Search results for ""Author Alex"

"... a gorgeous compilation of interiors from the homes of famous artists past and present as a way of exhibiting each creator's 'power and legacy' - Publishers Weekly An inspiring collection of the extraordinary private spaces of 250 of the world's most creative people, past and present Life Meets Art presents an unparalleled, global, behind-the-scenes tour through 250 beautiful interiors from the homes of the most creative people in art, architecture, design, fashion, literature, music, film and theatre. These inspiring, unique spaces show us the spaces where the greatest creatives in history lived their lives, honed their crafts and, in many cases, produced some of the world's most celebrated masterpieces - providing an intimate and insightful perspective on the masters that define artistic history. Organized alphabetically by artist, each interior features a color photograph and a short descriptive text, including details on whether the house is open to the public or private. This book will inspire everyone fascinated by stylish living, creative interior design, and the myriad possibilities for home décor, as well as those fascinated by the personal and professional lives of their cultural heroes. Life Meets Art includes homes from creative masters of past centuries such as artists da Vinci, Raphael and Rubens, composers Handel, Lizst, and Verdi and writers Dickens, Byron, and Coleridge. The book also showcases the extraordinary interiors of many twentieth century stars and epoch-defining talents such as architects Frank Lloyd Wright, Eileen Gray, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius, artists Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, and Henry Moore, writers Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Agatha Christie and musicians Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, and Elvis Presley. Homes from some of the most celebrated talents of today are also featured, including artists Francisco Clemente, Cornelia Parker, and Gilbert and George, fashion designers Alexander McQueen, Marc Jacobs, and Diane von Furstenberg, designers Marc Newson and Es Devlin and musicians Moby, Jimmy Page, and David Bowie.

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What to Expect When Black, Pregnant, and Expecting“This book stands as the modern-day guide to birthing while Black.” ―Angelina Ruffin-Alexander, certified nurse midwife2021 International Book Awards finalist in Health: Women’s Health#1 New Release in Pregnancy & Childbirth and Minority Demographic Studies, Medical Ethics, and Women's Health NursingWritten with lighthearted humor and cultural context, Oh Sis, You’re Pregnant! discusses the stages of pregnancy, labor, and motherhood as they pertain to pregnant Black women today.Tailored to today’s pregnant Black woman. In the age of social media, how do pregnant women communicate their big announcement? What are the best protective hairstyles for labor? Most importantly, how many pregnancy guides focus on issues like Black maternal birth rates and what it really looks like to be Black, pregnant, and single today? Written for the modern pregnant Black woman, Oh Sis, You’re Pregnant! is the essential what to expect when you're expecting guide to understanding pregnancy from a millennial Black mom’s point of view.Interviews, stories, and advice for pregnant women. Written by Black Moms Blog founder, the book tackles hard topics in a way that truly resonate with modern Black moms. With stories from her experiences through pregnancy, labor, and motherhood, and lessons learned as a mother at twenty-two, Oh Sis, You’re Pregnant! focuses on the common knowledge Black pregnant mothers should consider when having their first baby. It also shares topics beneficial to pregnant Black women on their second, third, or fourth born.Find answers to questions: Do I financially plan for my birth? Can I maintain my relationship and friendships during motherhood? Will I self-advocate for my rights in a world that already views me as less than? If you enjoyed books like Medical Apartheid, 50 Things To Do Before You Deliver, The Girlfriends' Guide to Pregnancy, or Birthing Justice, then you’ll love Oh Sis, You’re Pregnant!

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Since the earliest known marker denoting the edge of one land and the beginning of the next—a stone column inscribed with Sumerian cuneiform—borders have been imagined, mapped, moved, and fought over. In The Edge of the Plain, James Crawford skillfully blends history, travel writing, and reportage to trace these borderlines throughout history and across the globe. What happens on the ground when we impose lines on a map that contradict how humans have always lived—and moved? Crawford confronts that question from bloody territorial disputes in Mesopotamia, to the Sápmi lands of Scandinavia, the shifting boundaries of the Israel-Palestine conflict, efforts to build a wall on the United States-Mexico border, and the dangerous border crossings pursued by migrants into Europe. And yet the role of borders extends beyond specific sites of conflict. On the largest scale, borders define the limits of empire—the two walls in Britain that once represented the northwestern edge of the Roman Empire; the mythological eastern gate supposedly closed off by Alexander the Great; China’s virtual “Great Firewall.” On the smallest, human scale, cell walls are the last physical barrier against disease, after lines of quarantine have failed. Finally, as The Edge of the Plain reveals, humans have not only made their mark on the landscape: the landscape itself is now changing, more and more rapidly due to climate change. Crawford introduces us to both the Alpine watershed—one such shifting, natural borderline—and the “Great Green Wall” in Africa, envisioned as an international, community-built bulwark against desertification. Borders are as old as human civilization, and focal points for today’s colliding forces of nationalism, climate change, globalization, and mass migration. The Edge of the Plain illuminates these lines of separation past and present, how we define them—and how they define us.

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Far away from the trendy cafés, designer boutiques, and political protests and crackdowns in Moscow, the real Russia exists. Midnight in Siberia chronicles David Greene’s journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway, a 6,000-mile cross-country trip from Moscow to the Pacific port of Vladivostok. In quadruple-bunked cabins and stopover towns sprinkled across the country’s snowy landscape, Greene speaks with ordinary Russians about how their lives have changed in the post-Soviet years. These travels offer a glimpse of the new Russia—a nation that boasts open elections and newfound prosperity but continues to endure oppression, corruption, a dwindling population, and stark inequality. We follow Greene as he finds opportunity and hardship embodied in his fellow train travelers and in conversations with residents of towns throughout Siberia. We meet Nadezhda, an entrepreneur who runs a small hotel in Ishim, fighting through corrupt layers of bureaucracy every day. Greene spends a joyous evening with a group of babushkas who made international headlines as runners-up at the Eurovision singing competition. They sing Beatles covers, alongside their traditional songs, finding that music and companionship can heal wounds from the past. In Novosibirsk, Greene has tea with Alexei, who runs the carpet company his mother began after the Soviet collapse and has mixed feelings about a government in which his family has done quite well. And in Chelyabinsk, a hunt for space debris after a meteorite landing leads Greene to a young man orphaned as a teenager, forced into military service, and now figuring out if any of his dreams are possible. Midnight in Siberia is a lively travel narrative filled with humor, adventure, and insight. It opens a window onto that country’s complicated relationship with democracy and offers a rare look into the soul of twenty-first-century Russia.

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Far away from the trendy cafés, designer boutiques, and political protests and crackdowns in Moscow, the real Russia exists. Midnight in Siberia chronicles David Greene’s journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway, a 6,000-mile cross-country trip from Moscow to the Pacific port of Vladivostok. In quadruple-bunked cabins and stopover towns sprinkled across the country’s snowy landscape, Greene speaks with ordinary Russians about how their lives have changed in the post-Soviet years. These travels offer a glimpse of the new Russia—a nation that boasts open elections and newfound prosperity but continues to endure oppression, corruption, a dwindling population, and stark inequality. We follow Greene as he finds opportunity and hardship embodied in his fellow train travelers and in conversations with residents of towns throughout Siberia. We meet Nadezhda, an entrepreneur who runs a small hotel in Ishim, fighting through corrupt layers of bureaucracy every day. Greene spends a joyous evening with a group of babushkas who made international headlines as runners-up at the Eurovision singing competition. They sing Beatles covers, alongside their traditional songs, finding that music and companionship can heal wounds from the past. In Novosibirsk, Greene has tea with Alexei, who runs the carpet company his mother began after the Soviet collapse and has mixed feelings about a government in which his family has done quite well. And in Chelyabinsk, a hunt for space debris after a meteorite landing leads Greene to a young man orphaned as a teenager, forced into military service, and now figuring out if any of his dreams are possible. Midnight in Siberia is a lively travel narrative filled with humor, adventure, and insight. It opens a window onto that country’s complicated relationship with democracy and offers a rare look into the soul of twenty-first-century Russia.

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Each federal employee takes an oath to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic," but none had imagined that enemy might be the Commander-in-Chief. With the presidency of Donald Trump, a fault line between the president and vital forces within his government was established. Those who honored their oath of office, their obligation to the Constitution, were wary of the president and they in turn were not trusted and occasionally fired and replaced with loyalists. American Resistance is the first book to chronicle the unprecedented role so many in the government were forced to play and the consequences of their actions during the Trump administration. From Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and his brother Yevgeny, to Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, to Bill Taylor, Fiona Hill, and the official who first called himself "Anonymous"-Miles Taylor, among others, Rothkopf examines the resistance movement that slowly built in Washington. Drawing from first hand testimonies, deep background and research, American Resistance shows how when the President threatened to run amok, a few key figures rose in defiance. It reveals the conflict within the Department of Justice over actively seeking instances of election fraud and abuse to help the president illegally retain power, and multiple battles within the White House over the influence of Jared and Ivanka, and in particular the extraordinary efforts to get them security clearances even after they were denied to them. David Rothkopf chronicles how each person came to realize that they were working for an administration that threatened to wreak havoc - one Defense Secretary was told by his mother to resign before it was too late - in an intense drama in which a few good men and women stood up to the tyrant in their midst.

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Ekaterin Matusova offers a new approach to the old problems of interpretation of the “Letter of Aristeas”. Chapter 1 deals with the question of the structure of the narrative. Matusova argues that at the time of Aristeas compositions of the kind of the Reworked Pentateuch, or Rewritten Bible were circulating in Egypt in parallel with the LXX and were a source of interpretations of the Hebrew text different from the LXX and of specific combinations of subjects popular in Second Temple Judaism. In particular, Matusova further argues that the leading principle of the composition of the Letter is that of the Reworked Deuteronomy, where subjects referring to the idea of following the Law among the gentiles were grouped together. The analysis is based on a broad circle of Jewish sources, including Philo of Alexandria and documents from the Qumran library. The principle of the composition discovered in this part of the study is referred to as the Jewish paradigm. Chapter 2 offers a new interpretation of the frame story in the narrative, i.e. of the story of the translation in the strict sense. Matusova shows that two paradigms are skilfully combined in this split story: the Jewish one, based on the Bible, and the Greek one, which involves Greek grammatical theory. She further argues that the story, when read in terms of Greek grammar, turns out to be a consistent story not of the translation, but of the correction of the LXX, which is important for our understanding of the early history of the translation. The analysis involves extensive excurses into Greek grammatical theory, including a discussion of Aristotle, Dionysius Thrax and other Hellenistic grammarians. In Chapter 3 Matusova tries to find the reason for the combination of these two paradigms, namely the Jewish biblical paradigm and the Greek grammatical ones, and to interpret their interconnected meaning, by placing it in the broad historical context of the Ptolemaic state.

