Search results for ""Author Dom"

Becoming Beside Ourselves continues the investigation that the renowned cultural theorist and mathematician Brian Rotman began in his previous books Signifying Nothing and Ad Infinitum...The Ghost in Turing’s Machine: exploring certain signs and the conceptual innovations and subjectivities that they facilitate or foreclose. In Becoming Beside Ourselves, Rotman turns his attention to alphabetic writing or the inscription of spoken language. Contending that all media configure what they mediate, he maintains that alphabetic writing has long served as the West’s dominant cognitive technology. Its logic and limitations have shaped thought and affect from its inception until the present. Now its grip on Western consciousness is giving way to virtual technologies and networked media, which are reconfiguring human subjectivity just as alphabetic texts have done for millennia.Alphabetic texts do not convey the bodily gestures of human speech: the hesitations, silences, and changes of pitch that infuse spoken language with affect. Rotman suggests that by removing the body from communication, alphabetic texts enable belief in singular, disembodied, authoritative forms of being such as God and the psyche. He argues that while disembodied agencies are credible and real to “lettered selves,” they are increasingly incompatible with selves and subjectivities formed in relation to new virtual technologies and networked media. Digital motion-capture technologies are restoring gesture and even touch to a prominent role in communication. Parallel computing is challenging the linear thought patterns and ideas of singularity facilitated by alphabetic language. Barriers between self and other are breaking down as the networked self is traversed by other selves to become multiple and distributed, formed through many actions and perceptions at once. The digital self is going plural, becoming beside itself.

Read more less

Dead Subjects is an impassioned call for scholars in critical race and ethnic studies to engage with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Antonio Viego argues that Lacanian theory has the potential to begin rectifying the deeply flawed way that ethnic and racialized subjects have been conceptualized in North America since the mid-twentieth century. Viego contends that the accounts of human subjectivity that dominate the humanities and social sciences and influence U.S. legal thought derive from American ego psychology. Examining ego psychology in the United States during its formative years following World War II, Viego shows how its distinctly American misinterpretation of Freudian theory was driven by a faith in the possibility of rendering the human subject whole, complete, and transparent. Viego traces how this theory of the subject gained traction in the United States, passing into most forms of North American psychology, law, civil rights discourse, ethnic studies, and the broader culture.Viego argues that the repeated themes of wholeness, completeness, and transparency with respect to ethnic and racialized subjectivity are fundamentally problematic as these themes ultimately lend themselves to the project of managing and controlling ethnic and racialized subjects by positing them as fully knowable, calculable sums: as dead subjects. He asserts that the refusal of critical race and ethnic studies scholars to read ethnic and racialized subjects in a Lacanian framework—as divided subjects, split in language—contributes to a racist discourse. Focusing on theoretical, historical, and literary work in Latino studies, he mines the implicit connection between Latino studies’ theory of the “border subject” and Lacan’s theory of the “barred subject” in language to argue that Latino studies is poised to craft a critical multiculturalist, anti-racist Lacanian account of subjectivity while adding historical texture and specificity to Lacanian theory.

Read more less

The originators of classical political economy—Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Steuart, and others—created a discourse that explained the logic, the origin, and, in many respects, the essential rightness of capitalism. But, in the great texts of that discourse, these writers downplayed a crucial requirement for capitalism’s creation: For it to succeed, peasants would have to abandon their self-sufficient lifestyle and go to work for wages in a factory. Why would they willingly do this?Clearly, they did not go willingly. As Michael Perelman shows, they were forced into the factories with the active support of the same economists who were making theoretical claims for capitalism as a self-correcting mechanism that thrived without needing government intervention. Directly contradicting the laissez-faire principles they claimed to espouse, these men advocated government policies that deprived the peasantry of the means for self-provision in order to coerce these small farmers into wage labor. To show how Adam Smith and the other classical economists appear to have deliberately obscured the nature of the control of labor and how policies attacking the economic independence of the rural peasantry were essentially conceived to foster primitive accumulation, Perelman examines diaries, letters, and the more practical writings of the classical economists. He argues that these private and practical writings reveal the real intentions and goals of classical political economy—to separate a rural peasantry from their access to land.This rereading of the history of classical political economy sheds important light on the rise of capitalism to its present state of world dominance. Historians of political economy and Marxist thought will find that this book broadens their understanding of how capitalism took hold in the industrial age.

Read more less

In the early 1930s, the American Communist Party attracted support from a wide range of liberal and radical intellectuals, partly in response to domestic politics, and also in opposition to the growing power of fascism abroad. The Long War, a social history of these intellectuals and their political institutions, tells the story of the rift that developed among the groups loosely organized under the umbrella of the Party—representing communist supporters of the People’s Front and those who would become anti-Stalinists—and the evolution of that rift into a generational divide that would culminate in the liberal anti-communism of the post-World War II era.Judy Kutulas takes us into the debates and outright fights between and within the ranks of organizations such as the League of American Writers, the John Reed Clubs, the Committee for Cultural Freedom, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners. Showing how extremist views about the nature and value of communism triumphed over more moderate ones, she traces the transfer of the left’s leadership from one generation to the next. She describes how supporters of the People’s Front were discredited by the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and how this opened the way for a new generation of leaders better known as the New York intellectuals. In this shift, Kutulas identifies the beginnings of the liberal anti-communism that would follow World War II. A book for students and scholars of the intersection of politics and culture, The Long War offers a new, informed perspective on the intellectual maneuvers of the American left of the 1930s and leads to a reinterpretation of the time and its complex legacy.

