Search results for ""Author Various"

Glass is hard and brilliant, and can be cut and polished like a gem. When variously shaped and colored pieces are combined to create a design or image, the results can be stunning. Creating these glass works can use one of two different methods: lead and copper foil (the method made famous by Louis Comfort Tiffany). This book demystifies both in detail by explaining the underlying principles of this specialized field, providing an overall view of the methods and techniques from an educational viewpoint, and building confidence for working directly with glass. Step-by-step instruction for six different leaded glass projects is included, covering the complete process. From the initial plan to the finished object, each step is broken into simple and easy to follow procedures. Once mastered, these steps are readily applicable for creating your own leaded glass pieces from your own designs! A collected gallery of inspirational leaded glass projects and a section of resources completes this valuable guide.

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With an emphasis on peer–produced content and collaboration, Wikipedia exemplifies a departure from traditional management and organizational models. This iconic "project" has been variously characterized as a hive mind and an information revolution, attracting millions of new users even as it has been denigrated as anarchic and plagued by misinformation. Have Wikipedia's structure and inner workings promoted its astonishing growth and enduring public relevance? In Common Knowledge?, Dariusz Jemielniak draws on his academic expertise and years of active participation within the Wikipedia community to take readers inside the site, illuminating how it functions and deconstructing its distinctive organization. Against a backdrop of misconceptions about its governance, authenticity, and accessibility, Jemielniak delivers the first ethnography of Wikipedia, revealing that it is not entirely at the mercy of the public: instead, it balances open access and power with a unique bureaucracy that takes a page from traditional organizational forms. Along the way, Jemielniak incorporates fascinating cases that highlight the tug of war among the participants as they forge ahead in this pioneering environment.

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An intriguing case study on how popular images of Oceania, mediated through a developing culture of celebrity, contributed to the formation of British identity both domestically and as a nascent imperial power in the eighteenth century. At the end of the eighteenth century metropolitan Britain was entranced by stories emanating from the furthest edge of its nascent empire. In the experience of eighteenth-century Britain, Oceania was both a real place, evidencedby the journals of adventurers like Joseph Banks, the voyage books of Captain James Cook and the growing collection of artefacts and curiosities in the British Museum, and a realm of fantasy reflected in theatre, fashion and the new phenomenon of mass print. In this innovative study Ruth Scobie shows how these multiple images of Oceania were filtered to a wider British public through the gradual emergence of a new idea of fame - commodified, commercial, scandalous - which bore in some respects a striking resemblance to modern celebrity culture and which made figures such as Banks and Cook, Fletcher Christian and his fellow mutineers on Pitcairn Island into public icons. Bringing together literary texts, works of popular culture, visual art and theatrical performance, Scobie argues that the idea of Oceania functioned variously as reflection, ideal and parody both in very local debates over the problemsof contemporary fame and in wider considerations of national identity, race and empire. RUTH SCOBIE is a Stipendiary Lecturer at Mansfield College, University of Oxford.

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The recipient of a 2000 MacArthur fellowship, Ben Katchor (b. 1951) is a beloved comics artist with a career spanning four decades. Published in indie weeklies across the United States, his comics are known for evoking the sensorium of the modern metropolis. As part of the Biographix series edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, Ben Katchor offers scholars and fans a thorough overview of the artist’s career from 1988 to 2020. In some of his early strips published in the 1980s in the New York Press and Forward, Katchor introduced one of his quintessential characters, Julius Knipl, a real estate photographer. By crafting Knipl as an urban flâneur prone to wandering, Katchor was able to variously demonstrate his absurd humor and linguistic whimsy alongside narratives packed with social critique. Three volumes collecting the Julius Knipl strips, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer; Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay; and The Beauty Supply District, helped cement Katchor as a distinguished comics artist and social commentator. Later works, such as The Cardboard Valise, Hand-Drying in America, and The Dairy Restaurant, have diversified his comics legacy. Rooted in close analyses of the artist’s numerous series and collections, each chapter in Ben Katchor is dedicated to a distinct aspect of the urban experience. Individual pages from Katchor’s work depict not only the visual, but also the auditory, tactile, and olfactory dimensions of life in the city.

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Apart from herpes and Lulu - everything is eventually swept away Just one shimmering pearl of wisdom from popstar and polymath James Maker, whose worldly observations will (like herpes) once again be on everyone's lips thanks to his award-winning memoir, remastered with new chapters. If you hadn't heard of rock bands Raymonde or RPLA - fronted by James in the 80s and 90s - you might be forgiven for mistaking AutoFellatio for fiction. But here fact is more fantastical than any novel, as we follow our hero from Bermondsey enfant terrible to Valencian grande dame, a scenic journey that stops off variously at Morrissey confidant, dominatrix, singer, songwriter and occasional actor, and is literally littered with memorable bons mots and hilarious anecdotes that make you feel like you've hit the wedding-reception jackpot of being unexpectedly seated next to the groom's flamboyant uncle. According to Wikipedia, very few men can perform the act of autofellatio. We never discover whether James is one of them but certainly, as a storyteller, he is one in a million. WINNER OF THE POLARI FIRST BOOK PRIZE 2011 'Bloody Brilliant' JULIE BURCHILL 'Glitteringly epigrammatic, it's a glam-rock Naked Civil Servant in court shoes. But funnier. And tougher.' MARK SIMPSON 'Pistol sharp, loaded with witty one-liners and peppered with Maker's scatter gun observations on life, music and the meaning of good hair.' PAUL BURSTON

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Gregory Heyworth’s Desiring Bodies considers the physical body and its relationship to poetic and corporate bodies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Beginning in the odd contest between body and form in the first sentence of Ovid’s protean Metamorphoses, Heyworth identifies these concepts as structuring principles of civic and poetic unity and pursues their consequences as refracted through a series of romances, some typical of the genre, some problematically so. Bodies, in Ovidian romance, are the objects of human desire to possess, to recover, to form, or to violate. Part 1 examines this desire as both a literal and socio-political phenomenon through readings of Marie de France’s Lais, Chrétien de Troyes’ Cligès and Perceval, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, texts variously expressing social, economic, and political culture in romance. In part 2, Heyworth is concerned with missing or absent bodies in Petrarch’s Rime sparse, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and Milton’s Paradise Lost and the generic rupture they cause in lyric, tragedy, and epic. Throughout, Heyworth draws on social theorists such as Kant, Weber, Simmel, and Elias to explore the connection between social and literary form. The first comparative, diachronic study of romance form in many years, Desiring Bodies is a persuasive and important cultural history that demonstrates Ovid’s pervasive influence not only on the poetics but on the politics of the medieval and early modern Western tradition.