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In a series of revolts starting in 1820, four military officers rode forth on horseback from obscure European towns to bring political freedom and a constitution to Spain, Naples, and Russia; and national independence to the Greeks. The men who launched these exploits from Andalusia to the snowy fields of Ukraine--Colonel Rafael del Riego, General Guglielmo Pepe, General Alexandros Ypsilanti, and Colonel Sergei Muraviev-Apostol--all hoped to overturn the old order. Over the next six years, their revolutions ended in failure. The men who led them became martyrs. In The Four Horsemen, the late, eminent historian Richard Stites offers a compelling narrative history of these four revolutions. Stites sets the stories side by side, allowing him to compare events and movements and so illuminate such topics as the transfer of ideas and peoples across frontiers, the formation of an international community of revolutionaries, and the appropriation of Christian symbols and language for secular purposes. He shows how expressive behavior and artifacts of all kinds--art, popular festivities, propaganda, and religion--worked their way to various degrees into all the revolutionary movements and regimes. And he documents as well the corruption, abandonment of liberal values, and outright betrayal of the revolution that emerged in Spain and Naples; the clash of ambitions and ideas that wracked the unity of the Decembrists' cause; and civil war that erupted in the midst of the Greek struggle for independence. Richard Stites was one of the most imaginative and broad-ranging historians working in the United States. This book is his last work, a classic example of his dazzling knowledge and idiosyncratic yet accessible writing style. The culmination of an esteemed career, The Four Horsemen promises to enthrall anyone interested in nineteenth-century Europe and the history of revolutions.

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***Shortlisted for Best Fantasy Novel in the Aurealis Awards******Shortlisted for the Vogel Award ***Good girls don't talk back. Good girls don't cry. Good girls don't scream.Sadie Burke has been forced to be a good girl her entire life. As a banshee, she's the bottom of the ladder when it comes to the supernatural hierarchy. Weak. Condemned. Powerless. Silent. That's what she and her six sisters have been told their entire lives, since their species was first banished from Ireland.Yet when a figure from her childhood unexpectedly arrives on the scene, Sadie finds it harder than ever to toe the line.Texas Contos is the son of their greatest oppressor. He's also someone she's inexplicably drawn to, and as they grow closer, Sadie begins to question what banshees have been told for centuries about their gifts.But the truth comes at a cost. With Sadie and Tex forced to run for their lives, their journey leads them to new friends, old enemies, and finally to her true voice - one that could shatter the supernatural world forever.'Maria Lewis is a must-read' Buzzfeed'Pay attention urban fantasy fans - Maria Lewis is a name you'll want to remember' One More Page'If you haven't heard about Maria Lewis you must have been living under a rock' Good Reading Magazine'I can't wait to find out what happens next!' Keri Arthur'Truly one of the best in the genre I have ever read' Oscar-nominee Lexi Alexander (Green Street Hooligans, Punisher: War Zone, Arrow, Supergirl)'Journalist Maria Lewis grabs the paranormal fiction genre by the scruff of its neck and gives it a shake' The West Australian'An intriguing take on a classic monster with vibrant, modern characters' Sci Fi Bulletin

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Notoriously difficult to define as a genre, Live Art is commonly positioned as a challenge to received artistic, social and political categories: not theatre, not dance, not visual art... and often wilfully anti-mainstream and anti-establishment. But as it has become an increasingly prevalent category in international festivals, major art galleries, diverse publications and higher education streams, it is time for a reassessment. This collection of essays, conversations, provocations and archival images takes the twentieth anniversary of the founding of one of the sector’s most committed champions, the Live Art Development Agency (LADA) in London, as an opportunity to consider not only what Live Art has been against, but also what it has been for. Rather than defining the practices in oppositional terms – what they might be seeking to critique, reject or disrupt – this collection reframes these practices in terms of the relations and commitments they might be used to model or advocate. What kinds of care and recovery do they enable? What do they connect as well as reject? What do they make possible as they test the impossible? What ideas of success do they stand for as they risk failure? In this way, the central theme of the collection, and to which all contributors were invited to respond, is the idea of agency: the capacity for new kinds of thoughts, actions and energies as enacted by individual artists and groups. It seems appropriate that this question would be considered in relation to the history of one particular ‘agency’: LADA itself. These questions are explored in a unique conversational format, bringing together a diverse range of emerging and established practitioners, curators and leading figures in the field, each paired with another practitioner for a live conversation that has been sensitively edited for the page. Curated within a structure of five overlapping themes – Bodies, Spaces, Institutions, Communities and Actions – this format produces unexpected insights and accounts of the development of the field. Each theme also contains two provocative essays by leading scholars, thinkers and makers, exploring the conceptual frames in more detail. The result is a collection that is as heterogeneous, ambitious, contradictory and inspiring as the field of Live Art itself. Contributors: Aaron Williamson, Adrian Heathfield, Alan Read, Alastair MacLennan, Alexandrina Hemsley, Amelia Jones, Andrew Mottershead, Andy Field, Anne Bean, Barby Asante, Bryan Biggs, Cassils, Catherine Wood, David A. Bailey, Dominic Johnson, Gary Anderson, George Chakravarthi, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Hayley Newman, Heike Roms, Helen Paris, James Leadbitter, Jamila Johnson-Small, Jane Trowell, Jen Harvie, Johanna Tuukkanen, John Jordan, John McGrath, Jordan McKenzie, Joshua Sofaer, Katherine Araniello, Kira O'Reilly, Lena Šimić, Leslie Hill, Lois Keidan, Lois Weaver, Manuel Vason, Martin O'Brien, Mary Paterson, Rajni Shah, Rebecca French, Richard Dedomenici, Ron Athey, RoseLee Goldberg, Selina Thompson, Simon Casson and Tim Etchells. Co-published with Live Art Development Agency. Winner of the 2021 TaPRA Edited Collection Prize

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Thirty-four essays that take a serious look at the state of modern cinema Almost half a century ago, Jean-Luc Godard famously remarked, "I await the end of cinema with optimism." Lots of us have been waiting forand wondering aboutthis prophecy ever since. The way films are made and exhibited has changed significantly. Films, some of which are not exactly "films" anymore, can now be projected in a wide variety of wayson screens in revamped high tech theaters, on big, high-resolution TVs, on little screens in minivans and laptops. But with all this new gear, all these new ways of viewing films, are we necessarily getting different, better movies? The thirty-four brief essays in The End of Cinema as We Know It attend a variety of topics, from film censorship and preservation to the changing structure and status of independent cinemafrom the continued importance of celebrity and stardom to the sudden importance of alternative video. While many of the contributors explore in detail the pictures that captured the attention of the nineties film audience, such as Jurassic Park, Eyes Wide Shut, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, The Wedding Banquet, The Matrix, Independence Day, Gods and Monsters, The Nutty Professor, and Kids, several essays consider works that fall outside the category of film as it is conventionally definedthe home "movie" of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's honeymoon and the amateur video of the LAPD beating of Rodney King. Examining key films and filmmakers, the corporate players and industry trends, film styles and audio-visual technologies, the contributors to this volume spell out the end of cinema in terms of irony, cynicism and exhaustion, religious fundamentalism and fanaticism, and the decline of what we once used to call film culture. Contributors include: Paul Arthur, Wheeler Winston Dixon, Thomas Doherty, Thomas Elsaesser, Krin Gabbard, Henry Giroux, Heather Hendershot, Jan-Christopher Hook, Alexandra Juhasz, Charles Keil, Chuck Klienhans, Jon Lewis, Eric S. Mallin, Laura U. Marks, Kathleen McHugh, Pat Mellencamp, Jerry Mosher, Hamid Naficy, Chon Noriega, Dana Polan, Murray Pomerance, Hillary Radner, Ralph E. Rodriguez, R.L. Rutsky, James Schamus, Christopher Sharrett, David Shumway, Robert Sklar, Murray Smith, Marita Sturken, Imre Szeman, Frank P. Tomasulo, Maureen Turim, Justin Wyatt, and Elizabeth Young.

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Hailed by some as the Eighth Wonder of the World when it opened in 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge is one of the world’s most recognizable and beloved icons. For over one hundred years it has excited and fascinated with stories of ingenuity and heroism, and it has been endorsed as a flawless symbol of municipal improvement and a prime emblem of American technological progress. Despite its impressive physical presence, however, Brooklyn’s grand old bridge is much more than a testament of engineering and architectural achievement. As Richard Haw shows in this first of its kind cultural history, the Brooklyn Bridge owes as much to the imagination of the public as it does to the historical events and technical prowess that were integral to its construction. Bringing together more than sixty images of the bridge that, over the years, have graced postcards, magazine covers, and book jackets and appeared in advertisements, cartoons, films, and photographs, Haw traces the diverse and sometimes jarring ways in which this majestic structure has been received, adopted, and interpreted as an American idea. Haw’s account is not a history of how the bridge was made, but rather of what people have made of the Brooklyn Bridge—in film, music, literature, art, and politics—from its opening ceremonies to the blackout of 2003. Classic accounts from such writers and artists as H. G. Wells, Charles Reznikoff, Hart Crane, Lewis Mumford, Joseph Pennell, Walker Evans, and Georgia O’Keeffe, among many others, present the bridge as a deserted, purely aestheticized romantic ideal, while others, including Henry James, Joseph Stella, Yun Gee, Ernest Poole, Alfred Kazin, Paul Auster, and Don DeLillo, offer a counter-narrative as they question not only the role of the bridge in American society, but its function as a profoundly public, communal place. Also included are never-before-published photographs by William Gedney and a discussion of Alexis Rockman’s provocative new mural Manifest Destiny. Drawing on hundreds of cultural artifacts, from the poignant, to the intellectual, to the downright quirky, The Brooklyn Bridge sheds new light on topics such as ethnic and foreign responses to America, nationalism, memory, parade culture, commemoration, popular culture, and post-9/11 America icons. In the end, we realize that this impressive span is as culturally remarkable today as it was technologically and physically astounding in the nineteenth century.