Read more less

Film history identifies Italian neorealism as the exemplar of national cinema, a specifically domestic response to wartime atrocities. Brutal Vision challenges this orthodoxy by arguing that neorealist films—including such classics as Rome, Open City; Paisan; Shoeshine; and Bicycle Thieves—should be understood less as national products and more as complex agents of a postwar reorganization of global politics. For these films, cinema facilitates the liberal humanist sympathy required to usher in a new era of world stability. In his readings of crucial films and newly discovered documents from the archives of neorealism’s international distribution, Karl Schoonover reveals how these films used images of the imperiled body to reconstitute the concept of the human and to recalibrate the scale of human community. He traces how Italian neorealism emerges from and consolidates the transnational space of the North Atlantic, with scenarios of physical suffering dramatizing the geopolitical stakes of a newly global vision. Here we see how—in their views of injury, torture, and martyrdom—these films propose a new mode of spectating that answers the period’s call for extranational witnesses, makes the imposition of limited sovereignty palatable, and underwrites a new visual politics of liberal compassion that Schoonover calls brutal humanism. These films redefine moviegoing as a form of political action and place the filmgoer at the center of a postwar geopolitics of international aid. Brutal Vision interrogates the role of neorealism’s famously heart-wrenching scenes in a new global order that requires its citizenry to invest emotionally in large-scale international aid packages, from the Marshall Plan to the liberal charity schemes of NGOs. The book fundamentally revises ideas of cinematic specificity, the human, and geopolitical scale that we inherit from neorealism and its postwar milieu—ideas that continue to set the terms for political filmmaking today.

Read more less

Most pop songs are short-lived. They appear suddenly and, if they catch on, seem to be everywhere at once before disappearing again into obscurity. Yet some songs resonate more deeply—often in ways that reflect broader historical and cultural changes. In Footsteps in the Dark, George Lipsitz illuminates these secret meanings, offering imaginative interpretations of a wide range of popular music genres from jazz to salsa to rock. Sweeping changes that only remotely register in official narratives, Lipsitz argues, can appear in vivid relief within popular music, especially when these changes occur outside mainstream white culture. Using a wealth of revealing examples, he discusses such topics as the emergence of an African American techno music subculture in Detroit as a contradictory case of digital capitalism and the prominence of banda, merengue, and salsa music in the 1990s as an expression of changing Mexican, Dominican, and Puerto Rican nationalisms. Approaching race and popular music from another direction, he analyzes the Ken Burns PBS series Jazz as a largely uncritical celebration of American nationalism that obscures the civil rights era’s challenge to racial inequality, and he takes on the infamous campaigns to censor hip-hop and the radical black voice in the early 1990s. Teeming with astute observations and brilliant insights about race and racism, deindustrialization, and urban renewal and their connections to music, Footsteps in the Dark puts forth an alternate history of post–cold war America and shows why in an era given to easy answers and clichéd versions of history, pop songs matter more than ever. George Lipsitz is professor of black studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Among his many books are Life in the Struggle, Dangerous Crossroads, and American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minnesota, 2001).

Read more less

Despite tremendous advances in civil rights, we live in a world where the sexes remain sharply segregated from birth to death: in names, clothing, social groupings, and possessions; in occupations, civic association, and domestic roles. Gender separatism, so pervasive as to be almost invisible, permeates the fabric of our daily social routines. Preferring a notion of gender that is fluid and contextual, and denying that separatism is inevitable, Nancy Levit dismantles the myths of gender essentialism Drawing on a wealth of interdisciplinary data regarding the biological and cultural origins of sex differences, Levit provides a fresh perspective on gendered behaviors and argues the need for careful cultivation of new relations between the sexes. With its focus particularly on men, The Gender Line offers an insightful overview of the construction of gender and the damaging effects of its stereotypes. Levit analyzes the ways in which law legitimizes the social segregation of the sexes through legal decisions regarding custody, employment, education, sexual harassment, and criminal law. In so doing, she illustrates the ways in which men's and women's oppressions are intertwined and how law molds the very definition of masculinity. Applying feminist methodology to the doctrine of feminism itself, Levit artfully demonstrates that gender separatism infects even our contemporary views of feminism. Levit asks questions that have been too long been unspoken--those that lie at the core of the feminist project, yet threaten its very foundations. Revealing masculinity as both a privileged and a victimized condition, she calls for a step forward, past the bounds of contemporary feminism and its conflicts, toward a more egalitarian and inclusive feminism. This brand of feminism would reshape traditional masculinity, invite men into feminist dialogue, and claim men as political allies.

Read more less

Judith Stacey, 2012 winner of the Simon and Gagnon Lifetime Achievement Award presented by the American Sociological Association. A leading expert on the family explores varieties of love and counters the one-size-fits-all vision of family values A leading expert on the family, Judith Stacey is known for her provocative research on mainstream issues. Finding herself impatient with increasingly calcified positions taken in the interminable wars over same-sex marriage, divorce, fatherlessness, marital fidelity, and the like, she struck out to profile unfamiliar cultures of contemporary love, marriage, and family values from around the world. Built on bracing original research that spans gay men’s intimacies and parenting in America to plural and non-marital forms of family in South Africa and China, Unhitched decouples the taken for granted relationships between love, marriage, and parenthood. Countering the one-size-fits-all vision of family values, Stacey offers readers a lively, in-person introduction to these less familiar varieties of intimacy and family and to the social, political, and economic conditions that buttress and batter them. Through compelling stories of real families navigating inescapable personal and political trade-offs between desire and domesticity, the book undermines popular convictions about family, gender, and sexuality held on the left, right, and center. Taking on prejudices of both conservatives and feminists, Unhitched poses a powerful empirical challenge to the belief that the nuclear family—whether straight or gay—is the single, best way to meet our needs for intimacy and care. Stacey calls on citizens and policy-makers to make their peace with the fact that family diversity is here to stay.

Read more less

In The Creole Archipelago, Tessa Murphy traces how generations of Indigenous Kalinagos, free and enslaved Africans, and settlers from a variety of European nations used maritime routes to forge social, economic, and informal political connections that spanned the eastern Caribbean. Focusing on a chain of volcanic islands, each one visible from the next, whose societies developed outside the sphere of European rule until the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, Murphy argues that the imperial frameworks typically used to analyze the early colonial Caribbean are at odds with the geographic realities that shaped daily life in the region. Through use of wide-ranging sources including historical maps, parish records, an Indigenous-language dictionary, and colonial correspondence housed in the Caribbean, France, England, and the United States, Murphy shows how this watery borderland became a center of broader imperial experimentation, contestation, and reform. British and French officials dispatched to Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Tobago after 1763 encountered a creolized society that repeatedly frustrated their attempts to transform the islands into productive plantation colonies. By centering the stories of Kalinagos who asserted continued claims to land, French Catholics who demanded the privileges of British subjects, and free people of African descent who insisted on their right to own land and enslaved people, Murphy offers a vivid counterpoint to larger Caribbean plantation societies like Jamaica and Barbados. By looking outward from the eastern Caribbean chain, The Creole Archipelago resituates small islands as microcosms of broader historical processes central to understanding early American and Atlantic history, including European usurpation of Indigenous lands, the rise of slavery and plantation production, and the creation and codification of racial difference.