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Problem: Best friends keep giving extremely generous giftsSolution: Give better ones in return Philip has a lot on his mind. At home, in his unnecessarily large, excessively expensive house in south London, he is attempting to become a Taoist master of love with his wife Alice, but his quest is forever being interrupted by the requests of his twin daughters: Can we have a pony – please? I want to go to boarding school – please? At work, in his shed/office at the bottom of the garden, between countless games of Minesweep and FreeCell, Philip is trying to pay the mortgage by writing instruction manuals for Korean bread-making machines. And, at parties where he is concerned that he is not taken seriously (he has been variously mistaken as a doctor/waiter and sinologist) Philip tells the world he is a scriptwriter, even though all he has managed to pen is a story he calls Wang the Unlucky Scholar. But, above all, Philip is worrying about his best friends Sean and Barry. The problem is simple: they give great presents. Their gifts are exquisite: a full set of Italian crockery, a handmade corkscrew from Venice. They give them indiscriminately: on birthdays, at parties and quite often for no reason whatsoever. And, most distressingly, these presents break all bounds of generosity: two FA Cup Final tickets beside the royal box, a skiing holiday for Philip's entire family. These are gifts that hurt a man's pride, these are gifts that can never be matched.

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Documenting youth participation in the South African anti-apartheid struggle, Youth and Identity Politics in South Africa examines identity construction and negotiation in the region of KwaZulu/Natal. Based on extensive interviews, Sibusisiwe Nombuso Dlamini presents life stories of survival and identity negotiation in a region and at a time where to be youthful and politically active was to be associated with membership in Nelson Mandela's African National Congress -- a potentially dangerous association. Zulus are far from being an homogenous group. Dlamini examines the dynamics both of group identification -- that of being a young Zulu -- and of the differences, both class and regional. Further, she looks at the discourses of participation in the liberation struggle, and how these discourses intersect with KwaZulu/Natal identity and party politics. Youth and Identity Politics in South Africa shows how the youth identify variously as fans of jazz or hip-hop who espouse a none-racial national character, as athletes who feel a strong connection to traditional Zulu patriarchy, or in many other social and political subcultures. This is a rich and unprecedented youth-centred ethnography that paints a unique picture of the lives of South African youth.

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The brutality and racial hatred exhibited by Japan’s military during the Pacific War piqued outrage in the West and fanned resentments throughout Asia. Public understanding of Japan’s wartime atrocities, however, often fails to differentiate the racial agendas of its military and government elites from the racial values held by the Japanese people. While not denying brutalities committed by the Japanese military, Honored and Dishonored Guests overturns these standard narratives and demonstrates rather that Japan’s racial attitudes during wartime are more accurately discerned in the treatment of Western civilians living in Japan than the experiences of enemy POWs.The book chronicles Western communities in wartime Japan, using this body of experiences to reconsider allegations of Japanese racism and racial hatred. Its bold thesis is borne out by a broad mosaic of stories from dozens of foreign families and individuals who variously endured police harassment, suspicion, relocation, starvation, denaturalization, internment, and torture, as well as extraordinary acts of charity. The book’s account of stranded Westerners—from Tokyo, Yokohama, and Kobe to the mountain resorts of Karuizawa and Hakone—yields a unique interpretation of race relations and wartime life in Japan.

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Casting fresh light on the renowned productions of auteurs such as Antonioni, Fellini, and Bresson and drawing out from the shadows a range of important but lesser-known works, "Screening Modernism" is the first comprehensive study of European art cinema's postwar heyday. Spanning from the 1950s to the 1970s, Andras Balint Kovacs' encyclopedic work argues that cinematic modernism was not a unified movement with a handful of styles and themes but rather a stunning range of variations on the core principles of modern art. Illustrating how the concepts of modernism and the avant-garde variously manifest themselves in film, Kovacs begins by tracing the emergence of art cinema as a historical category. He then explains the main formal characteristics of modern styles and forms as well as their intellectual foundation. Finally, drawing on modernist theory and philosophy along the way, he provides an innovative history of the evolution of modern European art cinema. Exploring not only modernism's origins but also its stylistic, thematic, and cultural avatars, "Screening Modernism" ultimately lays out creative new ways to think about the historical periods that comprise this golden age of film.

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An eyewitness to profound change affecting marine environments on the Newfoundland coast, Antony Adler argues that the history of our relationship with the ocean lies as much in what we imagine as in what we discover.We have long been fascinated with the oceans, seeking “to pierce the profundity” of their depths. In studying the history of marine science, we also learn about ourselves. Neptune’s Laboratory explores the ways in which scientists, politicians, and the public have invoked ocean environments in imagining the fate of humanity and of the planet—conjuring ideal-world fantasies alongside fears of our species’ weakness and ultimate demise.Oceans gained new prominence in the public imagination in the early nineteenth century as scientists plumbed the depths and marine fisheries were industrialized. Concerns that fish stocks could be exhausted soon emerged. In Europe these fears gave rise to internationalist aspirations, as scientists sought to conduct research on an oceanwide scale and nations worked together to protect their fisheries. The internationalist program for marine research waned during World War I, only to be revived in the interwar period and again in the 1960s. During the Cold War, oceans were variously recast as battlefields, post-apocalyptic living spaces, and utopian frontiers.The ocean today has become a site of continuous observation and experiment, as probes ride the ocean currents and autonomous and remotely operated vehicles peer into the abyss. Embracing our fears, fantasies, and scientific investigations, Antony Adler tells the story of our relationship with the seas.

