examine examples of British ‘weather-blown films’ and work from around the world including Indigenous Australian film landscapes. The book offers an informed, personal view of the subject and threaded through the narrative is a concern with the environment and the vexed question of whether an appreciation of nature’s aesthetics undermines a commitment to ecology. The book is written in a clear, engaging style and is enlivened by Elwes's own experiences as a video artist, writer and curator, and the primary material she draws on derived from conversations with fellow practitioners across the years. As a practitioner, Elwes was a key figure in the early phases of video art in the UK as well as a curator and critic. She was professor of moving image art at the University of the Arts London; and is founding editor of the Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ) This book will appeal to students, undergraduate and post-graduate, Ph.D. candidates, researchers, practitioners, teachers and lecturers and a general readership of interested gallery-going public.

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A physician and chef identifies the top ten brain-smart ingredients and shows that eating to maintain brain health is easy, accessible, delicious, and necessary for everyone. The foods we choose to eat (or not) sit at the core of the Alzheimer’s epidemic. In The Brain Health Kitchen, readers will learn exactly how making the right choices about the foods we select and cook, and how we eat them, can keep our brains younger, sharper, more vibrant, and much less prone to dementia. Scientific studies show that there are ten foods with powerful neuroprotective properties. None should come as a surprise—leafy greens, whole grains, berries, fatty fish, beans and lentils, olive oil, and more have been touted for their health-giving benefits since researchers put a name to the Mediterranean diet. But Dr. Annie Fenn takes a much more targeted approach, beginning with 100 recipes that incorporate brain-healthy foods into every meal of the day. From Caramelized Apple and Quinoa Pancakes for breakfast to Mushroom and White Bean Socca for lunch to dinners like Miso-Glazed Cod with Rice and Gingery Green Beans and Marinated Steak with Warm Kale Salad and Sweet Potatoes, here are dishes that are simply delicious, regardless of their health-boosting effects. Same with the desserts, like Coffee, Date, and Oat Bars. Readers will also learn other strategies for creating a brain-friendly dietary pattern, including choosing meats that fuel instead of harm; understanding the nuances between “good” and “bad” fats; embracing methods that preserve nutrients, such as braising and steaming; making sure to drink the right beverages; and addressing holistic issues like how diverse your food choices are and how beneficial it is to share meals with family and friends. Shifting to and sticking with a brain healthy diet is your first and best line of defense against the heartbreaking diseases of Alzheimer’s and dementia. And it works for everyone—omnivores, pescatarians, vegetarians and vegans, and the gluten-intolerant.

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Nowadays, neurovascular diseases represent a field of enormous interest in clinical and surgical areas because of their complex management and recent advances about surgical and endovascular techniques. The difficult decision-making process at the base of these pathologies comprehends a wide series of treatment options which ought to be mastered by all the specialists facing the neurovascular pathology. This book addresses every aspect of the most common neurovascular diseases, as intracranial aneurysms, brain and spinal cord AVMs and cavernous angiomas, cranial and spinal dural arteriovenous fistulas, as well as spontaneous cerebral haemorrhages. It also focuses on the newer technologies regarding the intraoperative imaging of the cerebral blood flow. A large part is dedicated to the surgical approaches, but also tips and tricks of the management of these complex pathologies, presented by expert and world-renowned neurosurgeons, neuroradiologists and other specialists. The first section reviews the anatomy of the skull base, cranial and spinal cord vasculature. The second analyses in detail the diagnosis, decision-making process, preoperative evaluation and surgical planning of the most common surgical neurovascular diseases. The third reports the most common surgical approaches employed for cranial neurovascular diseases, whereas the fourth miscellaneous section is mainly dedicated to the peculiar aspects regarding the management of giant and complex aneurysms, endovascular techniques, and also the role of radiosurgery for specific intra-axial vascular lesions. A further chapter describes the technical aspects regarding the use of indocyanine green and fluorescein videoangiography during neurovascular surgery. The main valuable strengths of this book lie in its case-based conception and wide number of coloured figures, tables and treatment algorithms. In its structured organization, this book serves as a practical case-based guide for neurosurgeons, neurologists, neuroradiologists, residents, fellows, physicians and medical students involved in the field of neuroscience. The book enables all these specialists to gain high-value insights into the preoperative evaluation, planning, surgical techniques, pitfalls, prevention and management of complications of the surgical neurovascular pathology. Thanks to the contribution of different world-renowned neurosurgeons, neuroradiologists and experts, this book also promotes an updated overview of the most recent advances in neurovascular and neuroendovascular surgery, at the same time encouraging an interdisciplinary approach.