Read more less

One can rightly say of Peter Sloterdijk that each of his essays and lectures is also an unwritten book. That is why the texts presented here, which sketch a philosophical physiognomy of Martin Heidegger, should also be characterized as a collected renunciation of exhaustiveness. In order to situate Heidegger's thought in the history of ideas and problems, Peter Sloterdijk approaches Heidegger's work with questions such as: If Western philosophy emerged from the spirit of the polis, what are we to make of the philosophical suitability of a man who never made a secret of his stubborn attachment to rural life? Is there a provincial truth of which the cosmopolitan city knows nothing? Is there a truth in country roads and cabins that would be able to undermine the universities with their standardized languages and globally influential discourses? From where does this odd professor speak, when from his professorial chair in Freiburg he claims to inquire into what lies beyond the history of Western metaphysics? Sloterdijk also considers several other crucial twentieth-century thinkers who provide some needed contrast for the philosophical physiognomy of Martin Heidegger. A consideration of Niklas Luhmann as a kind of contemporary version of the Devil's Advocate, a provocative critical interpretation of Theodor Adorno's philosophy that focuses on its theological underpinnings and which also includes reflections on the philosophical significance of hyperbole, and a short sketch of the pessimistic thought of Emil Cioran all round out and deepen Sloterdijk's attempts to think with, against, and beyond Heidegger. Finally, in essays such as "Domestication of Being" and the "Rules for the Human Park," which incited an international controversy around the time of its publication and has been translated afresh for this volume, Sloterdijk develops some of his most intriguing and important ideas on anthropogenesis, humanism, technology, and genetic engineering.

Read more less

One can rightly say of Peter Sloterdijk that each of his essays and lectures is also an unwritten book. That is why the texts presented here, which sketch a philosophical physiognomy of Martin Heidegger, should also be characterized as a collected renunciation of exhaustiveness. In order to situate Heidegger's thought in the history of ideas and problems, Peter Sloterdijk approaches Heidegger's work with questions such as: If Western philosophy emerged from the spirit of the polis, what are we to make of the philosophical suitability of a man who never made a secret of his stubborn attachment to rural life? Is there a provincial truth of which the cosmopolitan city knows nothing? Is there a truth in country roads and cabins that would be able to undermine the universities with their standardized languages and globally influential discourses? From where does this odd professor speak, when from his professorial chair in Freiburg he claims to inquire into what lies beyond the history of Western metaphysics? Sloterdijk also considers several other crucial twentieth-century thinkers who provide some needed contrast for the philosophical physiognomy of Martin Heidegger. A consideration of Niklas Luhmann as a kind of contemporary version of the Devil's Advocate, a provocative critical interpretation of Theodor Adorno's philosophy that focuses on its theological underpinnings and which also includes reflections on the philosophical significance of hyperbole, and a short sketch of the pessimistic thought of Emil Cioran all round out and deepen Sloterdijk's attempts to think with, against, and beyond Heidegger. Finally, in essays such as "Domestication of Being" and the "Rules for the Human Park," which incited an international controversy around the time of its publication and has been translated afresh for this volume, Sloterdijk develops some of his most intriguing and important ideas on anthropogenesis, humanism, technology, and genetic engineering.

Read more less

The political history of the twentieth century can be viewed as the history of democracy’s struggle against its external enemies: fascism and communism. This struggle ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet regime. Some people think that democracy now faces new enemies: Islamic fundamentalism, religious extremism and international terrorism and that this is the struggle that will define our times. Todorov disagrees: the biggest threat to democracy today is democracy itself. Its enemies are within: what the ancient Greeks called 'hubris'. Todorov argues that certain democratic values have been distorted and pushed to an extreme that serves the interests of dominant states and powerful individuals. In the name of ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’, the United States and some European countries have embarked on a crusade to enlighten some foreign populations through the use of force. Yet this mission to ‘help’ others has led to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, to large-scale destruction and loss of life and to a moral crisis of growing proportions. The defence of freedom, if unlimited, can lead to the tyranny of individuals. Drawing on recent history as well as his own experience of growing up in a totalitarian regime, Todorov returns to examples borrowed from the Western canon: from a dispute between Augustine and Pelagius to the fierce debates among Enlightenment thinkers to explore the origin of these perversions of democracy. He argues compellingly that the real democratic ideal is to be found in the delicate, ever-changing balance between competing principles, popular sovereignty, freedom and progress. When one of these elements breaks free and turns into an over-riding principle, it becomes dangerous: populism, ultra-liberalism and messianism, the inner enemies of democracy.

Read more less

From the award-winning biographer of Chaucer, the story of his most popular and scandalous character, from the Middle Ages to #MeTooEver since her triumphant debut in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers—from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched her influence or capacity for reinvention in poetry, drama, fiction, and film. In The Wife of Bath, Marion Turner tells the fascinating story of where Chaucer’s favourite character came from, how she related to real medieval women, and where her many travels have taken her since the fourteenth century, from Falstaff and Molly Bloom to #MeToo and Black Lives Matter.A sexually active and funny working woman, the Wife of Bath, also known as Alison, talks explicitly about sexual pleasure. She is also a victim of domestic abuse who tells a story of rape and redemption. Formed from misogynist sources, she plays with stereotypes. Turner sets Alison’s fictional story alongside the lives of real medieval women—from a maid who travelled around Europe, abandoned her employer, and forged a new career in Rome to a duchess who married her fourth husband, a teenager, when she was sixty-five. Turner also tells the incredible story of Alison’s post-medieval life, from seventeenth-century ballads and Polish communist pop art to her reclamation by postcolonial Black British women writers.Entertaining and enlightening, funny and provocative, The Wife of Bath is a one-of-a-kind history of a literary and feminist icon who continues to capture the imagination of readers.