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This unique book captures the rise of New York's passionately musical Irish-Catholics and provides a compelling history of early New York City. The Unstoppable Irish follows the changing fortunes of New York's Irish Catholics, commencing with the evacuation of British military forces in late 1783 and concluding one hundred years later with the completion of the initial term of the city's first Catholic mayor. During that century, Hibernians first coalesced and then rose in uneven progression from being a variously dismissed, despised, and feared foreign group to ultimately receiving de facto acceptance as constituent members of the city's population. Dan Milner presents evidence that the Catholic Irish of New York gradually integrated (came into common and equal membership) into the city populace rather than assimilated (adopted the culture of a larger host group). Assimilation had always been an option for Catholics, even in Ireland. In order to fit in, they needed only to adopt mainstream Anglo-Protestant identity. But the same virile strain within the Hibernian psyche that had overwhelmingly rejected the abandonment of Gaelic Catholic being in Ireland continued to hold forth in Manhattan and the community remained largely intact. A novel aspect of Milner's treatment is his use of song texts in combination with period news reports and existing scholarship to develop a fuller picture of the Catholic Irish struggle. Products of a highly verbal and passionately musical people, Irish folk and popular songs provide special insight into the popularly held attitudes and beliefs of the integration epoch.

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This up-to-date and lively text focuses on a wide range of issues, such as politics as theater, the economic forces shaping contemporary political media, the rhetoric of the "War on Terrorism," and the growth of new media. Separate chapters explore a range of contexts, including the presidency, Congress and the courts, foreign news reporting, and political art. The text concludes with ways to open up additional pathways for imagining our national life, ranging from Internet-supported activism to innovative uses of documentary film. Center Stage: Media and the Performance of American Politics examines political and mediated communication as forms of representational theater. Taking the dramatic orientation to politics seriously, Woodward explores how American civic culture is variously enriched and diminished by the ways practitioners and journalists organize narratives, or stories, about our civic life.

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Derby has been variously described as the crossroads of history', the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution', the real ale capital of the world', Jubilee City' and the most haunted place in the country'. It is all of these and much, much more. For over a century it was an important railway-manufacturing centre, and the city has made a significant contribution to the artistic and cultural life of the country, particularly famed Enlightenment artist Wright of Derby. Britain's first factory was established in Derby in 1721, and in 1745 Derby became the southernmost point reached by Bonnie Prince Charlie in his abortive attempt to overthrow King George II and seize the Crown. In the twentieth century Derby became the home of Rolls-Royce, which alone has contributed to a number of world-beating achievements. But Derby's greatest asset is its people. The inventiveness of individual engineers, artists and scientists has been supported by the craftsmanship and skill of t he workforce through

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Whilst Richard I is one of medieval England’s most famous kings he is also the most controversial. He has variously been considered a great warrior but a poor king, a man driven by the quest for fame and glory but also lacking in self-discipline and prone to throwing away the short-term advantages that his military successes brought him. In this reassessment W. B. Bartlett looks at his deeds and achievements in a new light. The result is a compelling new portrait of ‘the Lionheart’ which shows that the king is every bit as remarkable as his medieval contemporaries found him to be. This includes his Muslim enemies, who spoke of him as their most dangerous and gallant opponent. It shows him to be a man badly let down by some of those around him, especially his brother John and the duplicitous French king Philip. The foibles of his character are also exposed to the full, including his complicated relationships with the key women in his life, especially the imposing contemporary figure of his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and his wife, Berengaria, with whom he failed to produce an heir, leading to later suggestions of homosexuality. This is a new Richard, one for the twenty-first century, and a re-evaluation of the life story of one of the greatest personalities of medieval Europe.

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In Beyond Casablanca, Kevin Dwyer explores the problems of creativity in the Arab and African world, focusing on Moroccan cinema and one of its key figures, filmmaker M. A. Tazi. Dwyer develops three themes simultaneously: the filmmaker's career and films; filmmaking in postcolonial Morocco; and the relationship between Moroccan cinema, Third World and Arab cinema, and the global film industry. This compelling discussion of Moroccan cinema is founded upon decades of anthropological research in Morocco, most recently on the Moroccan film sector and the global film industry, and exhibits a sensitivity to the cultural, political, social, and economic context of creative activity. The book centers on a series of interviews conducted with Tazi, whose career provides a rich commentary on the world of Moroccan cinema and on Moroccan cinema in the world. The interviews are framed, variously, by presentations of Moroccan history, society, and culture; the role of foreign filmmakers in Morocco; thematic discussions of cinematic issues (such as narrative techniques, the use of symbols, film as an expression of identity, and problems of censorship); and the global context of Third World filmmaking.

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Jenny King was born in London during the Blitz. Her parents, both teachers, encouraged her to write poetry as a child and overcame wartime paper rationing to make her a book to write them in. Her poems view the world calmly, thoughtfully. They consider memory, peace and its opposite, the inwardness and variety of the natural world, and how an individual relates to others. All the poems are concerned with the interest and excitement of language itself. Some use traditional patterns in unexpected ways, sometimes including rhyme, sometimes in more fluid forms. They work for clarity and memorable perception. Accessible language and natural rhythms are always important though used variously. Looking into the known - or half known - past of family history, the poem can disclose the fallibility of memory but also how present relates to past and how the present with its difficulties intrudes on any consideration of how to live. These poems result from a long writing life and study of both past and contemporary poets.

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The work of the classic philosophers is well known. But what do contemporary thinkers say about what it is to be a human being? In his serious, challenging, and remarkably accessible new book, Nicholas Fearn turns to contemporary philosophers to ask the age old questions: Who am I? What do I know? What should I do? In his search for higher meaning, Fearn consults with thinkers from around the world (including John Searle, Martha Nussbaum, Peter Singer, Richard Rorty, Daniel Dennett, Noam Chomsky, Derek Parfit, Nick Bostrom, among many others) to create an impressive survey of recent thought. Variously, they believe that free will, identity, and consciousness are not what they seem; that the difference between virtue and wickedness can be a matter of sheer luck; and that, one day, we will all be vegetarians. Fearn discovers that the topics haven’t changed, though our world has. Or has it? Moving deftly from pop culture to the writings of Plato, Philosophy is a brilliant and entertaining guide to the current state of the philosophical thought.