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"Miss Caroline Charles, aged 22 - youngest of the English designers whose fashions have captured New York - returns there to show her Spring collection. She is dark, beautiful and frail, with a small voice. But she is deceptive; she is made of iron; her energy is matched only by her persistence. Nothing will stop her. She is at the top now, and might stay there for 50 years." John Gale, Observer Oct 25th 1964 Caroline Charles is one of London's most respected womenswear designers. She has developed her business over the past five decades and the label is sold and marketed throughout the world. Caroline Charles began in the world of fashion art school followed by a couture apprenticeship and a stint as a photographer's assistant; she then worked for Mary Quant and was inspired by couturiers as well as being a leading designer in the '60s youthquake and swinging London. Her first collections were kooky and fresh and included a white cotton dress made from a bedspread! Caroline Charles was one of the original designers to join what was later to become British Fashion Week. Caroline opened a shop in Beverly Hills in the '70s and in the '90s had many successes with shops and shows in Japan. Her clothes were quickly snapped up by celebrities, which over the years have ranged from Lulu, Marianne Faithfull and Cilla Black as well as special suits being made for Mick Jagger and Ringo Starr. Princess Diana became a regular client as did Emma Thompson who wore a Caroline Charles design to receive an Oscar. Caroline Charles has been invited over the years to be a design consultant to major brands such as Burberry and Marks and Spencer as well as having design collaborations with major accessories and textile companies. In the '90s Caroline Charles designed the official scarf to mark the 40th anniversary of the accession of the Queen. As she celebrated her own 40th anniversary, Caroline Charles was awarded an OBE for services to the British Fashion Industry. Celebrations followed at the Victoria & Albert Museum with another award from the British Fashion Council. Book contributors include: Alexandra Shulman - Editor British Vogue, Suzy Menkes - Fashion Editor International Herald Tribune, Harold Tillman CBE - Chairman of the British Fashion Council, Caroline Baker - Fashion Director, Bruce Oldfield - Designer, Sue Crewe - Editor of House & Garden, Jess Cartner-Morley - Fashion Editor The Guardian and Richard Knight - Christies, London, among others.

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'Holt is, as usual, absurd, funny, and light-handed enough with the completely ridiculous bits to keep the story moving, assuring that the reader doesn't actually notice how bizarre the story has become, or how tangled the mystery is, until it's nearly done.' - Booklist'Uniquely twisted . . . cracking gags.' - GuardianThere are all kinds of products. The good ones. The bad ones. The ones that stay in the garage mouldering for years until your garden gnome makes a home out of them. Most are harmless if handled properly, even if they do contain traces of peanuts. But some are not. Not the ones that contain traces of magic.Chris Popham wasn't paying enough attention when he talked to his SatNav. Sure, she gave him directions, never backtalked him, and always led him to his next spot on the map with perfect accuracy. She was the best thing in his life. So was it really his fault that he didn't start paying attention when she talked to him? In his defence, that was her job. But when 'Take the next right' turned into 'Excuse me,' that was when the real trouble started. Because sometimes a SatNav isn't a SatNav. Sometimes it's an imprisoned soul trapped inside a metal box that will do anything it can to get free. And some products you just can't return.Another slice of fantastic comic TOMfoolery.Books by Tom Holt: Walled Orchard Series Goatsong The Walled Orchard J.W. Wells & Co. Series The Portable Door In Your Dreams Earth, Air, Fire and Custard You Don't Have to Be Evil to Work Here, But It Helps The Better Mousetrap May Contain Traces of Magic Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sausages YouSpace Series Doughnut When It's A Jar The Outsorcerer's Apprentice The Good, the Bad and the Smug Novels Expecting Someone Taller Who's Afraid of Beowulf Flying Dutch Ye Gods! Overtime Here Comes the Sun Grailblazers Faust Among Equals Odds and Gods Djinn Rummy My Hero Paint your Dragon Open Sesame Wish you Were Here Alexander at World's End Only Human Snow White and the Seven Samurai Olympiad Valhalla Nothing But Blue Skies Falling SidewaysLittle PeopleSong for NeroMeadowlandBarkingBlonde BombshellThe Management Style of the Supreme BeingsAn Orc on the Wild Side

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**A Red magazine book of 2023**'The most charming, utterly lovely story I've read in ages... this is one of my books of the year' RED 'This joyous novel is a feast for the senses, as well as the soul' JOANNA NELLA warm-hearted debut novel set in the beautiful coastal city of Chennai, for fans of Alexander McCall Smith, Joanna Nell and Graeme Simsion.Grand Life Apartments is a middle-class apartment block surrounded by lush gardens in the coastal city of Chennai, India. It is the home of Kamala, a pious, soon-to-be retired dentist who spends her days counting down to the annual visits from her daughter who is studying in the UK. Her neighbour, Revathi, is a thirty-two-year-old engineer who is frequently reminded by her mother that she has reached her expiry date in the arranged marriage market. Jason, a British chef, has impulsively moved to India to escape his recent heartbreak in London.The residents have their own complicated lives to navigate, but what they all have in common is their love of where they live, so when a developer threatens to demolish the apartments and build over the gardens, the community of Grand Life Apartments is brought even closer together to fight for their beautiful home...-------------------------------'I loved this heartwarming read' PRIMA'It's utterly entrancing - so humane and funny, and so seeped in India that I could smell the cooking and breathe the exhaust fumes. I absolutely loved it from start to finish.' DEBORAH MOGGACH'I was put in mind of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City . . . a distinctive and evocative voice' GRAEME SIMSION'Warm, gorgeous, tender, hopeful and human. I felt so HAPPY when I was reading it' DAISY BUCHANAN'An enchanting hug of a book with characters that you'll really root for' NIKKI MAY'A super warm and lovely read ... Should have a warning though: WILL MAKE YOU HUNGRY!' KATE SAWYER'Hema Sukumar's debut is an absolute joy. I loved being transported to the Grand Life Apartments and I was bewitched by the characters, colours and tastes of Chennai. Please can I move in forever?' CLARE POOLEY 'A gorgeous, beautifully-written story, full of wonderfully charming characters - and a loveable cat.' NICK BRADLEY'Written with such warmth ... full of life and love. Hema Sukumar's lovely characters became like friends to me, and I adored spending time with them.' SARA ADAMS

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A collection of scholarship on monsters and their meaning—across genres, disciplines, methodologies, and time—from foundational texts to the most recent contributions Zombies and vampires, banshees and basilisks, demons and wendigos, goblins, gorgons, golems, and ghosts. From the mythical monstrous races of the ancient world to the murderous cyborgs of our day, monsters have haunted the human imagination, giving shape to the fears and desires of their time. And as long as there have been monsters, there have been attempts to make sense of them, to explain where they come from and what they mean. This book collects the best of what contemporary scholars have to say on the subject, in the process creating a map of the monstrous across the vast and complex terrain of the human psyche.Editor Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock prepares the way with a genealogy of monster theory, traveling from the earliest explanations of monsters through psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and cultural studies, to the development of monster theory per se—and including Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s foundational essay “Monster Theory (Seven Theses),” reproduced here in its entirety. There follow sections devoted to the terminology and concepts used in talking about monstrosity; the relevance of race, religion, gender, class, sexuality, and physical appearance; the application of monster theory to contemporary cultural concerns such as ecology, religion, and terrorism; and finally the possibilities monsters present for envisioning a different future. Including the most interesting and important proponents of monster theory and its progenitors, from Sigmund Freud to Julia Kristeva to J. Halberstam, Donna Haraway, Barbara Creed, and Stephen T. Asma—as well as harder-to-find contributions such as Robin Wood’s and Masahiro Mori’s—this is the most extensive and comprehensive collection of scholarship on monsters and monstrosity across disciplines and methods ever to be assembled and will serve as an invaluable resource for students of the uncanny in all its guises.Contributors: Stephen T. Asma, Columbia College Chicago; Timothy K. Beal, Case Western Reserve U; Harry Benshoff, U of North Texas; Bettina Bildhauer, U of St. Andrews; Noel Carroll, The Graduate Center, CUNY; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Arizona State U; Barbara Creed, U of Melbourne; Michael Dylan Foster, UC Davis; Sigmund Freud; Elizabeth Grosz, Duke U; J. Halberstam, Columbia U; Donna Haraway, UC Santa Cruz; Julia Kristeva, Paris Diderot U; Anthony Lioi, The Julliard School; Patricia MacCormack, Anglia Ruskin U; Masahiro Mori; Annalee Newitz; Jasbir K. Puar, Rutgers U; Amit A. Rai, Queen Mary U of London; Margrit Shildrick, Stockholm U; Jon Stratton, U of South Australia; Erin Suzuki, UC San Diego; Robin Wood, York U; Alexa Wright, U of Westminster.

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Which Side of History? offers a collection of bold essays on how technology is affecting democracy, society, and our future. Featuring prominent national voices such as Sacha Baron Cohen, Marc Benioff, Ellen Pao, Ken Auletta, Chelsea Clinton, Tim Wu, Khaled Hosseini, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Jaron Lanier, Willow Bay, Sal Khan, Sherry Turkle, Shoshana Zuboff, Vivek Murthy, Geoffrey Canada, and many more. The essays focus on the extraordinary impact of technology on our privacy, kids and families, race and gender roles, democracy, climate change, and mental health. This groundbreaking book challenges opinion leaders and the broader public to take action to improve technology's effects on our lives. • Featuring notable journalists, engineers, entrepreneurs, novelists, activists, filmmakers, business leaders, scholars, and researchers, including: Thomas Friedman, Kara Swisher, Michelle Alexander, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Jenna Wortham, Cameron Kasky, Howard Gardner, and Tristan Harris. • Explores the ethical behavior of Big Tech, or the lack thereof. • Offers roadmaps for constructive change and thought-provoking perspectives. With the rise of cyberbullying and hate speech online, issues around climate change and technology, and the "move fast and break things" mentality of tech culture, Which Side of History? will urge readers to draw the line. • This book will help shape the conversations we have around technology in our society and our future for years to come. • A smart gift for anyone who approaches tech and the future with a healthy skepticism • Edited by James P. Steyer, the CEO and founder of Common Sense Media. • Add it to the shelf with books like Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff.