Read more less

An authoritative account of how and why the Islamic Republic has survived to become a critical player in the Middle East and the worldWhen Iranians overthrew their monarchy, rejecting a pro-Western shah in favor of an Islamic regime, many observers predicted that revolutionary turmoil would paralyze the country for decades to come. Yet forty years after the 1978–79 revolution, Iran has emerged as a critical player in the Middle East and the wider world, as demonstrated in part by the 2015 international nuclear agreement. In Iran Rising, renowned Iran specialist Amin Saikal describes how the country has managed to survive despite ongoing domestic struggles, Western sanctions, and countless other serious challenges.Saikal explores Iran’s recent history, beginning with the revolution, which set in motion a number of developments, including war with Iraq, precarious relations with Arab neighbors, and hostilities with Israel and the United States. He highlights the regime’s agility as it navigated a complex relationship with Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion, survived the Gulf wars, and handled fallout from the Iraqi and Syrian crises. Such success, Saikal maintains, stems from a distinctive political order, comprising both a supreme Islamic leader and an elected president and national assembly, which can fuse religious and nationalist assertiveness with pragmatic policy actions at home and abroad.But Iran’s accomplishments, including its nuclear development and ability to fight ISIS, have cost its people, who are desperately pressuring the ruling clerics for economic and social reforms—changes that might in turn influence the country’s foreign policy. Amid heightened global anxiety over alliances, terrorism, and nuclear threats, Iran Rising offers essential reading for understanding a country that, more than ever, is a force to watch.

Read more less

How the global tea industry influenced the international economy and the rise of mass consumerism Tea has been one of the most popular commodities in the world. Over centuries, profits from its growth and sales funded wars and fueled colonization, and its cultivation brought about massive changes--in land use, labor systems, market practices, and social hierarchies--the effects of which are with us even today. A Thirst for Empire takes a vast and in-depth historical look at how men and women--through the tea industry in Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa--transformed global tastes and habits and in the process created our modern consumer society. As Erika Rappaport shows, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries the boundaries of the tea industry and the British Empire overlapped but were never identical, and she highlights the economic, political, and cultural forces that enabled the British Empire to dominate--but never entirely control--the worldwide production, trade, and consumption of tea. Rappaport delves into how Europeans adopted, appropriated, and altered Chinese tea culture to build a widespread demand for tea in Britain and other global markets and a plantation-based economy in South Asia and Africa. Tea was among the earliest colonial industries in which merchants, planters, promoters, and retailers used imperial resources to pay for global advertising and political lobbying. The commercial model that tea inspired still exists and is vital for understanding how politics and publicity influence the international economy. An expansive and original global history of imperial tea, A Thirst for Empire demonstrates the ways that this fluid and powerful enterprise helped shape the contemporary world.

Read more less

Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) was the greatest intellectual historian of the twentieth century. But his work also made an original and important contribution to moral and political philosophy and to liberal theory. In 1921, at the age of eleven, Isaiah Berlin arrived in England from Riga, Latvia. By the time he was thirty he was at the heart of British intellectual life. He has remained its commanding presence ever since, and few would dispute that he was one of Britain's greatest thinkers. His reputation extends worldwide--as a great conversationalist, intellectual historian, and man of letters. He has been called the century's most inspired reader. Yet Berlin's contributions to thought--in particular to moral and political philosophy, and to liberal theory--are little understood, and surprisingly neglected by the academic world. In this book, they are shown to be animated by a single, powerful, subversive idea: value-pluralism which affirms the reality of a deep conflict between ultimate human values that reason cannot resolve. Though bracingly clear-headed, humane and realist, Berlin's value-pluralism runs against the dominant Western traditions, secular and religious, which avow an ultimate harmony of values. It supports a highly distinctive restatement of liberalism in Berlin's work--an agnostic liberalism, which is founded not on rational choice but on the radical choices we make when faced with intractable dilemmas. It is this new statement of liberalism, the central subject of John Gray's lively and lucid book, which gives the liberal intellectual tradition a new lease on life, a new source of life, and which comprises Berlin's central and enduring legacy. In a new introduction, Gray argues that, in a world in which human freedom has spread more slowly than democracy, Berlin's account of liberty and basic decency is more instructive and useful than ever.

Read more less

Winner of a Catholic Media Association Book AwardA revelatory account of the nouvelle théologie, a clerical movement that revitalized the Catholic Church’s role in twentieth-century French political life.Secularism has been a cornerstone of French political culture since 1905, when the republic formalized the separation of church and state. At times the barrier of secularism has seemed impenetrable, stifling religious actors wishing to take part in political life. Yet in other instances, secularism has actually nurtured movements of the faithful. Soldiers of God in a Secular World explores one such case, that of the nouvelle théologie, or new theology. Developed in the interwar years by Jesuits and Dominicans, the nouvelle théologie reimagined the Church’s relationship to public life, encouraging political activism, engaging with secular philosophy, and inspiring doctrinal changes adopted by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.Nouveaux théologiens charted a path between the old alliance of throne and altar and secularism’s demand for the privatization of religion. Envisioning a Church in but not of the public sphere, Catholic thinkers drew on theological principles to intervene in political questions while claiming to remain at arm’s length from politics proper. Sarah Shortall argues that this “counter-politics” was central to the mission of the nouveaux théologiens: by recoding political statements in the ostensibly apolitical language of doctrine, priests were able to enter into debates over fascism and communism, democracy and human rights, colonialism and nuclear war. This approach found its highest expression during the Second World War, when the nouveaux théologiens led the spiritual resistance against Nazism. Claiming a powerful public voice, they collectively forged a new role for the Church amid the momentous political shifts of the twentieth century.