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In France, Mattie feels 20 again. In Poland, Magda revisits her impoverished family. In Uzbekistan, Diana lets a fellow tourist kiss her. In Germany, Lynn loses her luggage on the Düsseldorf train.The Hopeful Traveller is a collection of short stories about—and told by—single women who have put the past behind them but are still looking for their anchor in the present. It includes bitter-sweet accounts of the freedoms of postwar life, of foreign travel, of the rekindling of old friendships and of the search for new ones. The stories speak of cosmopolitan, self-confident, well-heeled characters, in an era just before the birth of feminism, conventional in their expectations of men, always just a step away from displacement and alienation.Set variously in Paris, Kalisz, Samarkand, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Erfurt, Singapore and London, these stories, from a much-admired veteran writer, offer a teasing mix of realism and fantasy, wish-fulfilment and regret. Some of these stories have appeared in translation in overseas annuals and collections.

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Nietzsche's Ecce Homo was published posthumously in 1908, eight years after his death, and has been variously described ever since as useless, mad, or merely inscrutable. Against this backdrop, Nicholas D. More provides the first complete and compelling analysis of the work, and argues that this so-called autobiography is instead a satire. This form enables Nietzsche to belittle bad philosophy by comic means, attempt reconciliation with his painful past, review and unify his disparate works, insulate himself with humor from the danger of 'looking into abysses', and establish wisdom as a special kind of 'good taste'. After showing how to read this much-maligned book, More argues that Ecce Homo presents the best example of Nietzsche making sense of his own intellectual life, and that its unique and complex parody of traditional philosophy makes a powerful case for reading Nietzsche as a philosophical satirist across his corpus.

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In this era of tweets and blogs, it is easy to assume that the self-obsessive recording of daily minutiae is a recent phenomenon. But Americans have been navel-gazing since nearly the beginning of the republic. The daily planner - variously called the daily diary, commercial diary, and portable account book - first emerged in colonial times as a means of telling time, tracking finances, locating the nearest inn, and even planning for the coming winter. They were carried by everyone from George Washington to the soldiers who fought the Civil War. And by the twentieth century, this document had become ubiquitous in the American home as a way of recording a great deal more than simple accounts. In this appealing history of the daily act of self-reckoning, Molly McCarthy explores just how vital these unassuming and easily overlooked stationery staples were to those who used them. From their origins in almanacs and blank books through the nineteenth century and on to the enduring legacy of written introspection, McCarthy has penned an exquisite biography of an almost ubiquitous document that has borne witness to American lives in all of their complexity and mundanity.

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Mist and fog engender fascination and mystery, enticing with their wispy veils and vapourous moods, and they are the stuff of dreams and visions. 'The mists of time' and 'in a fog' are common expressions that substantiate the long association of mist and fog with the passage of time, the vagaries of memory and feelings of uncertainty. Mist and fog obscure, conceal and when they dissipate, reveal. Vapourous atmosphere in art and life masks evil and can elicit presentiments of death. It also has been used in art to convey the splendours of the spiritual world and the terrors of the supernatural. The metaphorical meanings that have accrued to mist and fog, encouraged by their indeterminate and transitory nature, and the emotions to which they give rise, are variously evident in the work of major artists and their contemporaries. This book focusses on mist and fog from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries in the places they most proliferated. Examples of literature that employ mist and fog as metaphor and in allegory from antiquity to Joseph Conrad serve to amplify many of the paintings discussed.

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"I was following orders." The answer most commonly quoted by SS men accused of atrocious crimes after Germany had surrendered in 1945. But who gave those orders? Who was the mastermind behind the sophisticated machinery which allowed men from normal family backgrounds to kill on such a scale? The right man at the right time, fate steered Heinrich Himmler to take control of an organisation destined to carry out Hitler's racial policies. This study not only sets out in detail how Heinrich Himmler's daily routine allowed him to implement Nazi strategy, but it also provides illustrations of the man behind much of it, both at work and at home. Of all the personalities of history demonized by post-war writers, Heinrich Himmler ranks among the most reviled. His legacy is one of hatred, violence and cold blooded murder on a vast scale. A Jekyll and Hyde character, variously described by his generation and those who followed as charming, loyal, polite, a pedant, an eccentric, an organizational genius, a fool, a desk killer and a loving father.The camera allows us into his world, albeit temporarily, and we can equate his busy, but mostly mundane schedule with contemporary images frozen in time. What makes this book unique is the astonishing amount of photographic material, following Himmler on his day to day routine. It is a must read for anyone interested in the enigmatic man and the operations of the Third Reich.

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An extensive look at historical, literary, and media representations of '68 in Germany, challenging the way it has been instrumentalized. In Germany, the concept of "1968" is enduring and synonymous with the German Student Movement, and is viewed, variously, as a fundamental liberalization, a myth, a second foundation, or an irritation. The movement's aims - radicalre-imagination of the political and economic order and social hierarchy - have been understood as requiring a "long march." While the movement has been judged at best a "successful failure," cultural elites continue to engage inthe construction of 1968. Ingo Cornils's book argues that writing about 1968 in Germany is no longer about the historical events or the specific objectives of a bygone counterculture, but is instead a moral touchstone, a marker ofsocial group identity meant to keep alive (or at bay) a utopian agenda that continues to fire the imagination. The book demonstrates that the representation of 1968 as a "foundational myth" suits the needs of a number of surprisingly heterogeneous groups, and that even attempts to deconstruct the myth strengthen it. Cornils brings together for the first time the historical, literary, and media representations of the movement, showing the motivation behindand effect of almost five decades of writing about 1968. In so doing, Cornils challenges the way 1968 has been instrumentalized: as a powerful imaginary that has colonized every aspect of life in Germany, and as symbolic capitalin cultural and political debates. Ingo Cornils is Professor of German Studies at the University of Leeds.