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The syndrome X or metabolic syndrome may be defined as a constellation of several interrelated risk factors of metabolic origin which includes centrally distributed obesity, decreased high density lipoprotein cholesterol, elevated triglycerides, elevated blood pressure and hyperglycemia. Persons with syndrome X are at twice the risk of developing cardiovascular disease, and are at about five-fold the risk of type 2 diabetes mellitus as compare to persons with this syndrome. There are considerable evidences of important ethnic differences in the prevalence of syndrome X, its components and sequelae. The prevalence varied between ethnic groups even within the same geographical location. Apart from multifactorial (genetic vs. environmental) nature, there are intriguing metabolic and anthropometric differences found across different ethnic groups. The estimates vary by ethnicity, for instance, high prevalence in non-European groups such as Black African-Caribbeans, Hispanics, indigenous populations of North America, South Asians, and the Western Pacific Region and lower prevalence in Chinese populations, and European-White. Public health strategies that are well known to be important for chronic disease prevention in general can substantially reduce the prevalence of syndrome X. Population-specific studies will be important in identifying subgroups for which syndrome X is a health issue and for which disease management strategies are needed. Simultaneously, studies to identify different biomarkers associated with syndrome X that are linked with the development of specific chronic diseases, such as CVD and diabetes, will significantly enhance the early detection of these diseases. Existing preventions strategies, if implemented in population subgroups at highest risk, may have a substantial effect on reducing these trends. The prevalence of syndrome X increases with advancing age suggests that the efforts to increase awareness of prevention strategies must begin early. Intensive treatment and effective targeting efforts would help in avoiding future sequelae of syndrome X across different ethnicity. This book will be an assemblage of similarities and differences in the risk of syndrome X and related disorders among different ethnic groups worldwide, and reviews potential mechanisms for ethnic differences. It would certain help in translational research for early intervention and better prevention of syndrome X and its associated public health burden worldwide.

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In the 19th century, Daniel Waggoner and his son, W.T. (Tom), put together an empire in North Texas that became the largest ranch under one fence in the nation. The 520,000-plus acres or 800 square miles covers six counties and sits on a large oil field in the Red River Valley of North Texas. Over the years, the estate also owned five banks, three cottonseed oil mills, and a coal company. Headquarters are in an office building in Vernon. Estimated value last quoted was $300 million. The history is colorful. Although Dan seems to have led a fairly low-profile life, W. T. moved to Fort Worth, became a bank director, built two office buildings, ran his cattle on the Big Pasture in Indian Territory (Oklahoma), hosted Teddy Roosevelt at a wolf hunt in the Big Pasture, and sent Quanah Parker to Washington, D.C., for Roosevelt’s inauguration. W. T. had three children including his daughter, Electra, the light of his life. W. T. built a mansion in Fort Worth for her—today the house, the last surviving cattle baron mansion on Fort Worth’s Silk Stocking Row, is open to the public for tours and events. Electra, an international celebrity and extravagant shopper (she once spent $10,000 in one day at Neiman Marcus), died at the age of forty-three. W.T.’s brother Guy had nine wives; his brother E. Paul, partier and horse breeder, was married to the same woman for fifty years and had one daughter, Electra II. Electra II was a both a celebrity and a talented sculptor, best known for a heroic-size state of Will Rogers on his horse, Soapsuds, as well as busts of two presidents and various movie stars. She is said to once have been involved with Cary Grant. After marriage to an executive she settled in a mansion at the ranch and raised two daughters. This book tells the story of the Wagonner women and their need to do something with the restless energy they possessed. The women did not have—or did not choose—ranching as an outlet for their strong personalities. The story is also about the juxtaposition of a love of the land versus the self-indulgent love of money—a common theme among ranch families that led to the dissolution of many.