Read more less

Diamonds have long been bloody. A new history shows how Germany’s ruthless African empire brought diamond rings to retail display cases in America—at the cost of African lives.Since the late 1990s, activists have campaigned to remove “conflict diamonds” from jewelry shops and department stores. But if the problem of conflict diamonds—gems extracted from war zones—has only recently generated attention, it is not a new one. Nor are conflict diamonds an exception in an otherwise honest industry. The modern diamond business, Steven Press shows, owes its origins to imperial wars and has never escaped its legacy of exploitation.In Blood and Diamonds, Press traces the interaction of the mass-market diamond and German colonial domination in Africa. Starting in the 1880s, Germans hunted for diamonds in Southwest Africa. In the decades that followed, Germans waged brutal wars to control the territory, culminating in the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples and the unearthing of vast mineral riches. Press follows the trail of the diamonds from the sands of the Namib Desert to government ministries and corporate boardrooms in Berlin and London and on to the retail counters of New York and Chicago. As Africans working in terrifying conditions extracted unprecedented supplies of diamonds, European cartels maintained the illusion that the stones were scarce, propelling the nascent US market for diamond engagement rings. Convinced by advertisers that diamonds were both valuable and romantically significant, American purchasers unwittingly funded German imperial ambitions into the era of the world wars.Amid today’s global frenzy of mass consumption, Press’s history offers an unsettling reminder that cheap luxury often depends on an alliance between corporate power and state violence.

Read more less

By the time Matthias was in seventh grade, he felt he’d better belong to some group, lest he be alone and vulnerable. The punks and anarchists were identifiable by their tattoos and hairstyles and music. But it was the skinheads who captured his imagination. They had great parties, and everyone seemed afraid of them. “They really represented what it meant to be a strong man,” he said. What draws young men into violent extremist groups? What are the ideologies that inspire them to join? And what are the emotional bonds forged that make it difficult to leave, even when they want to? Having conducted in-depth interviews with ex–white nationalists and neo-Nazis in the United States, as well as ex-skinheads and ex-neo-Nazis in Germany and Sweden, renowned sociologist Michael Kimmel demonstrates the pernicious effects that constructions of masculinity have on these young recruits. Kimmel unveils how white extremist groups wield masculinity to recruit and retain members—and to prevent them from exiting the movement. Young men in these groups often feel a sense of righteous indignation, seeing themselves as victims, their birthright upended in a world dominated by political correctness. Offering the promise of being able to "take back their manhood," these groups leverage stereotypes of masculinity to manipulate despair into white supremacist and neo-Nazi hatred. Kimmel combines individual stories with a multiangled analysis of the structural, political, and economic forces that marginalize these men to shed light on their feelings, yet make no excuses for their actions. Healing from Hate reminds us of some men's efforts to exit the movements and reintegrate themselves back into society and is a call to action to those who make it out to help those who are still trapped.

Read more less

Using over twelve thousand previously classified documents made available through the Freedom of Information Act, David Cunningham uncovers the riveting inside story of the FBI's attempts to neutralize political targets on both the Right and the Left during the 1960s. Examining the FBI's infamous counterintelligence programs (COINTELPROs) against suspected communists, civil rights and black power advocates, Klan adherents, and antiwar activists, he questions whether such actions were aberrations or are evidence of the bureau's ongoing mission to restrict citizens' right to engage in legal forms of political dissent. At a time of heightened concerns about domestic security, with the FBI's license to spy on U.S. citizens expanded to a historic degree, the question becomes an urgent one. This book supplies readers with insights and information vital to a meaningful assessment of the current situation. "There's Something Happening Here" looks inside the FBI's COINTELPROs against white hate groups and the New Left to explore how agents dealt with the hundreds of individuals and organizations labeled as subversive threats. Rather than reducing these activities to a product of the idiosyncratic concerns of longtime director J. Edgar Hoover, Cunningham focuses on the complex organizational dynamics that generated literally thousands of COINTELPRO actions. His account shows how - and why - the inner workings of the programs led to outcomes that often seemed to lack any overriding logic; it also examines the impact the bureau's massive campaign of repression had on its targets. The lessons of this era have considerable relevance today, and Cunningham extends his analysis to the FBI's often controversial recent actions to map the influence of the COINTELPRO legacy on contemporary debates over national security and civil liberties.

Read more less

Between 1948 and 1955, nearly two-thirds of all American families bought a television set—and a revolution in social life and popular culture was launched. In this fascinating book, Lynn Spigel chronicles the enormous impact of television in the formative years of the new medium: how, over the course of a single decade, television became an intimate part of everyday life. What did Americans expect from it? What effects did the new daily ritual of watching television have on children? Was television welcomed as an unprecedented "window on the world," or as a "one-eyed monster" that would disrupt households and corrupt children? Drawing on an ambitious array of unconventional sources, from sitcom scripts to articles and advertisements in women's magazines, Spigel offers the fullest available account of the popular response to television in the postwar years. She chronicles the role of television as a focus for evolving debates on issues ranging from the ideal of the perfect family and changes in women's role within the household to new uses of domestic space. The arrival of television did more than turn the living room into a private theater: it offered a national stage on which to play out and resolve conflicts about the way Americans should live. Spigel chronicles this lively and contentious debate as it took place in the popular media. Of particular interest is her treatment of the way in which the phenomenon of television itself was constantly deliberated—from how programs should be watched to where the set was placed to whether Mom, Dad, or kids should control the dial. Make Room for TV combines a powerful analysis of the growth of electronic culture with a nuanced social history of family life in postwar America, offering a provocative glimpse of the way television became the mirror of so many of America's hopes and fears and dreams.

Read more less

In this jarring look at contemporary warfare and political visuality, renowned anthropologist of violence Allen Feldman provocatively argues that contemporary sovereign power mobilizes asymmetric, clandestine, and ultimately unending war as a will to truth. Whether responding to the fantasy of weapons of mass destruction or an existential threat to civilization, Western political sovereignty seeks to align justice, humanitarian right, and democracy with technocratic violence and visual dominance. Connecting Guantanamo tribunals to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, American counterfeit killings in Afghanistan to the Baader-Meinhof paintings of Gerhard Richter, and the video erasure of Rodney King to lynching photography and political animality, among other scenes of terror, Feldman contests sovereignty's claims to transcendental right -whether humanitarian, neoliberal, or democratic-by showing how dogmatic truth is crafted and terror indemnified by the prosecutorial media and materiality of war. Excavating a scenography of trials-formal or covert, orchestrated or improvised, criminalizing or criminal-Feldman shows how the will to truth disappears into the very violence it interrogates. He maps the sensory inscriptions and erasures of war, highlighting war as a media that severs factuality from actuality to render violence just. He proposes that war promotes an anesthesiology that interdicts the witness of a sensory and affective commons that has the capacity to speak truth to war. Feldman uses layered deconstructive description to decelerate the ballistical tempo of war to salvage the embodied actualities and material histories that war reduces to the ashes of collateral damage, the automatism of drones, and the opacities of black sites. The result is a penetrating work that marries critical visual theory, political philosophy, anthropology, and media archeology into a trenchant dissection of emerging forms of sovereignty and state power that war now makes possible.