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A word conventionally imbued with melancholy meanings, "diaspora" has been used variously to describe the cataclysmic historical event of displacement, the subsequent geographical scattering of peoples, or the conditions of alienation abroad and yearning for an ancestral home. But as Daniel Boyarin writes, diaspora may be more constructively construed as a form of cultural hybridity or a mode of analysis. In A Traveling Homeland, he makes the case that a shared homeland or past and traumatic dissociation are not necessary conditions for diaspora and that Jews carry their homeland with them in diaspora, in the form of textual, interpretive communities built around talmudic study. For Boyarin, the Babylonian Talmud is a diasporist manifesto, a text that produces and defines the practices that constitute Jewish diasporic identity. Boyarin examines the ways the Babylonian Talmud imagines its own community and sense of homeland, and he shows how talmudic commentaries from the medieval and early modern periods also produce a doubled cultural identity. He links the ongoing productivity of this bifocal cultural vision to the nature of the book: as the physical text moved between different times and places, the methods of its study developed through contact with surrounding cultures. Ultimately, A Traveling Homeland envisions talmudic study as the center of a shared Jewish identity and a distinctive feature of the Jewish diaspora that defines it as a thing apart from other cultural migrations.

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'I did not regard myself as a slacker. Even in childhood I taught myself to carry out tasks entrusted conscientiously and carefully. In war, it is no secret that the casual don't survive'. Evgeni Nikolaev was one of Russia s leading snipers of World War II and his memoir provides and unparralled account of frontline action in crucial theatres of war. Nikolaev is credited with a remarkable 324 kills and his wartime service included time in the siege of Leningrad in 1941/1942. His memoir is not an neutral, apolitical account. Far from it. Nikolaev asserts, for example, that Finland attached Russia. As a member of the NKVD is it not surprising that his memoir full of historical misinterpretation and justification of the agency s actions. Equally, Nikoalev is dismissive of his Nazi opponents. He variously describes his Nazi counterparts as bandits and scum and implores the reader to take a look, fellows, at the beast of a bastard I ve laid low . In vivid, arresting recollections he paints his actions in a saintly heroic light. He describes the comfort of the German foxholes, wired with telephone connections, relative to the Russians who fasted without food or water awaiting the moment for a perfect shot. He claimes the Russian soldier was a moral warrior, killing only with head or heart shots. In addition to describing details of his kills, Nikolaev explains how his life was saved when an explosive rifle bullet struck a watch that he kept in his jacket pocket. His life was saved by a surgeon who extracted all the watch parts.

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A new, thoroughly updated second edition of Bradt's Australian Wildlife, covering habitats, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, invertebrates, the marine environment and where to go. Wildlife writer Stella Martin combines the encyclopaedic knowledge of David Attenborough with the enthusiasm of the late Steve Irwin to offer a unique guide which, compared to others, is variously more portable and more detailed, has a broader scope, goes beyond identification notes and includes an in-depth guide to ecosystems. It also covers all regions of Australia. Background chapters explain how Australia's wildlife evolved in isolation and how the geology, soil and climate affect its natural history. There is also a close look at Australia's infamously dangerous creatures, avoiding the clichés and putting their threat into perspective: although most of the world's most venomous snakes are found in Australia, they are by no means the deadliest. Essential advice is offered for avoiding hazardous wildlife and there are also useful first aid tips. Up-to-date information on conservation is included, including fire and its role in the Australian ecology and the effect of exotic feral animals and weeds. And there are tips on how to find, enjoy and identify wildlife with a 'where to go' section featuring a state-by-state overview of key wildlife sites, with maps. With a focus on interesting information about the general biology and behaviour of the animals - with some detail about the most commonly seen species - and explaining how the different ecosystems 'work', this guide is for visitors who want to know more about what they see but don't have room for an entire library of reference books. It is a book to read in bed - and encourage you to be up at dawn.

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This is a book of theory written from Africa. Its concern is the development of concepts for an understanding of emancipatory politics in Africa in particular, and in the Third World in general. ‘Politics’ here means consciousness, ideology, practice, choices and thought. The two core concepts which the book develops are the idea of ‘excess’ and that of ‘political sequence’. These are both made necessary by the underlying commitment to the axiom that ‘people think’ – that people are capable of thinking rationally beyond their interests as de?ned by their social location within a matrix of social relations regulated by the state. Drawing on the work of Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus, the category of the sequence is used to provide an alternative to historicism in which ‘politics’ exists only as historical sequences which are discontinuous.These concepts are deployed variously in the history of anti-colonial and national liberation struggles and in contemporary experiences on the African continent. The book asserts that Africans, rather than having simply been the victims of modern history, have contributed to the universal history of humanity and continue to do so in original and inventive ways which provide important pointers for thinking human emancipation worldwide in the 21st century.

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Enter the extraordinary world of Arthurian legend in an adventure overflowing with knightly chivalry, the danger of jousting and the warmth of true love. But the Legend of Parzival is more than the tale of one knight's epic journey to find the elusive Holy Grail; along the way Parzival faces a challenging journey of self-discovery. He must conquer his ignorance and pride, and learn humility and compassion before he is finally worthy of becoming a Grail Knight.This accessible prose retelling of the medieval German epic brings the wonderful story of the Arthurian knight (known variously as Parzival, Parsifal and Percival) to life for today's readers, while faithfully preserving the story, characters and tone of Wolfram von Eschenbach's thirteenth century narrative poem.In Steiner-Waldorf education, Parzival's quest is seen as a metaphor for the difficult journey through life, which speaks strongly to the adolescent, and its study is at the heart of the Class 11 curriculum. As a hugely experienced Steiner-Waldorf teacher, Robin Cook's engaging retelling will provide valuable inspiration for other teachers and students, as well as enjoyment and enrichment for all readers.

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Plucking Chrysanthemums is a critical study of the life and works of Narushima Ryūhoku (1837–1884): Confucian scholar, world traveler, pioneering journalist, and irrepressible satirist. A major figure on the nineteenth-century Japanese cultural scene, Ryūhoku wrote works that were deeply rooted in classical Sinitic literary traditions. Sinitic poetry and prose enjoyed a central and prestigious place in Japan for nearly all of its history, and the act of composing it continued to offer modern Japanese literary figures the chance to incorporate themselves into a written tradition that transcended national borders. Adopting Ryūhoku’s multifarious invocations of Six Dynasties poet Tao Yuanming as an organizing motif, Matthew Fraleigh traces the disparate ways in which Ryūhoku drew upon the Sinitic textual heritage over the course of his career. The classical figure of this famed Chinese poet and the Sinitic tradition as a whole constituted a referential repository to be shaped, shifted, and variously spun to meet the emerging circumstances of the writer as well as his expressive aims. Plucking Chrysanthemums is the first book-length study of Ryūhoku in a Western language and also one of the first Western-language monographs to examine Sinitic poetry and prose (kanshibun) composition in modern Japan.