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***A Best Book of 2022, The Times******Book of the Year, Spectator***A myth-busting biography of Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I, which retells the dramatic story of the civil war from her perspectiveHenrietta Maria, Charles I's queen, is the most reviled consort to have worn the crown of Britain's three kingdoms. Condemned as that 'Popish brat of France', a 'notorious whore' and traitor, she remains in popular memory the wife who wore the breeches and turned her husband Catholic - so causing a civil war - and a cruel and bigoted mother.Leanda de Lisle's White King was hailed as 'the definitive modern biography about Charles I' (Observer). Here she considers Henrietta Maria's point of view, unpicking the myths to reveal a very different queen. We meet a new bride who enjoyed annoying her uptight husband, a leader of fashion in clothes and cultural matters, an innovative builder and gardener and an advocate of the female voice in public affairs. No bigot, her closest friends included 'Puritans' as well as Catholics, and she led the anti-Spanish faction at court linked to the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years' War. When civil war came, the strategic planning and fundraising of his 'She Generalissimo' proved crucial to Charles's campaign.The story takes us to courts across Europe, and looks at the fate of Henrietta Maria's mother and sisters, who also faced civil wars. Her estrangement from her son Henry is explained, and the image of the Restoration queen as an irrelevant crone is replaced with Henrietta Maria as an influential 'phoenix queen', presiding over a court with 'more mirth' even than that of the Merry Monarch, Charles II.It is time to look again at this despised queen and judge if she is not in fact one of our most remarkable.'this is revisionist history at its absolute best' ANDREW ROBERTS'beautifully written and endlessly fascinating' ALEXANDER LARMAN'popular history of the finest kind' RONALD HUTTON

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With engaging wit and subtle irony, Albert Hirschman maps the diffuse and treacherous world of reactionary rhetoric in which conservative public figures, thinkers, and polemicists have been arguing against progressive agendas and reforms for the past two hundred years.Hirschman draws his examples from three successive waves of reactive thought that arose in response to the liberal ideas of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, to democratization and the drive toward universal suffrage in the nineteenth century, and to the welfare state in our own century. In each case he identifies three principal arguments invariably used: (1) the perversity thesis, whereby any action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order is alleged to result in the exact opposite of what was intended; (2) the futility thesis, which predicts that attempts at social transformation will produce no effects whatever—will simply be incapable of making a dent in the status quo; (3) the jeopardy thesis, holding that the cost of the proposed reform is unacceptable because it will endanger previous hard-won accomplishments. He illustrates these propositions by citing writers across the centuries from Alexis de Tocqueville to George Stigler, Herbert Spencer to Jay Forrester, Edmund Burke to Charles Murray. Finally, in a lightning turnabout, he shows that progressives are frequently apt to employ closely related rhetorical postures, which are as biased as their reactionary counterparts. For those who aspire to the genuine dialogue that characterizes a truly democratic society, Hirschman points out that both types of rhetoric function, in effect, as contraptions designed to make debate impossible. In the process, his book makes an original contribution to democratic thought.The Rhetoric of Reaction is a delightful handbook for all discussions of public affairs, the welfare state, and the history of social, economic, and political thought, whether conducted by ordinary citizens or academics.

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Where mountains meet ocean in Alaska's Alexander Archipelago, white skeletons of dead yellow cedar trees stand prominently amidst a verdant landscape of old-growth forests. Researchers spent nearly three decades deciphering the cause of the majestic species' death and uncovering climate change as the culprit. Lauren E. Oakes, a young scientist at Stanford University, was one of them. But even as she set to record the demise of a species, she soon found herself immersed in an even bigger, and totally unexpected, story: how the people of Alaska were adapting to the tree's disappearance, and how the tree itself, seemingly doomed, was adapting to a changing world. In Search of the Canary Tree is the story of six years that Oakes and her team spent in the Alaskan wilds, studying thousands of trees and saplings along the archipelago of southeast Alaska. Far from losing faith in the survival of our woodlands, she discovered the resiliency of forgotten forests, flourishing again after years of destruction and decomposition. And, through deep encounters with loggers, naturalists, Native weavers, and enthusiasts of the yellow cedar, Oakes discovered how the people of Alaska were determined to develop new relationships with the emerging environment. Where many scientists and commentators have found in climate change an unmitigated disaster, Oakes found beacons of hope even in the disorienting death of a species. Above all else, Oakes shows us that, although we can respond to climate change with either fear or denial, we can also find in it a new world, and one that doesn't necessarily have to be for the worst. Eloquent, insightful, and deeply heartening, In Search of the Canary Tree shows how human and natural resilience can help preserve ourselves, even in our rapidly changing world.

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A new look at the interrelationship of architecture and sculpture during one of the richest periods of American modern designAlloys looks at a unique period of synergy and exchange in the postwar United States, when sculpture profoundly shaped architecture, and vice versa. Leading architects such as Gordon Bunshaft and Eero Saarinen turned to sculptors including Harry Bertoia, Alexander Calder, Richard Lippold, and Isamu Noguchi to produce site-determined, large-scale sculptures tailored for their buildings’ highly visible and well-traversed threshold spaces. The parameters of these spaces—atriums, lobbies, plazas, and entryways—led to various designs like sculptural walls, ceilings, and screens that not only embraced new industrial materials and processes, but also demonstrated art’s ability to merge with lived architectural spaces.Marin Sullivan argues that these sculptural commissions represent an alternate history of midcentury American art. Rather than singular masterworks by lone geniuses, some of the era’s most notable spaces—Philip Johnson’s Four Seasons Restaurant in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, Max Abramovitz’s Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center, and Pietro Belluschi and Walter Gropius’s Pan Am Building—would be diminished without the collaborative efforts of architects and artists. At the same time, the artistic creations within these spaces could not exist anywhere else. Sullivan shows that the principle of synergy provides an ideal framework to assess this pronounced relationship between sculpture and architecture. She also explores the afterlives of these postwar commissions in the decades since their construction.A fresh consideration of sculpture’s relationship to architectural design and functionality following World War II, Alloys highlights the affinities between the two fields and the ways their connections remain with us today.

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"Russell has complete mastery of his material, and the book's sweep is grand: a tour of the first five centuries of Christian intellectual history with the spotlight on the villain instead of the hero.... Satan is a valuable introduction to the theological portion of the Western Devil tradition."― Speculum Undeniably, evil exists in our world; we ourselves commit evil acts. How can one account for evil's ageless presence, its attraction, and its fruits? The question is one that Jeffrey Burton Russell addresses in his history of the concept of the Devil—the personification of evil itself. In the predecessor to this book, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity, Russell traced the idea of the Devil in comparative religions and examined its development in Western thought through ancient Hebrew religion and the New Testament. This volume follows its course over the first five centuries of the Christian era. Like most theological problems, the question of evil was largely ignored by the primitive Christian community. The later Christian thinkers who wrestled with it for many centuries were faced with a seemingly irreconcilable paradox: if God is benevolent and omnipotent, why does He permit evil? How, on the other hand, can God be all-powerful if one adopts a dualist stance, and posits two divine forces, one good and one evil? Drawing upon a rich variety of literary sources as well as upon the visual arts, Russell discusses the apostolic fathers, the apologetic fathers, and the Gnostics. He goes on to treat the thought of Irenaeus and Tertullian, and to describe the diabology of the Alexandrian fathers, Clement and Origen, as well as the dualist tendencies in Lactantius and in the monastic fathers. Finally he addresses the syntheses of the fifth century, especially that of Augustine, whose view of the Devil has been widely accepted in the entire Christian community ever since. Satan is both a revealing study of the compelling figure of the Devil and an imaginative and persuasive inquiry into the forces that shape a concept and ensure its survival.

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"Russell has complete mastery of his material, and the book's sweep is grand: a tour of the first five centuries of Christian intellectual history with the spotlight on the villain instead of the hero.... Satan is a valuable introduction to the theological portion of the Western Devil tradition."― Speculum Undeniably, evil exists in our world; we ourselves commit evil acts. How can one account for evil's ageless presence, its attraction, and its fruits? The question is one that Jeffrey Burton Russell addresses in his history of the concept of the Devil—the personification of evil itself. In the predecessor to this book, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity, Russell traced the idea of the Devil in comparative religions and examined its development in Western thought through ancient Hebrew religion and the New Testament. This volume follows its course over the first five centuries of the Christian era. Like most theological problems, the question of evil was largely ignored by the primitive Christian community. The later Christian thinkers who wrestled with it for many centuries were faced with a seemingly irreconcilable paradox: if God is benevolent and omnipotent, why does He permit evil? How, on the other hand, can God be all-powerful if one adopts a dualist stance, and posits two divine forces, one good and one evil? Drawing upon a rich variety of literary sources as well as upon the visual arts, Russell discusses the apostolic fathers, the apologetic fathers, and the Gnostics. He goes on to treat the thought of Irenaeus and Tertullian, and to describe the diabology of the Alexandrian fathers, Clement and Origen, as well as the dualist tendencies in Lactantius and in the monastic fathers. Finally he addresses the syntheses of the fifth century, especially that of Augustine, whose view of the Devil has been widely accepted in the entire Christian community ever since. Satan is both a revealing study of the compelling figure of the Devil and an imaginative and persuasive inquiry into the forces that shape a concept and ensure its survival.