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The first comprehensive biography of this undervalued writer, who was considered 'far and away the best living woman poet' in her day.Andrew Motion's Spectator Book of the Year.'One of the many achievements of This Rare Spirit is its rejection of that tired view of the poet as mouse that barely roared in favour of a true sense of a spikily modern woman, bound by various obligations but resilient, headstrong, and poetically inventive . . . Copus's diligent, scholarly, sensitive work should help Mew's pipe play on for years to come.' Declan Ryan, Los Angeles Review of Books'[A] supreme biography . . . It is hard to do justice to the breadth of research Copus has done here, or the compassionate, detailed conjuring of Mew and her milieu . . . An essential book, a classic work of literary biography.' Seán Hewitt, Irish Times'[K]eenly intelligent, fascinating and nuanced biography . . . Save Charlotte Mew! And read this book.' Joanna Kavenna, Literary Review'An exquisitely told account of the life of a half-forgotten London poet whose work was admired by Hardy, Sassoon and Virginia Woolf. Julia Copus does her justice at last.' Claire Tomalin'This Rare Spirit is a classic - the biography of Mew we have all been waiting for.' Fiona BensonThe British poet Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) was regarded as one of the best poets of her age by fellow writers, including Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sasson, Walter de la Mare and Marianne Moore. She has since been neglected, but her star is beginning to rise again, all the more since her 150th anniversary in 2019. This is the first comprehensive biography, from cradle to grave, and is written by fellow poet Julia Copus, who recently unveiled a blue plaque on Mew's childhood house in Doughty Street and was the editor of the Selected Poetry and Prose (2019).Mew was a curious mix of New Woman and stalwart Victorian. Her poems speak to us strongly today, in these strangely mixed times of exposure and seclusion: they reveal the private agony of an isolated being who was forced to keep secret the tragedies of her personal life while being at the same time propelled by her work into the public arena. Her poetry transfigures that very private suffering into art that has a universal resonance.

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The new book from interior design powerhouse Abigail Ahern, Masterclass is based on the building blocks that will make your home look great: seating, lighting, walls, floors and accessories. Abigail demonstrates her style perfectly with original location photography and case studies of fabulous homes. The furniture is in, the cushions are plumped, the shelves are up but something is missing… a touch of design magic. This book takes interiors to another level – encouraging all of us to become home design rule-breakers, from combining polarizing qualities and using elements that shouldn’t work together but actually do, to never mixing too much of the same period or style in a space. Globally recognized interiors guru Abigail Ahern uses lavish colour photography and tried-and-tested tips to demystify the design process and decode exactly why a space works. From key furniture arrangements and fail-safe magic formulas for surfaces, to cracking the code on mixing and matching lighting, from ‘fake it till you make it’ flooring to stylish statements with tiles, as well as remedies for renters, there are infinite ways to spice things up. Abigail imparts the tips, tricks and insider knowledge that she has honed over many years at the top of her game. Her friendly and witty writing style means that you’ll feel like you’re learning while being entertained. With this book, you’ll create a relaxing yet swoon-worthy home by layering lighting, combining colours just right, putting the sofa where it belongs (clue: not where you’d think) – and much more. Abigail divides the home into five main subjects such as Lighting. Each chapter includes handy checklists of pro tips, and ends with a case study of a gorgeous home belonging to a creative or designer including chef Jason Atherton and top designers Jeremiah Brent and Nate Berkus’s phenomenal New York brownstone. It’s a motivational, inspirational and full to the brim of cool and clever ideas, style advice and stories. It's good to be home! Chapters:Perfect PerchesCracking the Code on LightingWall WisdomThe Low-down on FloorsAccessories and Accents

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Start every day with Sunrise Gratitude, a collection of 365 guided meditations accompanied by lush photographs of nature that will guide your mind to a place of calm awareness and purpose—the perfect companion to Moonlight Gratitude. As the sun rises, it can be hard to motivate yourself to wake up and start your busy schedule, but with this gorgeous book you’ll learn to heighten your awareness, so you start the day feeling refreshed and ready to be your best self.Sunrise Gratitude will naturally calm your thinking as you learn to understand your mind in the morning for a tranquil daily routine. You’ll wake up with a peaceful, purposeful mindset—ideal for when you need a little pick-me-up to make you feel ready to take on the day.Sample meditations:February 20 Living intentionally creates a soulful reason behind our actions. When we take the time to focus on what we want and why we want it, we can narrow our focus. Instead of allowing our thoughts to run wild, focusing shapes our reality. Wherever our focus goes, growth can take place. Creating an intention with focus will reap rewards. In fact, it may not happen exactly as you would envision, but it will happen as it should.June 21 Each of us has a gift to share with the world. We are born with these gifts or develop them, and they burn like a fire inside our souls. We are all creative in our own way. It takes courage to create and share something that comes from the soul—and your gift is best when shared. You never know who may need to receive your gift. Sometimes all we need is an audience of one. Create without expectation. Let the fire within you bring passion and light into the world. Easily implement calm, gratitude, and meditation into your daily habits with the Daily Gratitude series. These inspiring books guide you through the process of building mindful habits for your preferred schedule or personal goals. They are beautifully designed and elegantly put together to make your journey enjoyable as well as simple. Also available from the series: Moonlight Gratitude and Moon Meditations.