Read more less

The Great Houses of the prehistoric and early medieval periods were enormous structures whose forms were modelled on those of domestic dwellings. Most were built of wood rather than stone; they were used over comparatively short periods; they were frequently replaced in the same positions; and some were associated with exceptional groups of artefacts. Their construction made considerable demands on human labour and approached the limits of what was possible at the time. They seem to have played specialised roles in ancient society, but they have been difficult to interpret. Were they public buildings or the dwellings of important people? Were they temples or military bases, and why were they erected during times of crisis or change? How were their sites selected, and how were they related to the remains of a more ancient past? Although their currency extended from the time of the first farmers to the Viking Age, the similarities between the Great Houses are as striking as the differences.This study focuses on the monumental buildings of northern and northwestern Europe, but draws on structures over a wide area, extending from Anatolia as far as Brittany and Norway. It employs ethnography as a source of ideas and discusses the concept of the House Society and its usefulness in archaeology. The main examples are taken from the Neolithic and Iron Age periods, but this account also draws on the archaeology of the first millennium AD. The book emphasises the importance of comparing archaeological sequences with one another rather than identifying ideal social types. In doing so, it features a range of famous and less famous sites, from Stonehenge to the Hill of Tara, and from Old Uppsala to Yeavering.

Read more less

A no-nonsense study guide helping seafarers to pass their MCA or Flag State oral exams for Deck Officer qualifications. This handy revision guide is the one book that Deck Officer Cadets, Master and Deck Officers will want by their side when studying for the much-feared oral exams. Expert marine training director Simon Jinks strips back the masses of information to the core essential points that are easy to absorb and quick to remember when it comes to the oral assessment. The MCA Deck Officer (Officer of the Watch, Chief Mate and Master) syllabi cover a vast amount of information that candidates are required to understand and use in their oral exam, which for many presents a major stumbling block to qualification. While it inevitably takes a long time for candidates to build up this wealth of knowledge, this study aid is the perfect refresher, listing the key points and including helpful sample questions and worked examples on tidal working, radar plotting and more. Written in simple terms, this trusted crammer covers all the principal areas of the MCA’s exam syllabus, including sections on business and law conventions, pollution prevention, responses to emergencies and distress signals. Clearly presented, it is packed with straightforward diagrams and flow charts, making it ideal for revising. This is an invaluable reference for all international STCW Deck Officer candidates, and covers both MCA and Flag State oral exams. It is also suitable for Near Coastal and Boatmaster apprentices, Workboat crew apprentices, Yachtmaster Offshores, Yachtmaster instructors, and fishermen going for their fishing licences on larger vessels, and for shore workers such as vessel superintendents, maritime managers and trainers. There is specific information for all vessels, with sections on smaller, code and domestic vessels.

Read more less

The studies collected in this volume, some of them rather difficult to access, date mostly from the last fifteen years and focus primarily on Persian book painting of the 14th to the early 16th centuries. In this period, Iran dominated the art of book painting in the Islamic world. The articles reprinted here examine various aspects of this, the golden age of Persian painting. They range from the period of Mongol rule, when the impact of Far Eastern themes and modes radically transformed the heritage bequeathed to Iran by Arab painting - a textbook case of the clash of civilisations - to the dawn of the modern era and the swansong of the classical style of Persian painting under the early Safavids. Yet other articles focus on the roots of book painting in the themes and styles developed in painted ceramics, on medieval Qur'anic calligraphy, on bookbinding and on the remarkably original variations played on the hitherto hackneyed theme of the figural frontispiece by Arab painters. Two major leitmotifs are explored in this selection of essays. One is provided by the constantly varying interpretations of the Shahnama ( The Book of Kings ), the Persian national epic, and especially the tendency of painters to interpret this familiar text in terms of contemporary politics. The other is the interplay of text and image, which highlights the tendency of painters to strike out on their own and to leave the literal text progressively further behind while they develop plots and sub-plots of their own. These enquiries are set within the context of a concerted effort to explore in detail how Persian painters achieved their most spectacular visual effects. In its combination of general surveys and closely focused analyses of individual manuscripts, this collection of articles will be of interest to specialists in book painting and in Islamic art as a whole

Read more less

Richard Wilson was born in London in 1953. Descended on one side from a line of builders and on the other of artists, his work often comes closer to engineering or even architecture than it does to traditional sculpture. Typically he transforms the viewer's environment into something unsettling and strange by the interventions he makes, whether in the internal space of a gallery, the structure of a building or in one of the ships with which he has a particular affinity. Perhaps his best-known work is 20:50, currently on show at, and probably the most popular exhibit in, the Saatchi Gallery in London. For 20:50, Wilson flooded a gallery space with oil, which has a highly reflective surface. Into the oil is built a kind of narrow pier or promenade down which one person at a time can walk, the oil perilously close to their body. So reflective is the oil that the room induces a strong sense of disorientation. Further along the River Thames, next to the Millennium Dome, is another Wilson piece that provides an unexpected sight. The skeletal ship A Slice of Reality, its sides removed and with the tides moving freely through it, is both a startling sculptural object in its own right and a comment on the vanished shipping industry that was once a mainstay of the river community. In Los Angeles, Wilson was inspired by one of the most ubiquitous symbols of Californian life, the swimming pool, suspending a fibreglass pool shell from a sixty foot-long pipe in MOCA's subterranean gallery (Deep End). In addition to and often in conjunction with these large-scale projects, Wilson makes films and sculpture, takes photographs and stages performance events and has been a formative influence on a generation of British artists. This lavishly illustrated career survey includes a new interview with Wilson and examines six key works in depth.