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Step back in time to an ancient world of mythical beasts, bow down to gods and goddesses, and take a trip to the first Olympics in this illustrated guide. Become an eyewitness to the glory of ancient Greece in this picture-led reference guide that will take you on a visual tour of what classical Greece was like. Children will be mesmerized by striking photography, maps, paintings, and lots of artefacts to help understand what life was like at this time.This illustrated guide lets kids aged 9+ experience the significance ancient Greece has had in transforming our world, in this detailed introduction to one of the world's founding nations. Learn why Greek pottery is so famous, discover how children played, and take a look at what people wore.Throughout the pages of this newly-revised book on Ancient Greece, you can expect to find: - A fresh new look; new photographs, updated information, and a new “eyewitness” feature.- Amazing facts, updated diagrams, statistics, and timelines.- Brand new eyewitness accounts from experts in the field.DK Eyewitness Ancient Greece is crammed full of fascinating information, statistics and facts. Meet a fierce minotaur, wage war with Alexander the Great, look inside a temple, and learn how the people of ancient Greece lived their lives. Find out about their religions, their hobbies, and their amazing impact on the rest of our history.So, what’s new? Part of DK’s best-selling Eyewitness series, this popular title has been reinvigorated for the next generation of information-seekers and stay-at-home explorers, with a fresh new look, up to 20 percent new images, including photography and updated diagrams, updated information, and a new “eyewitness” feature with fascinating first-hand accounts from experts in the field.Explore the series!Globally, the Eyewitness series has sold more than 50 million copies over 30 years. Travel through the solar system with Eyewitness Space, discover the incredible world of creepy-crawlies in Eyewitness Insect, examine precious stones in Eyewitness Crystal & Gem or take a trip aboard the most famous ship in history with Eyewitness Titanic.

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The elegant Bible you'll keep coming back to because it's so easy to read and use.Enjoy the beautiful New King James Version in a traditional Scripture design optimized to help you quickly navigate through the Bible. The 2-column text employs a verse-by-verse—or verse-style—setting, which means that each verse starts on its own line, making them a snap to find. The large print text is easy to read, and the blue headings and verse numbers stand out while providing a restful, thoroughly enjoyable Scripture-reading experience. With over 72,000 cross references and the complete set of NKJV translator notes, this Bible gives you the tools you'll need to dive deeply into God's Word for yourself.Features include: Verse-style Scripture format starts each verse on its own line so it’s easy to navigate the text Premium Bible paper in opaque white creates a high contrast with the black text, improving readability Words of Christ in black for a reading experience that is easy on your eyes throughout Scripture Ultra-flexible sewn binding lays flat in your hand or on your desk End of page cross references allow you to find related passages quickly and easily Wide double-faced satin ribbons help keep track of where you were reading Full color maps show a visual representation of Israel and other biblical locations for better context Clear and readable 10.5-point NKJV Comfort Print Trusted by millions of believers around the world, the NKJV remains a bestselling modern “word-for-word” translation. It balances the literary beauty and familiarity of the King James tradition with an extraordinary commitment to preserving the grammar and structure of the underlying biblical languages. And while the translator’s relied on the traditional Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic text used by the translators of the 1611 KJV, the comprehensive translator notes offer important insights about the latest developments in biblical manuscript studies. The result is a Bible translation that is both beautiful and uncompromising—perfect for serious study, devotional use, and reading aloud.About the Maclaren Series: Named for noted Victorian-era preacher Alexander Maclaren, this series of elegant Bibles features regal blue highlights and verse numbers and clear, line-matched text.

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Lord Alanbrooke was Churchill's right-hand man during World War II, and as Chief of the Imperial General Staff he had an integral part in shaping the strategy of Britain and the Allies. Despite this crucial role, he is very little known compared to military commanders such as Montgomery, Alexander, Slim, Mountbatten, Patton, or Eisenhower. This new biography of Lord Alanbrooke uses archival material and his diaries to trace his life, including his experiences in World War I and the development of his military career in the interwar years, with a focus on his post as the Chief of the Imperial General Staff during World War II.Voted the greatest Briton of the 20th century, Churchill has long been credited with almost single-handedly leading his country to victory in World War II. However without Brooke, a skilled tactician, at his side the outcome might well have been disastrous. Brooke more often than not served as a brake on some of Churchill's more impetuous ideas. However, while Brooke's diaries reveal his fury with some of Churchill's decisions, they also reveal his respect and admiration for the wartime prime minister. In return Churchill must surely have considered Brooke one of his most difficult subordinates but later wrote that he was "fearless, formidable, articulate, and in the end convincing".As CIGS, Brooke was integral to coordination between the Allied forces, and so had to wrestle with the cultural strategy clash between the British and Americans. Comments in his diaries offer up his opinions of both his British and American military colleagues – his negative assessments of Mountbatten’s ability, and acerbic comments on the difficult character of de Gaulle and the weaknesses of Eisenhower. Conversely he was clearly over-indulgent in the face of Montgomery's foibles. Brooke was often seen as a stern and humourless figure, but a study of his private life reveals an little-seen lighter side, a lifelong passion for birdwatching, and abiding love for his family. The two tragedies that befell his immediate family were a critical influence on his life. Sangster completes this new biography with a survey of the way various historians have assessed Brooke, explaining how he has lapsed into seeming obscurity in the years since his crucial part in the Allied victory in World War II.

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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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This NKJV Large Print Thinline Bible is inviting to pick up and hard to put down. Unique to this edition, the words of Christ are highlighted in a restful blue ink that’s easy to read and colorblind-friendly.The slim design of the NKJV Large Print Thinline Reference Bible means you can bring it along, wherever your day takes you. This large print edition features Thomas Nelson’s NKJV Comfort Print®, designed to provide a smooth reading experience of the accurate and beautiful New King James Version. And with features including extensive cross-references, concordance, and full-color maps, you’ll still have the tools to get more out of God’s Word. Features include: Presentation page to personalize this special gift by recording a memory or a note Words of Christ in blue quickly identify verses spoken by Jesus Double column provides a nice readable flow of the text End-of-page cross-references and translator notes allow you to find related passages quickly and easily Concordance for finding a word’s occurrences throughout the Bible Full-color maps show a visual representation of Israel and other biblical locations for better context Durable Smyth-sewn binding lies flat in your hand or on your desk Two satin ribbon markers for you to easily navigate and keep track of where you are reading Elegant, gilded page-edge design Clear and readable 10-point NKJV Comfort Print About the Maclaren Series: Named for noted Victorian-era preacher Alexander Maclaren, this series of elegant Bibles features regal blue highlights and verse numbers and clear, line-matched text.Trusted by millions of believers around the world, the NKJV remains a bestselling modern “word-for-word” translation. It balances the literary beauty and familiarity of the King James tradition with an extraordinary commitment to preserving the grammar and structure of the underlying biblical languages. And while the translator’s relied on the traditional Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic text used by the translators of the 1611 KJV, the comprehensive translator notes offer important insights about the latest developments in biblical manuscript studies. The result is a Bible translation that is both beautiful and uncompromising—perfect for serious study, devotional use, and reading aloud.

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"Tusk", the first record in history to cross the million dollar threshold in production costs, was the Fleetwood Mac's critically acclaimed, commercially disappointing 1979 double album. This book is an in-depth and 'official' look at one of the most unusual albums ever released by a major rock band. After "Rumours" became the best-selling single album of all-time, Fleetwood Mac asked Warner Brothers Records to buy them a studio (the label refused, costing both Warner Brothers and the band significant cash in the long run) and then handed the reins to their guitarist and resident perfectionist Lindsey Buckingham, a fusion of factors that led "Tusk" to become the first record in history to cross the million dollar threshold in production costs. Blame (or credit) Buckingham's public perception as a punctilious performer and producer on this, the Mac's critically acclaimed, commercially disappointing 1979 double album (it's said that Warner Brothers executives could see their Christmas bonuses flying out the window upon finally hearing "Tusk's" first rough cuts). But the 1975 addition of Buckingham and Stevie Nicks undeniably transformed Fleetwood Mac from a barely viable blues-based group into a radio powerhouse. "Rumours", the second LP by the Mac reconfiguration of Buckingham, one-time paramour Nicks, drummer Mick Fleetwood, bassist John McVie and his wife and keyboardist Christine, sold more than 20 million copies. But during its creation, relationships within the band broke down - Buckingham split from Nicks, McVie from McVie - leaving the follow-up "Tusk" as a bizarre and fractious assemblage held together only by Buckingham's much-documented, Brian Wilson - like obsession. What remains is Fleetwood Mac's "Apocalypse Now", their "White Album", the epic beginning of their ongoing end, a shotgun blast of musical spray. And, without question, the ballsiest venture in rock history. 'A growing Alexandria of rock criticism' - "Los Angeles Times, 2008". 'Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren't enough' - "Rolling Stone". For more information on the series and on individual titles in the series, check out our blog.

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“It’s a good thing that this is only the first book of a trilogy, because after getting to know Tabitha, you won’t want to leave her at the end. . . . Written intimately as if you’re peering into the mind of a close friend, this book is a true testament to the stresses on women today and how great girlfriends (and grandmothers) are often the key to our sanity.” — Good Morning AmericaThe first novel in a captivating three-book series about modern womanhood, in which a young Black woman must rely on courage, laughter, and love—and the support of her two longtime friends—to overcome an unexpected setback that threatens the most precious thing she’s ever wanted.Tabitha Walker is a black woman with a plan to “have it all.” At 33 years old, the checklist for the life of her dreams is well underway. Education? Check. Good job? Check. Down payment for a nice house? Check. Dating marriage material? Check, check, and check. With a coveted position as a local news reporter, a "paper-perfect" boyfriend, and even a standing Saturday morning appointment with a reliable hairstylist, everything seems to be falling into place.Then Tabby receives an unexpected diagnosis that brings her picture-perfect life crashing down, jeopardizing the keystone she took for granted: having children. With her dreams at risk of falling through the cracks of her checklist, suddenly she is faced with an impossible choice between her career, her dream home, and a family of her own. With the help of her best friends, the irreverent and headstrong Laila and Alexis, the mom jeans-wearing former "Sexy Lexi," and the generational wisdom of her grandmother and the nonagenarian firebrand Ms. Gretchen, Tabby explores the reaches of modern medicine and tests the limits of her relationships, hoping to salvage the future she always dreamed of. But the fight is all consuming, demanding a steep price that forces an honest reckoning for nearly everyone in her life. As Tabby soon learns, her grandmother's age-old adage just might still be true: Black girls must die exhausted.