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Each year, thousands of pilgrims visit the celebrated New Orleans tomb where Marie Laveau is said to lie. They seek her favors or fear her lingering influence. Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau is the first study of the Laveaus, mother and daughter of the same name. Both were legendary leaders of religious and spiritual traditions many still label as evil.The Laveaus were free women of color and prominent French-speaking Catholic Creoles. From the 1820s until the 1880s when one died and the other disappeared, gossip, fear, and fierce affection swirled about them. From the heart of the French Quarter, in dance, drumming, song, and spirit possession, they ruled the imagination of New Orleans.How did the two Maries apply their ""magical"" powers and uncommon business sense to shift the course of love, luck, and the law? The women understood the real crime--they had pitted their spiritual forces against the slave system of the United States. Moses-like, they led their people out of bondage and offered protection and freedom to the community of color, rich white women, enslaved families, and men condemned to hang.The curse of the Laveau family, however, followed them. Both loved men they could never marry. Both faced down the press and police who stalked them. Both countered the relentless gossip of curses, evil spirits, murders, and infant sacrifice with acts of benevolence.The book is also a detective story--who is really buried in the famous tomb in the oldest ""city of the dead"" in New Orleans? What scandals did the Laveau family intend to keep buried there forever? By what sleight of hand did free people of color lose their cultural identity when Americans purchased Louisiana and imposed racial apartheid upon Creole creativity? Voodoo Queen brings the improbable testimonies of saints, spirits, and never-before-printed eyewitness accounts of ceremonies and magical crafts together to illuminate the lives of the two Marie Laveaus, leaders of a major, indigenous American religion.

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‘Morland predicts the future of humanity in 10 illuminating statistics (could the Japanese and Italians now go the way of the dodo?) and looks back to how ebbs and flows of population have shaped history, such as the Soviet Union’s plummeting birth rate in the 1960s, which hastened the end of the Cold War.’ - The Daily Telegraph ‘The Best Books for Summer 2022’The great forces of population change – the balance of births, deaths and migrations – have made the world what it is today. They have determined which countries are superpowers and which languish in relative obscurity, which economies top the international league tables and which are at best also-rans.The same forces that have shaped our past and present are shaping our future. Illustrating this through ten illuminating indicators, from the fertility rate in Singapore (one) to the median age in Catalonia (forty-three), Paul Morland shows how demography is both a powerful and an under-appreciated lens through which to view the global transformations that are currently underway.Tomorrow’s People ranges from the countries of West Africa where the tendency towards large families is combining with falling infant mortality to create the greatest population explosion ever witnessed, to the countries of East Asia and Southern Europe where generations of low birth-rate and rising life expectancy are creating the oldest populations in history. Morland explores the geographical movements of peoples that are already under way – portents for still larger migrations ahead – which are radically changing the cultural, ethnic and religious composition of many societies across the globe, and in their turn creating political reaction that can be observed from Brexit to the rise of Donald Trump. Finally, he looks at the two underlying motors of change – remarkable rises in levels of education and burgeoning food production – which have made all these epochal developments possible.Tomorrow’s People provides a fascinating, illuminating and thought-provoking tour of an emerging new world. Nobody who wants to understand that world should be without it.