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Shortlisted for the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction 2019Shortlisted for the Mascara Literary Review's Avant Garde Awards 2020The Flight of Birds is a novel in twelve stories, each of them compelled by an encounter between the human and animal worlds. The birds in these stories inhabit the same space as humans, but they are also apart, gliding above us. The Flight of Birds: A Novel in Twelve Stories explores what happens when the two worlds meet. Joshua Lobb’s stories are at once intimate and expansive, grounded in an exquisite sense of place. The birds in these stories are variously free and wild, native and exotic, friendly and hostile. Humans see some of them as pets, some of them as pests, and some of them as food. Through a series of encounters between birds and humans, the book unfolds as a meditation on grief and loss, isolation and depression, and the momentary connections that sustain us through them. Underpinning these interactions is an awareness of climate change, of the violence we do to the living beings around us, and of the possibility of transformation.The Flight of Birds will change how you think about the planet and humanity’s place in it.

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Trust occupies a unique place in contemporary discourse. Seen as both necessary and virtuous, it is variously depicted as enhancing the social fabric, lowering crime rates, increasing happiness, and generating prosperity. It allows for complex political systems, permits human communication, underpins financial instruments and economic institutions, and generally holds society together. Against these overwhelmingly laudable qualities, mistrust often goes unnoticed as a positive social phenomenon, treated as little more than a corrosive absence, a mere negative of trust itself. With this book, Matthew Carey proposes an ethnographic and conceptual exploration of mistrust that raises it up as legitimate stance in its own right. While mistrust can quickly ruin relationships and even dissolve extensive social ties, Carey shows that it might have other values. Drawing on fieldwork in Morocco's High Atlas Mountains as well as comparative material from regions stretching from Eastern Europe to Melanesia, he examines the impact of mistrust on practices of conversation and communication, friendship and society, and politics and cooperation. In doing so, he demonstrates that trust is not the only basis for organizing human society and cooperating with others. The result is a provocative but enlightening work that makes us rethink social issues such as suspicion, doubt, and uncertainty.

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Newly updated to incorporate recent additions to the English language, the Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins provides a fascinating exploration of the origins and development of over 3,000 words in the English language. Drawing on Oxford's unrivalled dictionary research programme and language monitoring it brings to light the intriguing and often unusual stories of some of our most used words and phrases. The A-Z entries include the first known use of the term along with examples, related lexes, and expressions which uncover the etymological composition of each word. Also featured are 22 special panels that give overviews of broad topic areas, 5 of which are completely new and that variously cover words from Oceania, word blends, eponyms, and acronyms. New findings in the OED since the previous edition have also been added, including emoji, mansplain, meeple, meme, and spam. An absorbing resource for language students and enthusiasts, but also an intriguing read for any person interested in the development of the English language, and of language development in general. It also includes an extended introduction on the history of the English language.

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Edith Wharton returns- spirited, brilliant, alive. In this highly entertaining novel, Edith Wharton is variously reimagined- as a host in the afterlife, a historical figure in a modern novella, and as an elusive presence in the pages of her own writing. But when a lifelong secret is exposed, it's almost too shocking to be true. Hugely acclaimed during her lifetime, writer Edith Wharton is back - with the most extraordinary opportunity. Summoned to a room in the afterlife, Edith finds the manuscript of a new novella inspired by her life. A letter from her one-time editor advises Edith to consider carefully whether to destroy the work or allow its publication. Is this a chance to correct her image of haughtiness and privilege, and to reignite interest in her writing? Edith begins reading the novella to her astonished companions; and what unfolds is a cautionary story of online fame. But as she gradually remembers the details of her life, Edith becomes fearful about what the work might reveal and is haunted by the words- The letters survive, and everything survives. 'Philippa Swan's is an original voice that is articulate, humorous and disarmingly refreshing.' - NZ Books

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In Everything: And Other Performance Texts from Germany, Matt Cornish gathers texts drawn from performances by five of the most renowned theater collectives working today: andcompany&Co., Gob Squad, Rimini Protokoll, She She Pop, and Showcase Beat Le Mot. Drawn from theater events variously described as documentary, post-dramatic, and live art, the texts collected in Everything seldom look or read like plays-some comprise rules for improvisation; others could best be described as theatrical scenarios; a few are transcripts; one includes a soup recipe. Yet amid these dramaturgical tests and trials, one finds poetry: heartbreaking stories of disability and triumph as well as strange, disjointed fairy tales interrupted by communist songs. This volume is an extension of the original theatrical experiments. For the reader, the texts are calls to action. They ask one to do things: watch the news, listen to music, make soup, and dance. While the groups do not mean for actors to repeat the words printed here, they invite the reader to adapt their ideas and rules to make their own entirely new productions.

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These poems report on worlds both robust and delicate, from boisterous pub-bluff to the oxygen bubble of an exquisite underwater spider. Whether situated in the quiet lanes of his native Co Cork or amid the bustle of his adopted London, Riordan's poems exist between many states, poised at once in the grip of both activity and stillness, concerned with speaking and listening to what he hauntingly describes as 'the unwonted quiet'. There are tributes to the departed and the living, the befriended and the estranged; there are also conversations with poets, in memory and in translation, from the Spanish and from the Irish. The collection concludes with 'The Pilgrim' - that hovers eerily 'in patrol of the edges', wherever they may be located. But just as these poems can be sage, they are also mischievous, fun-loving, gregarious creatures who like nothing better than to sing or to joke at your ear. The Water Stealer is a book full of invention and delight, whose hypnotic stories remind us of the variousness and the enchantment of the world.