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‘IB was one of the great affirmers of our time.’ John Banville, New York Review of BooksThe title of this final volume of Isaiah Berlin’s letters is echoed by John Banville’s verdict in his review of its predecessor, Building: Letters 1960–75, which saw Berlin publish some of his most important work, and create, in Oxford’s Wolfson College, an institutional and architectural legacy. In the period covered by this new volume (1975–97) he consolidates his intellectual legacy with a series of essay collections. These generate many requests for clarification from his readers, and stimulate him to reaffirm and sometimes refine his ideas, throwing substantive new light on his thought as he grapples with human issues of enduring importance.Berlin’s comments on world affairs, especially the continuing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and the collapse of Communism, are characteristically acute. This is also the era of the Northern Ireland Troubles, the Iranian revolution, the rise of Solidarity in Poland, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, and wars in the Falkland Islands, the Persian Gulf and the Balkans. Berlin scrutinises the leading politicians of the day, including Reagan, Thatcher and Gorbachev, and draws illuminating sketches of public figures, notably contrasting the personas of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrey Sakharov. He declines a peerage, is awarded the Agnelli Prize for ethics, campaigns against philistine architecture in London and Jerusalem, helps run the National Gallery and Covent Garden, and talks at length to his biographer. He reflects on the ideas for which he is famous – especially liberty and pluralism – and there is a generous leavening of the conversational brilliance for which he is also renowned, as he corresponds with friends about politics, the academic world, music and musicians, art and artists, and writers and their work, always displaying a Shakespearean fascination with the variety of humankind.Affirming is the crowning achievement both of Berlin’s epistolary life and of the widely acclaimed edition of his letters whose first volume appeared in 2004.

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The Pashtun Tribes of Afghanistan is a tour de force - combining erudite analysis, historical research, atmospheric story-telling, page-turning prose and above all, profound passion.' **- ****Sir Nicholas Kay, NATO Senior Civilian Representative in Afghanistan (2019-2020) & ****British Ambassador to Afghanistan (2017-2019)** The abrupt withdrawal of US and NATO forces in 2021 ushered in a new era for Afghanistan. The subsequent Taliban takeover facilitated a reversion to some of the worst hallmarks of Afghanistan's past, including bans on women's education and other rights-related roll-backs. Navigating this new reality necessitates that more constructive relationships are built between Westerners and Afghans, particularly with the majority ethnicity - the Pashtun tribes. The Pashtun Tribes in Afghanistan: Wolves Among Men is the toolkit for doing so. It provides the knowledge needed to navigate a complex tribal environment. Framed by first-hand experience and balancing in-depth analysis with engaging anecdotes, it sheds light on the Pashtun way of life still enshrined in the ancient Pashtunwali honour code. It explains the tribal structure, tribal territories, historic battles, prominent figures and even Pashtun proverbs and poets. It also highlights how recent wars are destroying the tribal arena. Focusing on people rather than politics, this book unveils the layers, paradoxes and subtleties of the world's largest tribal society. On turning the final page, readers will understand the Pashtun brand of tribalism and how it influences Afghanistan today. They will be aware that tribal life has been permanently challenged but that the Pashtun identity remains intact - in psychology if not always in practice. They will recognise why Pashtuns are not a single entity and should not be treated as one . The need to understand the tribes as they understand themselves will also be clear, particularly their concept of honour. This book illuminates why, from Alexander the Great to Winston Churchill, and even with the Taliban today, Pashtuns are still stereotyped as primitive, violence-prone barbarians. But were men like Rudyard Kipling right to characterise tribesmen as being as unaccountable as the grey Wolf, who is his blood brother? This book has the answer.

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The human race is on a 10,000 year urban adventure. Our ancestors wandered the planet or lived scattered in villages, yet by the end of this century almost all of us will live in cities. But that journey has not been a smooth one and urban civilizations have risen and fallen many times in history. The ruins of many of them still enchant us. This book tells the story of the rise and fall of ancient cities from the end of the Bronze Age to the beginning of the Middle Ages. It is a tale of war and politics, pestilence and famine, triumph and tragedy, by turns both fabulous and squalid. Its focus is on the ancient Mediterranean: Greeks and Romans at the centre, but Phoenicians and Etruscans, Persians, Gauls, and Egyptians all play a part. The story begins with the Greek discovery of much more ancient urban civilizations in Egypt and the Near East, and charts the gradual spread of urbanism to the Atlantic and then the North Sea in the centuries that followed. The ancient Mediterranean, where our story begins, was a harsh environment for urbanism. So how were cities first created, and then sustained for so long, in these apparently unpromising surroundings? How did they feed themselves, where did they find water and building materials, and what did they do with their waste and their dead? Why, in the end, did their rulers give up on them? And what it was like to inhabit urban worlds so unlike our own - cities plunged into darkness every night, cities dominated by the temples of the gods, cities of farmers, cities of slaves, cities of soldiers. Ultimately, the chief characters in the story are the cities themselves. Athens and Sparta, Persepolis and Carthage, Rome and Alexandria: cities that formed great families. Their story encompasses the history of the generations of people who built and inhabited them, whose short lives left behind monuments that have inspired city builders ever since - and whose ruins stand as stark reminders to the 21st century of the perils as well as the potential rewards of an urban existence.

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Six Georgian Poets brings us the work of the most outstanding literary representatives of what has been dubbed 'the Gagarin Generation". Yuri Gagarin, the first astronaut who died tragically young, was an international celebrity and a hero of the Soviet Bloc. His space journey could be subversively interpreted not as one of the victories in the Cold War competition between two ideologically opposed superpowers, but as a daring breakout towards freedom. This generation of people born in an era of a growing resistance against the strictures of Soviet rule, a generation characterised by challenging the entrenched conformism of thought and action, is represented here by a diverse set of voices, each of which speaks out of an experience both personal and collective, giving us a rare insight into a culture and literature we need to know more about. The majority of the poems in this volume were translated in two workshops, the first of which was held in September 2014 in Tbilisi, Georgia, supported by the Georgian National Book Centre and the British Council, and the second in March 2015 in Aberystwyth, Wales, supported by Literature Across Frontiers. The workshop participants were: Alexandra Büchler, translator and director of Literature Across Frontiers; Nia Davies, poet, translator and Editor of Poetry Wales; Adham Smart, poet and translator; Stephen Watts, poet and translator; and Angela Jarman, editor at Arc Publications. The translators initially worked from literal translations supplied by the poets and others, but at both workshops they received help and advice from the playwright and translator, Davit Gabunia, whose contribution was invaluable. There are other poems included in this volume that were translated by individual translators outside the workshops. One such translator is Donald Rayfield, who was not part of either workshop; Stephen Watts and Adham Smart also completed a number of translations outside the workshop setting. Where this is the case, their names appear under the relevant translations. Poems where individual translators are not named were translated collaboratively by the workshop participants.

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The next step in the evolution of user interfaces is here. Chatbots let your users interact with your service in their own natural language. Use free and open source tools along with Ruby to build creative, useful, and unexpected interactions for users. Take advantage of the Lita framework's step-by-step implementation strategy to simplify bot development and testing. From novices to experts, chatbots are an area in which everyone can participate. Exercise your creativity by creating chatbot skills for communicating, information, and fun. Developers of all skill levels can craft user experiences that are natural, easy to use, and most of all, fun. Build chatbots using free, open source tools and launch them to popular chat platforms like Slack and Amazon's Alexa. Use the Ruby programming language and the Lita bot framework to unlock fun and powerful chat abilities such as sending text messages and emails, creating new meme images, driving a robot around the room, and talking out loud on a home speaker. Use frameworks available in Ruby and Node.js to get started quickly. Create simple chatbot skills that respond quickly to basic requests. Chain skills together for more complex interactions. Take advantage of test-driven development techniques to build your bots with confidence. Coordinate tasks with colleagues via bot. Connect with external APIs to provide users with data they need. Extract data information from web pages when an API isn't available. Expand your bot's reach with SMS and e-mail messaging. Deploy a chatbot to a host so users can interact with it on their schedule. Build a more responsive, easy-to-use interface for your users today. What You Need: You don't need much to get started with chatbots. A Mac or Linux computer with a recent version of Ruby is recommended. Windows users can keep up with a free virtual machine running Linux. You'll deploy your chatbots for free (or at least cheaply) on cloud hosting platforms like Heroku and Digital Ocean.

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As Chicago grew into the world-class city it is today, its civic leaders took exceptional care in their cultivation of the arts. The establishment of the Art Institute, the widespread support of wealthy patronage, and the activity of numerous organizations including the Chicago Architectural Club, the Urban League, and the Chicago Women's Club, combined to make Chicago home to many painters. Since rising from the ashes in 1873, Chicago has supported generation after generation of inspired artists who painted land and cityscapes, and honored their patrons with portraits. The full length and breadth of their amazing work can at last be appreciated in the Powell and Barbara Bridges Collection. Susan C. Larsen provides a profile of the collectors and introduces the Bridges Collection, featuring an impressive range of canvases by Charles Francis Browne, Alice Kellogg Tyler, Frank Peyraud, Alfred Juergens, and other notable painters. Formerly the private treasure of the Bridges, Chicago Painting makes all 78 paintings of their remarkable collection available, in full color, to art lovers the world over. Wendy Greenhouse offers a host of insights into the lives and work of the artists who worked prior to the turn of the last century. She surveys the "conservative" Chicago painters who resisted the avant-garde, showing that while the European avant-garde did exert an influence, excellent work continued to be done in traditional genres such as portraits and landscapes. Painters the quality of Junius Sloan, Lucie Hartrath, George Peter Alexander Healy, Louis Betts, Ralph Clarkson, and Daniel Folger Bigelow are represented here. Finally, Susan Weiniger guides us into the Modernist era Chicago painters--Gertrude Abercrombie, Frances Strain, Frederic Tellander, Rudolph Weisenborn, and others--whose works show conclusively that Chicago did more than import avant-garde painting. Chicago Painting 1895 to 1945 also includes updated biographies of 49 painters and commentary on each painting.