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This excellent second edition of Fisheries Biology, Assessment and Management, has been fully updated and expanded, providing a book which is an essential purchase for students and scientists studying, working or researching in fisheries and aquatic sciences. In the same way that excessive hunting on land has threatened terrestrial species, excessive fishing in the sea has reduced stocks of marine species to dangerously low levels. In addition, the ecosystems that support coastal marine species are threatened by habitat destruction, development and pollution. Open access policies and subsidised fishing are placing seafood in danger of becoming a scarce and very expensive commodity for which there is an insatiable demand. Positive trends include actions being taken to decrease the incidental catches of non-target species, consumer preferences for seafood from sustainable fisheries, and the establishment of no-take areas that provide refuges for marine species. But there is an urgent need to do more. Because there is an increasing recognition of the need to manage ecosystems as well as fish stocks, this second edition of this bestselling text book includes an additional chapter on marine ecology. Chapters on parameter estimation and stock assessment now include step-by-step instructions on building computer spreadsheet models, including simulations with random variations that realistically emulate the vagaries of nature. Sections on ecosystem management, co-management, community-based management and marine protected areas have been expanded to match the increased interest in these areas. Containing many worked examples, computer programs and numerous high quality illustrations, Fisheries Biology, Assessment and Management, second edition, is a comprehensive and essential text for students worldwide studying fisheries, fish biology, aquatic and biological sciences. As well as serving as a core text for students, the book is a superb reference for fisheries and aquatic researchers, scientists and managers across the globe, in both temperate and tropical regions. Libraries in all universities where fish biology, fisheries, aquatic sciences and biological sciences are studied and taught will need copies of this most useful new edition on their shelves. Supplementary material is available at: www.blackwellpublishing.com/king

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This is Martha Wainwright’s heartfelt memoir about growing up in a bohemian musical family and her experiences with love, loss, motherhood, divorce, the music industry and more. Born into music royalty, the daughter of folk legends Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III and sister to the highly-acclaimed singer Rufus Wainwright, Martha grew up in a world filled with such incomparable folk legends as Leonard Cohen, Anna McGarrigle, Richard and Linda Thompson, Pete Townsend and Emmylou Harris. It was within this loud, boisterous, musical milieu that Martha came of age, struggling to find her voice until she exploded onto the music scene with her 2005 debut and critically acclaimed album, Martha Wainwright, which contained the blistering hit, ‘Bloody Mother F*cking Asshole’, which the Sunday Times called one of the best songs of that year. Her successful debut album and the ones that followed such as Come Home to Mama, I Know You're Married but I've Got Feelings Too and Goodnight City came to define Martha's searing songwriting style and established her as a powerful voice to be reckoned with.'With disarming candour and courage, Martha tells us of finding her own voice and peace as a working artist and mother. Her story is made more unique because of the remarkably gifted musical family she was born into.' EMMYLOU HARRIS In Stories I Might Regret Telling You, Martha digs into the deep recesses of herself with the same emotional honesty that has come to define her music. She describes her tumultuous public-facing journey from awkward, earnest and ultimately rebellious daughter, through her intense competition and ultimate alliance with her brother, Rufus, to the heart-breaking loss of their mother, Kate, and then, finally, discovering her voice as an artist. With candour and grace, Martha writes of becoming a mother herself and making peace with her past struggles with Kate and her younger self. Ultimately, this book offers a thoughtful and deeply personal look into the extraordinary life of one of the most talented singer-songwriters in music today.

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She’s a sunny morning-show host. He’s a cynical ex-reporter. They're destined to hate each other . . . Aren’t they?Brynn Cornell has to be stuck in a nightmare. Just last week, she was riding high as cohost of the popular morning show Sunup. She's America's Ray of Sunshine—the girl-next-door beauty who drives up TV ratings while never exuding anything but her trademark positivity and poise. All it took was one huge on-air mistake to expose her snarky side to the world and make it all come crumbling down. Now she’s back in her hometown of Adelaide Springs, Colorado, in a last-ditch attempt to convince viewers she’s not the mean girl they think she is. All she has to do is apologize and capture some feel-good footage reminding everyone she’s just a girl from humble beginnings who’s grateful for her big break, and she might manage to preserve both her career and her image. But this town holds painful memories that she’s not ready to face.Sebastian Sudworth was on the fast track to the journalist hall of fame. A superstar reporter with a reputation for being in the center of the action, his fearless, relentless coverage of major events around the globe was winning him awards and accolades—until something snapped inside him and he vanished from the scene under mysterious circumstances. Sebastian sought refuge in tiny Adelaide Springs, working odd jobs and trying to blend in as a scruffy mountain town citizen.When Sebastian is assigned to chauffeur Brynn around town, Brynn is sure he can see right through her carefully cultivated, sunny persona. But she’s determined to do what it takes to maintain her image and save her career—so she’ll just have to charm the socks off Sebastian the same way she charmed her viewers. Easier said than done. It's no picnic to play nice around someone you hate . . . especially when you might be crazy about them. Parks and Rec meets The Morning Show in this stand-alone enemies-to-lovers rom-com Also by Bethany Turner: The Do-Over and Plot Twist Includes discussion questions for book clubs

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