Read more less

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the greatest European writers, whose untrammelled imaginative capacity was matched by a remarkable knowledge of the science of his era. His poems also paint compelling visual images. In Visions of Heaven, renowned scholar Martin Kemp investigates Dante's characterisation of divine light and its implications for the visual artists who were the inheritors of Dante's vision. The whole book may be regarded as a new paragone (comparison), the debate that began in the Renaissance about which of the arts is superior. Dante’s ravishing accounts of divine light set painters the severest challenge, which it took them centuries to meet. A major theme running through Dante's Divine Comedy, particularly in its third book, the Paradiso, centres on Dante’s acts of seeing. On earth his visual perceptions are conducted according to optical rules, while in heaven the poet's human senses are overwhelmed by light of divine origin, which does not obey his rules of mathematical optics. The repeated blinding of Dante by excessive light sets the tone for artists’ striving to portray unseeable brightness. Raphael shows himself to be the greatest master of spiritual radiance, while Correggio works his radiant magic in his dome illusions in Parma Cathedral. When Gaulli evokes the glories of the name of Jesus in the huge vault of the Jesuit Church in Rome he does so with an ineffable light that explodes though encircling clusters of glowing angels, whose pink bodies are bleached by the extreme luminosity of the light source. Published to coincide with the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, this hugely original book combines a close reading of Dante’s poetry with analysis of early optics and the art of the Renaissance and Baroque to create a fascinating, wide-ranging and visually exciting study.

Read more less

The Last Knight of Flanders is the story of the Flemish volunteers of Germany’s famed Waffen-SS, told by those who were there. The book centers around Remy Schrijnen, the only Flemish volunteer to win the heralded bravery award, the Knight’s Cross to the Iron Cross. The book presents the varying viewpoints of the war as told through the eyes of Schrijnen and those who surrounded him. From enlisted men to officers – those who were there tell it like it was. Since 1830, Belgium has been a country consisting primarily of two peoples: the French-speaking Walloons and the Dutch-speaking Flemings. Despite the fact that they are the minority in regards to total population, the Walloons have dominated and ruled the Belgian government since the very beginning, which has prevented prosperity for the Flemings. The Flemish volunteers sided with the Germans in World War II in hopes that the blessings of the victor would gain them independence within their native country. The Flemish youth rallied behind the calls of their mothers and fathers – many of whom had fought against the Germans in the First World war for a free Flanders. The church called on these young men to put an end to the possibility of a “Red” invasion of Europe. They were heroes in the eyes of many. Under the leadership of the Germans, the Flemings got to know the harsh and brutal realities of combat on the Eastern Front. It was there that many young men perished. The war went on for three long years. After the war, they were vanquished and returned home to their native Flanders as criminals. Some were executed, most were sent to prison. This is their story.

Read more less

For half a century the US Congress effectively evaded its constitutional duty by allowing the US President to take the lead in the formulation of trade policy. The result was a system which avoided the danger of log-rolling exercises when setting tariffs. It facilitated the growth of trade and thus encouraged economic growth and rising living standards. For some, however, the system has shown signs of fragmentation arising from new pressures and challenges and is producing policy outcomes that lack coherence and rationale. New pressures include demands for trade protection arising from America's mounting trade deficit, as well as jolts to the system caused by the struggle to create a North America Free Trade Agreement. More recently, new demands largely unrelated to trade have perversely affected the policy as non-governmental organisations have demanded a role in its formulation, including those concerned with environmental, social and labour issues. To a significant extent they have effectively 'privatised' the policy process. Moreover, the US government has increasingly used trade policy for non-trade purposes - principally as a tool of foreign and security policy. The pro-liberalisation forces within Congress and the administration have been comprehensively outplayed. In the absence of political leadership and a greater public awareness of the issues at stake the stage is set for the still greater abuse of trade policy by narrow special interest groups in pursuit of particularist ends. In the circumstances, the best that can be hoped for may be a series of international agreements which could constrain the abuse of US domestic policy formulation. But even this will require greater courage and resolve by the advocates of free trade than has recently been shown.

Read more less

A Daily Mail Book of the Year and a The Times and Sunday Times Best Book of 2021'Monumental.. Authoritative and highly readable.' Ben Macintyre, The Times'A fascinating history of royal espionage.' Sunday Times'Excellent... Compelling' GuardianFor the first time, The Secret Royals uncovers the remarkable relationship between the Royal Family and the intelligence community, from the reign of Queen Victoria to the death of Princess Diana. In an enthralling narrative, Richard J. Aldrich and Rory Cormac show how the British secret services grew out of persistent attempts to assassinate Victoria and then operated on a private and informal basis, drawing on close personal relationships between senior spies, the aristocracy, and the monarchy. This reached its zenith after the murder of the Romanovs and the Russian revolution when, fearing a similar revolt in Britain, King George V considered using private networks to provide intelligence on the loyalty of the armed forces - and of the broader population.In 1936, the dramatic abdication of Edward VIII formed a turning point in this relationship. What originally started as family feuding over a romantic liaison with the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, escalated into a national security crisis. Fearing the couple's Nazi sympathies as well as domestic instability, British spies turned their attention to the King. During the Second World War, his successor, King George VI gradually restored trust between the secret world and House of Windsor. Thereafter, Queen Elizabeth II regularly enacted her constitutional right to advise and warn, raising her eyebrow knowingly at prime ministers and spymasters alike.Based on original research and new evidence, The Secret Royals presents the British monarchy in an entirely new light and reveals how far their majesties still call the shots in a hidden world.

Read more less

Knit unique beanies inspired by the jaw-dropping and unique landscapes from each of the 63 US National Parks.From the brightly colored pebbles of Lake McDonald in Montana’s Glacier National Park to the regal granite cliffs of El Capitan and Half Dome in California’s Yosemite Valley, the US National Parks contain some of the most recognizable and iconic natural landmarks in the world. Capture the majesty each national park offers with original beanie patterns created by knitting designer and outdoor enthusiast Nancy Bates. Beanies range from simple beanie constructions to more challenging stitch patterns such as the two-color crossovers inspired by South Dakota’s Badlands or the multiple cable designs inspired by New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns. Clear charts, easy-to-read keys, and thorough instructions help any knitter, whether beginner or experienced, through these gratifying projects. Show your love and appreciation of our national parks with these beautiful and practical beanie projects you can wear any time or any place. 63 KNITTING PATTERNS: Every US National Park is celebrated with a unique beanie design, including the newly designated park New River Gorge in West Virginia BEAUTIFULLY PHOTOGRAPHED: Each pattern is accompanied by photos of the finished beanie and gorgeous images of the park’s landscapes that inspired it INSPIRED BY NATURE: Learn about each national park’s unique fauna, flora, and landscapes that inspired each original beanie, from the Painted Wall in Colorado’s Black Canyon of the Gunnison to the Salt Flats in California Death Valley EASY-TO-FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS: Each of the 63 beanies knitting patterns have been tested and verified and offer clear charts so that knitters of every skill level can knit a beanie in no time