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Blackwell's Non-Fiction Book of the Month'A formidable achievement' Rory Stewart'Thoughtful [and] heartfelt' Observer'Profound [and] compelling' Spectator'A noble endeavour' New StatesmanWithout a permanent home, a wife or a job, and with no clear sense of where his life was going, Anthony Seldon set out on a 35-day pilgrimage from the French-Swiss border to the English Channel.The route of his 1,000 kilometre journey was inspired by a young British soldier of the First World War, Alexander Douglas Gillespie, who dreamed of creating a 'Via Sacra' that the men, women and children of Europe could walk to honour the fallen. Tragically, Gillespie was killed in action, his vision forgotten for a hundred years, until a chance discovery in the archive of one of England's oldest schools galvanised Anthony into seeing the Via Sacra permanently established.Tracing the historic route of the Western Front, he traversed some of Europe's most beautiful and evocative scenery, from the Vosges, Argonne and Champagne to the haunting trenches of Arras, the Somme and Ypres. Along the way, he wrestled heat exhaustion, dog bites and blisters as well as a deeper search for inner peace and renewed purpose. Touching on grief, loss and the legacy of war, The Path of Peace is the extraordinary story of Anthony's epic walk, an unforgettable act of remembrance and a triumphant rediscovery of what matters most in life.***A WATERSTONES BEST BOOKS OF 2022 PICK***____________________________________________'The Western Front Way, an idea that waited 100 years for its moment, is the simplest and fittest memorial yet to the agony of the Great War. Anthony Seldon's account of how he walked it, and what it means to all of us, will be an inspiration to younger generations.' Sebastian Faulks'A deeply informed meditation on the First World War, an exploration of walking's healing power, a formidable physical achievement... and above all a moving enactment of a modern pilgrimage.' Rory Stewart'A journey of self-discovery and a pilgrimage of peace... A remarkable book by a remarkable man.' Michael Morpurgo'An incredible journey that will move and inspire.' Bear Grylls

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The amazing true story of Blackbeard, Calico Jack and all the other pirates of the Caribbean and Captain Woodes Rogers, the privateer turned governor of the Bahamas, who brought them to book. ‘Both a brilliant idea and an engrossing book that tells the story of a ship of the line in Nelson's day' Bernard Cornwell, Books of the Year, Mail on Sunday ‘David Cordingly is a brilliant historian: authoritative but easy to read, with an eye for the story yet with a touch light enough to let the facts speak for themselves' Daily Telegraph Today most of us know what we know about pirates from icons like Long John Silver and Jack Sparrow. But who were the real pirates of the Caribbean, and where did they come from? And how were they tamed? David Cordingly's latest book reveals the true story to have been at least as fascinating and gripping as the legends. After the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, there was an explosion of piracy across the Caribbean and along the eastern seaboard of North America. Hundreds of unemployed sailors roamed the seaports and many were tempted to take to piracy. Unable to attack enemy targets any longer, they replaced their national flags with the black flag and became ‘pyrates and enemies of all mankind'. Nowhere was the problem greater than in the Bahamas. So, after years of ignoring the problem, the British Government was forced to act. Three warships were despatched across the Atlantic with orders to suppress the pirates and it was agreed that a Governor of the Bahama Islands be appointed ‘to drive the pirates from their lodgement'. The man selected for the nigh impossible task was Captain Woodes Rogers, a former privateer who had made his name (he rescued Alexander Selkirk, the model for Defoe's Robinson Crusoe) and his fortune (£9m) by leading a highly successful voyage round the world. This is the story of his battle with the pirates, told in David Cordingly's inimitable style.

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Dans son Discours historique, l'Arménien Lewond raconte comment «Muhammad et ses successeurs conquirent non seulement l'Arménie, mais l'univers». Posant l'expansion de l'islam comme un phénomène universel, l'auteur relate le sort de son pays, depuis la mort de Muhammad et celle d'Héraclius (641), jusqu'en 789. Selon lui, les Arabes ont poursuivi dès le début le dessein de déstructurer la société arménienne, d'exploiter le territoire et les populations soumises, en créant un contexte défavorable à la vie chrétienne. Il apporte ainsi des informations uniques sur l'Arménie, tout en exposant ses propres points de vue sur les califes, les conquêtes, les guerres civiles ou le passage des Omeyyades aux Abbassides. Effectuée sur un texte critique établi par Alexan Hakobian, qui respecte les divisions de chapitres et les titres les plus anciens, la traduction a été conjointement élaborée par Jean-Pierre Mahé et Bernadette Martin-Hisard. Cette dernière est la principale responsable des annotations à caractère historique qui accompagnent la traduction, ainsi que des pages qui lui font suite, consacrées à l'oeuvre de Lewond, sa date et son dessein. Bien des données du texte plaident en faveur de la datation, récemment contestée, à la fin du VIIIe siècle. L'auteur ne s'efforce pas seulement de relater les changements imposés à son pays par l'arrivée des Arabes; il présente aussi sa chronique comme l'Enseignement spirituel qu'on peut attendre d'un théologien s'adressant à des fidèles, désorientés par des événements sans précédent. Au-delà de son interprétation biblique, Lewond, sensible au sort de la population, est un des premiers auteurs arméniens à s'interroger sur la guerre et sur la domination califale: faut-il se révolter, se soumettre ou temporiser? On ne saurait dire avec certitude si son opinion est celle de certains milieux aristocratiques ou des autorités de l'Église, ce qui est le plus probable. Son oeuvre invite aussi à reconsidérer les relations entre monde arménien et monde byzantin au VIIIe siècle. En annexe on trouvera une Correspondance apocryphe d'Omar II et de Léon III, insérée ultérieurement dans le Discours historique de Lewond. La version arménienne de ce débat théologique entre le christianisme et l'islam est présentée, traduite et annotée par Jean-Pierre Mahé, qui a confronté l'arménien à la rédaction arabe de la Lettre d'Omar (IXe-Xe s.).

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Two hundred years ago, on September 8, 1814, in the northern French city of Bourbourg, a boy was born into a family of local entrepreneurs connected to the local political or judicial elite. The young Charles-Etienne Brasseur was lucky to spend days and days in the impressive library of Alexandre Nicolas Muchembled, the son of his godmother. The reading of exciting travel books there mapped out the course of his truly adventurous life to come. Although a rebellious schoolboy, he acquired a huge knowledge in many fields by his omnivorous reading of books and journals. He was also a very curious young man, delving into the private libraries of the local grand families, resulting in him contributing many historical articles to newspapers and learned societies. At the age of 24, while still in high school, he published his first novel. This biography is the first to reveal insights into the many facets of the life of Brasseur; the extent of his secret activities for the Vatican; his advanced ideas regarding the dual phonetic and ideographic nature of Mayan writing, as early as 1843-44, and explicitly confirmed by him in May 1852, which he later dramatically rejected in 1870, thus failing to become the Champollion of Mesoamerica; his continuous attempts to preserve documents while crossing territories ravaged by civil wars; the immense value of the manuscripts he saved, like the Tzeltal vocabulary of Copanabastla or the Motul dictionary; his unique dedication in copying old manuscripts, with the help of his nephews, to be sent to other pioneers of Mayan studies in Europe and America; his short-lived pioneering work on the Huave (Wabis); details of his six expeditions to Mesoamerica, often in terrible conditions, as shown by his later severe ill health; his defence of the Indians against the academic community; details of the internal conflicts in the Quebec Catholic Church; and his ideas on certain geophysical events, such as the elevation of ocean beds and islands, which he wrongly dated to the time of the ancient Mayans, or the shifting of the Earth’s rotation axis.

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A study and a guidance device, the first book on the Royal Book Lodge (RBL) is the culmination of a three-year exploration by renowned art historian John C. Welchman. It examines the contribution of the RBL to an array of art, film and performance practices including photography, ceramics, writing, and publishing—centered on the creation of artist books and the powerful and wide-ranging dialogue and material experimentations they engender. The volume unfolds from various cultural and political geographies, including in the Parisian suburb of Montreuil which served as an HQ, beginning in 1989; and narratives of migrations and travels, art-inflected or otherwise, in Iceland, Paraguay, Eastern Europe, Los Angeles and on the Ligurian coast of Italy. It unpacks questions caught up in constructs of autobiography, fiction, ideas and images of remote control, and the relation of RBL to the aftermath of the Situationist International, concluding with the RBL’s socially urgent inquiry into experiences—and culturally pharmacological contestations—of violence. Royal Book Lodge The Royal Book Lodge emerged from a collaboration between artists Juli Susin and Veronique Bourgoin in mid-1980's expanding its Collection and Archive and other activities after the turn of the millennium with the assistance of Yasha Gofman. For more than three decades RBL’s projects have been sparked by a porous but a distractedly nimble network of artists from France, Germany, Russia, Iceland, Paraguay, and other locations, working with painting, sculpture, photography, film, installations, ceramics, writing, publishing, and curating. RBL affiliates include: Raisa Aid, Kai Althoff, Abel Auer, Linda Bilda, André Butzer, matali crasset, Les Schlag (Grems, Tex, Virassamy), Gudny Guðmundsdóttir, Beate Günther, Tobias Hauser, Andy Hope 1930, Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir, Dorota Jurczak, Bruce Kalberg, Armin Krämer, Alexandre Kalinkine, Lutz Krüger, Charlet Kugel, Jean-Louis Leibovitch, Anne Lefebvre, Jochen Lempert, Jonathan Meese, Birgit Mergele, Anna Parkina, Raymond Pettibon, Jason Rhoades, Lucia Sotnikova, Julia Rublow, Ralph Rumney, Gianfranco Sanguinetti.

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Knox College's Old Main—a national landmark and the only extant building that was a site of the Lincoln-Douglas debates—is a campus treasure with a secret. Built in 1857, Old Main was designed by Charles Ulricson, a Swedish-born immigrant who was trained by Freemasons. In Chapel in the Sky, Knox faculty member Lance Factor decodes the symbols of this beloved building and explores how an ardently Anti-Mason administration came to hire Ulricson. The mysterious Masonic architect left his legacy on both Knox's Old Main and the Augustana Lutheran Church in Andover, Illinois. Ulricson (1816–1887), born to an elite family in Stockholm, emigrated to the United States in 1835, arriving in New York City with empty pockets. Ulricson found work as a draftsman in the firm of Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis, America's premier antebellum architects and the leaders of the Greek, Gothic, and Tuscan revivals. From Davis, Ulricson learned that architects belonged to a "sacred priesthood." From Town, Ulricson learned the secret doctrines of "alchemical" architecture, its search for geometric philosopher's stones, and its techniques for drafting with a Masonic cubit and for transforming buildings into talismans, which they believed carried the protective energy of the Divine Architect and Geometer of the Universe. These lessons found expression in Ulricson's hidden codes for Old Main and Augustana Church. Ulricson's unique designs, rigorous geometry, elaborate windows, and interior decorations all contain tell-tale signs of Freemasonry. Ulricson essentially hid his symbols in plain sight of clients—vehement Anti-Masons who condemned all secret societies as "ungodly" and viewed all forms of alchemical architecture as "geomancy" or black magic. Chapel in the Sky explains how a dispossessed immigrant Masonic architect came to be the architect for the Anti-Masons, and how the meanings of his designs change our understanding of the architectural and ethnic history of Illinois. Factor's story will interest Knox alumni, architects, Freemasons, Swedish Americans, and those who love a tale of irony.