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From windswept tundra to humid subtropical everglades, fromgracious coniferous forests to austere deserts, North America isblessed with an incredibly diverse array of natural environments,each supporting a unique system of plant and animal life. Thesesystems--also known as biomes--are tightly woven webs of life thathave taken millennia to evolve. This lavishly illustrated bookintroduces readers to this extraordinary array of naturalcommunities and to the subtle interactions of minerals, plants, andanimals that take place within them. Professor Eric Bolen takes a qualitative, intuitive approach to hissubject, beginning with an overview of essential ecological termsand concepts, such as competitive exclusion, taxa, niches, andsuccession. Then, biome by biome, he covers the entirety of Canadaand the United States, starting with the tundra of the far northand working his way south and then west to conclude in the desertsand chaparral of southern California. Along the way, he delves intopertinent conservation issues and features fascinating historicalvignettes and original documents detailing human impact on variousenvironments--for instance, the role of John Deere's plow insettling grasslands, and the use of fur records from Hudson's BayCompany. Throughout, he enlivens the text with dozens of exquisitephotographs and illuminating maps, graphs, charts, andtables. Ecology of North America is an ideal first text for studentsinterested in natural resources, environmental science, andbiology, and it is a useful and attractive addition to the libraryof anyone interested in understanding and protecting the naturalenvironment.

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Dr Jean Michel Massing is a Reader in the History of Art and a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. The first volume of Studies in Imagery, Text and Images, consists of 25 "studies grouped under four sections: Classical Art and its Nachleben; Symbolic Languages; Saints and Devils; Comets, Dreams and Stars. The topics include the Celto-Roman "goddess Epona, the Calumny of Apelles and its reconstructions, the Triumph of Caesar, proverb illustration, the art of memory, emblematic and didactic imagery, the temptations of St Anthony, as well as dreams and celestial phenomena. They span a wide range of periods, from classical antiquity to the nineteenth century. Vol. 2, The World Discovered, deals variously with the relationship of European with non-European cultures, cartography in medieval and early modern times, the representation of foreign lands and people, and the collecting of exotic artefacts. A central theme involves the imagery of black Africans from the Middle Ages up to the nineteenth century.

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Dr Jean Michel Massing is a Reader in the History of Art and a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. The first volume of Studies in Imagery, Text and Images, consists of 25 "studies grouped under four sections: Classical Art and its Nachleben; Symbolic Languages; Saints and Devils; Comets, Dreams and Stars. The topics include the Celto-Roman "goddess Epona, the Calumny of Apelles and its reconstructions, the Triumph of Caesar, proverb illustration, the art of memory, emblematic and didactic imagery, the temptations of St Anthony, as well as dreams and celestial phenomena. They span a wide range of periods, from classical antiquity to the nineteenth century. Vol. 2, The World Discovered, deals variously with the relationship of European with non-European cultures, cartography in medieval and early modern times, the representation of foreign lands and people, and the collecting of exotic artefacts. A central theme involves the imagery of black Africans from the Middle Ages up to the nineteenth century.

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Foundations of Electroheat unifies an extremely diverse area ofelectricity utilisation in a coherent and concise reference. Fromlaser welding to plasma furnaces for waste treatment and inductionheating for forging to radio frequency drying textiles, the varioustopics that comprise electroheat are presented as a whole. Theunified approach concentrates on three major themes: * Electromagnetic heating, embracing direct resistance, inductionheating of metals and radio frequency and microwave heating ofdielectrics * The ionised state, dealing with laser processing, plasma torchesand furnaces, glow discharges for nitriding and arc furnaces formelting scrap * Heat and mass transfer The impact of computers on electrotechnology is explored byconsidering topics such as expert systems, neural networks andcomputational electromagnetics. Featuring industrial applicationsand case studies, as well as worked examples of the principlesinvolved, this text is essential reading for the engineeringstudent of electroheat. Professional engineers, scientists andtechnologists interested in the efficient utilisation of electricalenergy will also find this an invaluable reference.

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WINNER OF THE OCM BOCAS PRIZE FOR NON-FICTIONSHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITINGIn this astonishing collection of essays, the award-winning poet and novelist Kei Miller explores the silence in which so many important things are kept. He examines the experience of discrimination through this silence and what it means to breach it: to risk words, to risk truths. And he considers the histories our bodies inherit - the crimes that haunt them, and how meaning can shift as we move throughout the world, variously assuming privilege or victimhood. Through letters to James Baldwin, encounters with Liam Neeson, Soca, Carnival, family secrets, love affairs, white women's tears, questions of aesthetics and more, Miller powerfully and imaginatively recounts everyday acts of racism and prejudice. With both the epigrammatic concision and conversational cadence of his poetry and novels, Things I Have Withheld is a great artistic achievement: a work of beauty which challenges us to interrogate what seems unsayable and why - our actions, defence mechanisms, imaginations and interactions - and those of the world around us.

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Globalization: Key Thinkers offers a critical commentary on the leading thinkers in the contemporary globalization debate, as well as new arguments about the future direction of globalization thinking. The book guides the reader through the key arguments of leading thinkers, explaining their place in the wider globalization debate and evaluating their critical reception. Eleven thematic chapters focus on one or two key thinkers covering every aspect of the globalization debate including the theoretical arguments of Anthony Giddens and Manuel Castells, to the positive arguments of Thomas Friedman and Martin Wolf and the reforming ideas of Joseph Stiglitz. Other chapters variously address the ideas of Immanuel Wallerstein, Arjun Appadurai, Paul Hirst, Naomi Klein, Grahame Thompson, David Held, Anthony McGrew, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Saskia Sassen and Peter Dicken. Each chapter also provides some carefully selected recommendations for further reading for the thinkers discussed. The book ends with a concluding chapter that examines how thinking about globalization is likely to develop in future. Whilst individual chapters can stand alone, the book is designed as a whole to enhance the reader's understanding of how different thinkers' ideas relate and contrast to each other.