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German political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-75) fled from the Nazis to New York in 1941, and during the next thirty years in America she penned her best-known and most influential works, such as The Human Condition, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and On Revolution. Yet, despite the fact that a substantial portion of her oeuvre was written in America-not Europe-no one has directly considered the influence of America on her thought-until now. In Arendt and America, historian Richard H. King argues that while all of Arendt's work was haunted by her experience of totalitarianism, it was only in her adopted homeland that she was able to formulate the idea of the modern republic as an alternative to totalitarian rule. Situating Arendt within the context of US intellectual, political, and social history, King reveals how Arendt developed an extensive grasp of American constitutional history and how her idea of the American republic grew through her dialogue with the work of Alexis de Tocqueville. King also re-creates her intellectual exchanges with American friends and colleagues, such as Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy, and shows how her lively correspondence with sociologist David Riesman helped her understand modern American culture and society. In the last section of Arendt and America, King sets out the context in which the Eichmann controversy took place and follows the debate about "the banality of evil" that has continued ever since. As King shows, Arendt's work, regardless of focus, was shaped by postwar American thought, culture, and politics, including the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War. For Arendt, the United States was much more than a refuge from Nazi Germany; it was a stimulus to rethink the political, ethical, and historical traditions of human culture. This authoritative combination of intellectual history and biography offers a unique approach for thinking about the influence of America on Arendt's ideas and also the effect of her ideas on American thought.

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The spectacular growth in the 1970s and 1980s of the Marxist literature on politics and the state in capitalist society was hailed at the time as cumulative proof of Marxism's success in producing an effective theory of the political superstructure. More generally, it was seen as confirmation of the health and vigor of Marxist theory. Axel van den Berg questions both of these claims. Through comprehensive analysis of Marxist thought on bourgeois politics and the state, from that produced by Marx himself on, van den Berg radically challenges the viability of a distinctly Marxist theory of the state and of recent Marxist theorizing in general. In an exhaustive review of the literature, van den Berg shows that neo-Marxist theories are, for the most part, not empirically testable. To the extent that it is possible to draw any empirical implications from these theories at all, such implications are virtually indistinguishable from those of "bourgeois" theories. Van den Berg proceeds to lay bare the contradiction at the heart of Marxist theory in general: it presupposes the viability and desirability of some ideal socialist society yet its "anti-utopian" insistence that all criticisms of capitalism must rest on foundations immanent in capitalism itself prohibits any open discussion of such a utopia. Now available in paperback, this is a fundamental work for political and social theorists."This work is brilliant in its polemical courage, its originality, and its detailed and revealing examination of texts. Van den Berg demonstrates that postwar Marxist political theory and sociology is not only vague and contradictory but that it actually makes critical concessions to the bourgeois thought' it claims to surpass. Appearing in the midst of afar-reaching reconsideration of the Marxism project in Europe, this volume crystallizes these issues for North American social science..."--Jeffrey Alexander, University of California, Los Angeles."Van den Berg has made a major contribution to the long overdue relegation of Marxism to the museum of nineteenth-century ideological antiquities."--Dennis Wrong, Contemporary Sociology.Axel van den Berg is a Dutch-Canadian professor of sociology at McGill University in Montreal. His most recent work is The Social Sciences and Rationality.

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The volume relates the history of four parishes in Gore hundred and of the five which form Edmonton hundred. The first group contains Hendon, Kingsbury, and Little Stanmore, all bordering Edgware Road, and Great Stanmore. A northward projection of Ossulstone hundred separates it from the second, consisting of Edmonton, Enfield, and Tottenham, along the Essex boundary following the river Lea, and of South Mimms, finally transferred to Hertfordshire in 1965,and Monken Hadley, transferred in 1889 but now part of Greater London. In size the parishes range from Monken Hadley, with 695 a., to Enfield, among the largest in England with more than 12,000 a.; the most populous, Totten-ham with Wood Green, had well over 200,000 inhabitants by 1931. The story is of the rise of roadside settle-ment, of the purchase of land by Lon-doners, of suburban growth around railway stations and along new avenues, and, most recently, of rebuilding. Today's residents include a large Jewish community at Golders Green and coloured immigrants in working-class Tottenham and Edmonton. The scene is mainly suburban, although varying from the villas of late Victorian and Edwardian Southgate to ferry-built terraces farther east, and from Hampstead Garden Suburb to municipal housing estates and tower blocks. Many houses in Enfield, Mill Hill, Monken Hadley, South Mimms, and Stanmore are leftfrom the genteel villages of 18th- and early- 19th-century Middlesex. Park-land and farms survive in the north, notably in South Mimms, where Wrotham and Dyrham parks stand in their grounds, and around the former royal forest ofEnfield Chase. Canons, the area's most famous mansion, is recalled by the remnants of its park, close to the church where the princely duke of Chandos lies buried. Industry is confined mainly to the Lea valley, where the Royal Small Arms factory produced the first Enfield rifle in the 1850s, and to sites near Edgware Road, where Hendon Aerodrome lay. Other landmarks include the Alexandra Palace, whence the earliest television service was relayed, HarringayStadium and Arena, and the White Hart Lane ground of Tottenham Hotspurs football club.

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In The Ledger and the Chain, prize-winning historian Joshua D. Rothman tells the disturbing story of the Franklin and Armfield company and the men who built it into the largest and most powerful slave trading company in the United States. In so doing, he reveals the central importance of the domestic slave trade to the development of American capitalism and the expansion of the American nation.Few slave traders were more successful than Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, who ran Franklin and Armfield, and none were more influential. Drawing on source material from more than thirty archives in a dozen states, Rothman follows the three traders through their first meetings, the rise of their firm, and its eventual dissolution. Responsible for selling between 8,000 and 12,000 slaves from the Upper South to Deep South plantations over a period of eight years in the 1830s, they ran an extensive and innovative operation, with offices in New Orleans and Alexandria in Louisiana and Natchez in Mississippi. They advertised widely, borrowed heavily from bankers and other creditors, extended long term credit to their buyers, and had ships built to take slaves from Virginia down to New Orleans. Slavers are often misremembered as pariahs of more cultivated society, but as Rothman argues, the men who perpetrated the slave trade were respected members of prominent social and business communities and understood themselves as patriotic Americans.By tracing the lives and careers of the nation's most notorious slave traders, The Ledger and the Chain shows how their business skills and remorseless violence together made the malevolent entrepreneurialism of the slave trade. And it reveals how this horrific, ubiquitous trade in human beings shaped a growing nation and corrupted it in ways still powerfully felt today.

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Pieces of paper that claimed to be good for two dollars upon redemption at a distant bank. Foreign coins that fluctuated in value from town to town. Stock certificates issued by turnpike or canal companies-worth something...or perhaps nothing. IOUs from farmers or tradesmen, passed around by people who could not know the person who first issued them. Money and banking in antebellum America offered a glaring example of free-market capitalism run amok-unregulated, exuberant, and heading pell-mell toward the next "panic" of burst bubbles and hard times. In Other People's Money, Sharon Ann Murphy explains how banking and money worked before the federal government, spurred by the chaos of the Civil War, created the national system of US paper currency. Murphy traces the evolution of banking in America from the founding of the nation, when politicians debated the constitutionality of chartering a national bank, to Andrew Jackson's role in the Bank War of the early 1830s, to the problems of financing a large-scale war. She reveals how, ultimately, the monetary and banking structures that emerged from the Civil War also provided the basis for our modern financial system, from its formation under the Federal Reserve in 1913 to the present. Touching on the significant role that numerous historical figures played in shaping American banking-including Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Louis Brandeis- Other People's Money is an engaging guide to the heated political fights that surrounded banking in early America as well as to the economic causes and consequences of the financial system that emerged from the turmoil. By helping readers understand the financial history of this period and the way banking shaped the society in which ordinary Americans lived and worked, this book broadens and deepens our knowledge of the Early American Republic.

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Bella Abzug’s promotion of women’s and gay rights, universal childcare, green energy, and more provoked not only fierce opposition from Republicans but a split within her own party. The story of this notorious, galvanizing force in the Democrats’ “New Politics” insurgency is a biography for our times.Before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, or Hillary Clinton, there was New York’s Bella Abzug. With a fiery rhetorical style forged in the 1960s antiwar movement, Abzug vigorously promoted gender parity, economic justice, and the need to “bring Congress back to the people.”The 1970 congressional election season saw Abzug, in her trademark broad-brimmed hats, campaigning on the slogan “This Woman’s Place Is in the House—the House of Representatives.” Having won her seat, she advanced the feminist agenda in ways big and small, from gaining full access for congresswomen to the House swimming pool to cofounding the National Women’s Political Caucus to putting the title “Ms.” into the political lexicon. Beyond women’s rights, “Sister Bella” promoted gay rights, privacy rights, and human rights, and pushed legislation relating to urban, environmental, and foreign affairs.Her stint in Congress lasted just six years—it ended when she decided to seek the Democrats’ 1976 New York Senate nomination, a race she lost to Daniel Patrick Moynihan by less than 1 percent. Their primary contest, while gendered, was also an ideological struggle for the heart of the Democratic Party. Abzug’s protest politics had helped for a time to shift the center of politics to the left, but her progressive positions also fueled a backlash from conservatives who thought change was going too far.This deeply researched political biography highlights how, as 1960s radicalism moved protest into electoral politics, Abzug drew fire from establishment politicians across the political spectrum—but also inspired a generation of women.

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