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This book provides an overview of the extent to which the 18th-century English Landscape Garden spread through Europe and Russia. While this type of garden acted widely as an inspiration, it was not slavishly copied but adapted to local conditions, circumstances and agendas. A garden ‘in the English style’ is commonly used to denote a landscape garden in Europe, while the term ‘landscape garden’ is used for layouts that are naturalistic in plan and resemble natural scenery, though they might be highly contrived and usually large in scale. The landscape garden took hold in mainland Europe from about 1760. Due to the differing geopolitical character of several of the countries, and a distinct division between Catholic and Protestant, the notion of the landscape garden held different significance and was interpreted and applied variously in those countries: in other words, they found it a very flexible medium. Each country is considered individually, with a special chapter devoted to ‘Le Jardin Anglo-Chinois’, since that constitutes a major issue of its own. The gardens have been chosen to illustrate the range and variety of applications of the landscape garden, though they are also those about which most is known in English.

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India is widely regarded as the most celebrated case of a "failed" developmental state, seemingly the exception that belies the prediction of a triumphant Asian century. Its central political and economic institutions have been variously characterized as both "soft" and "strong"—at once weak, predatory, and interventionist. Aseema Sinha presents an innovative model that questions conventional views of economic development by showing that the Indian state is a divided leviathan: its developmental failure is the combined product of central-local interactions and political choices by regional elites. To develop this disaggregated model, she examines three regional states with sharply divergent development trajectories: Gujarat, West Bengal, and Tamil Nadu. Drawing on recent work in comparative political economy, the theory of nested games, incentive theory, and an ethnographic analysis of business actors, this study directs analytical attention at the creation of micro-institutions at the subnational level, explores the role of provinces in shaping investment flows, and considers the role of federalism as a mediating institution shaping the vertical strategies of provinces. A comparative chapter applies the model to data from China, Brazil, Russia, and the former Soviet Union.

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Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India looks at how religion provides an arena to make place and challenge the majoritarian, exclusionary, and introverted tendencies of contemporary India. Places do not simply exist. They are made and remade by the acts of individuals and communities at particular historical moments. In India today, the place for Muslims is shrinking as the revanchist Hindu Right increasingly realizes its vision of a Hindu nation. Religion enables Muslims to re-envision India as a different kind of place, one to which they unquestionably belong. Analyzing the religious narratives, practices, and constructions of religious subjectivity of diverse groups of Muslims in Old Delhi, Kalyani Devaki Menon reveals the ways in which Muslims variously contest the insular and singular understandings of nation that dominate the sociopolitical landscape of the country and make place for themselves. Menon shows how religion is concerned not just with the divine and transcendental but also with the anxieties and aspirations of people living amid violence, exclusion, and differential citizenship. Ultimately, Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India allows us to understand religious acts, narratives, and constructions of self and belonging as material forces, as forms of the political that can make room for individuals, communities, and alternative imaginings in a world besieged by increasingly xenophobic understandings of nation and place.

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Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India looks at how religion provides an arena to make place and challenge the majoritarian, exclusionary, and introverted tendencies of contemporary India. Places do not simply exist. They are made and remade by the acts of individuals and communities at particular historical moments. In India today, the place for Muslims is shrinking as the revanchist Hindu Right increasingly realizes its vision of a Hindu nation. Religion enables Muslims to re-envision India as a different kind of place, one to which they unquestionably belong. Analyzing the religious narratives, practices, and constructions of religious subjectivity of diverse groups of Muslims in Old Delhi, Kalyani Devaki Menon reveals the ways in which Muslims variously contest the insular and singular understandings of nation that dominate the sociopolitical landscape of the country and make place for themselves. Menon shows how religion is concerned not just with the divine and transcendental but also with the anxieties and aspirations of people living amid violence, exclusion, and differential citizenship. Ultimately, Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India allows us to understand religious acts, narratives, and constructions of self and belonging as material forces, as forms of the political that can make room for individuals, communities, and alternative imaginings in a world besieged by increasingly xenophobic understandings of nation and place.

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In contemporary debates, communication is variously invoked as a panacea for the problems of both democracy and love, as a dream of a new information society brought about by new technologies, and as a wistful ideal of human relations. How, and why, did communication come to shoulder the load it carries? In John Durham Peters's work, the teachings of Socrates and Jesus, the theology of Saint Augustine, the political philosophy of Locke, and the American tradition from Emerson through William James all become relevant for understanding communication in our age. Peters finds that thinkers across the centuries have struggled with the same questions - how we can hope for contact with others, what has become of human beings in increasingly technological times, how new modes of communication have altered the ways the world is imagined and how we relate to others - and he weaves intellectual history and communications history together. The book traces the yearning for contact not only through philosophy and literature but also by exploring the cultural reception of communication technologies from the telegraph to the radio. The history of communication, Peters shows, is not a triumphant progress toward global harmony but rather a collection of uncanny devices that conjure angels, spirits and alien intelligences. His is an account of a complex concept that has both shaped us and been shaped by us.

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Gene Therapy Technologies, Applications and Regulations From Laboratory to Clinic Edited by Anthony Meager Division of Immunobiology, The National Institute for Biological Standards and Control, South Mimms, UK The development of gene-based technologies has been rapid over the past decade and has consequently resulted in a surge of interest in human gene therapy, the deliberate transfer of genes to somatic cells to cure or alleviate disease symptoms. Hundreds of clinical protocols involving variously designed vectors for efficient gene transfer have been developed. However, the use of such complex 'gene medicines' containing potentially heritable genes has raised numerous concerns regarding quality, efficacy and safety. Encompassing recent developments in the field and addressing current concerns this book: * surveys many of the current technologies for preparing vectors for use in gene therapy protocols * reviews the application of gene-mediated therapies to a range of medical conditions * considers the regulatory aspects of gene therapy including product quality and safety requirements * appraises the transfer of technologies from laboratory to clinic with regard to the attendant requirements and facilities for: * good laboratory practice (GLP) conditions in the R&D laboratory * large-scale production methods and good manufacturing practice (GMP) * current in-process and final product testing Written by international experts knowledgeable about many aspects of human somatic gene therapy, this book will be an essential guide for those embarking on gene therapy technologies relevant to specifications of production and testing of products (and procedures) required to meet existing regulations, including quality, efficacy and safety considerations.

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