Read more less

Born in 1948 into a family of ministers in Kingston, Jamaica, the statuesque and strikingly beautiful Grace Jones lived with her family in Syracuse, NY, before launching a career as a model in New York City. Gaining fame as the cover girl for such publications as Vogue and Elle, Jones's flamboyant look proved to be a hit on the New York City nightclub circuit and she became a darling of the disco scene, which led to a recording contract and a substantial following among gay men. With her sexually charged, outrageous live shows, Grace soon earned the title of 'Queen of the Gay Discos.' When she moved to Paris in 1970, the French fashion scene embraced her unusual, androgynous looks and, in addition to cover work, she dominated the runways of designers like Yves St. Laurent and befriended the likes of Giorgio Armani and Karl Lagerfeld. While there, she shared an apartment with Jerry Hall and Jessica Lange and became artist Jean-Paul Goude's muse - he also fathered her son Paulo. (Grace was married twice - to a producer and a bodyguard - and she dated Swedish actor Dolph Lundgren for four years.)But with the dawn of the '80s came a massive anti-disco movement across the U.S., leading to Grace Jones focusing on more new wave and experimental-based work, putting her 2½ octave voice to good use. She is as known for her unique look as she is for her music and has influenced the likes of Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Annie Lennox. In the book, Grace takes us on a journey from her religious upbringing in Jamaica to her heyday in Paris and New York in the 70s and 80s, all the way to present-day London, where she is working on a new album.

Read more less

A dramatic new interpretation of the encounter between Europe and the Americas that reveals the crucial role of animals in the shaping of the modern world.When the men and women of the island of Guanahani first made contact with Christopher Columbus and his crew on October 12, 1492, the cultural differences between the two groups were vaster than the oceans that had separated them. There is perhaps no better demonstration than the divide in their respective ways of relating to animals. In The Tame and the Wild, Marcy Norton tells a new history of the colonization of the Americas, one that places wildlife and livestock at the center of the story. She reveals that the encounters between European and Native American beliefs about animal life transformed societies on both sides of the Atlantic.Europeans’ strategies and motives for conquest were inseparable from the horses that carried them in military campaigns and the dogs they deployed to terrorize Native peoples. Even more crucial were the sheep, cattle, pigs, and chickens whose flesh became food and whose skins became valuable commodities. Yet as central as the domestication of animals was to European plans in the Americas, Native peoples’ own practices around animals proved just as crucial in shaping the world after 1492. Cultures throughout the Caribbean, Amazonia, and Mexico were deeply invested in familiarization: the practice of capturing wild animals—not only parrots and monkeys but even tapir, deer, and manatee—and turning some of them into “companion species.” These taming practices not only influenced the way Indigenous people responded to human and nonhuman intruders but also transformed European culture itself, paving the way for both zoological science and the modern pet.

Read more less

Now a major TV series on Prime Video The prequel novel to the globally bestselling Wheel of Time series - a fantasy phenomenonThe city of Canluum lies close to the scarred and desolate wastes of the Blight, a walled haven from the dangers away to the north, and a refuge from the ill works of those who serve the Dark One. Or so it is said. The city that greets Al'Lan Mandragoran, exiled king of Malkier and the finest swordsman of his generation, is instead one that is rife with rumour and the whisperings of Shadowspawn. Proof, should he have required it, that the Dark One grows powerful once more and that his minions are at work throughout the lands.And yet it is within Canluum's walls that Lan will meet a woman who will shape his destiny. Moiraine is a young and powerful Aes Sedai who has journeyed to the city in search of a bondsman. She requires aid in a desperate quest to prove the truth of a vague and largely discredited prophecy - one that speaks of a means to turn back the shadow, and of a child who may be the dragon reborn.'Epic in every sense' - Sunday Times'With the Wheel of Time, Jordan has come to dominate the world that Tolkien began to reveal' New York Times'A fantasy phenomenon' SFXThe Wheel of Time series:Book 1: The Eye of the WorldBook 2: The Great HuntBook 3: The Dragon RebornBook 4: The Shadow RisingBook 5: The Fires of HeavenBook 6: Lord of ChaosBook 7: A Crown of SwordsBook 8: The Path of DaggersBook 9: Winter's HeartBook 10: Crossroads of TwilightBook 11: Knife of DreamsBook 12: The Gathering StormBook 13: Towers of MidnightBook 14: A Memory of LightPrequel: New SpringLook out for the companion book: The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time

Read more less

“Alice was always beautiful—Armenian immigrant beautiful, with thick, curly black hair, olive skin, and big dark eyes,” writes Dana Walrath. Alice also has Alzheimer’s, and while she can remember all the songs from The Music Man, she can no longer attend to the basics of caring for herself. Alice moves to live with her daughter, Dana, in Vermont, and the story begins. Aliceheimer’s is a series of illustrated vignettes, daily glimpses into their world with Alzheimer’s. Walrath’s time with her mother was marked by humor and clarity: “With a community of help that included pirates, good neighbors, a cast of characters from space-time travel, and my dead father hovering in the branches of the maple trees that surround our Vermont farmhouse, Aliceheimer’s let us write our own story daily—a story that, in turn, helps rewrite the dominant medical narrative of aging.” In drawing Alice, Walrath literally enrobes her with cut-up pages from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. She weaves elements from Lewis Carroll’s classic throughout her text, using evocative phrases from the novel to introduce the vignettes, such as “Disappearing Alice,” “Missing Pieces,” “Falling Slowly,” “Curiouser and Curiouser,” and “A Mad Tea Party.” Walrath writes that creating this book allowed her not only to process her grief over her mother’s dementia, but also “to remember the magic laughter of that time.” Graphic medicine, she writes, “lets us better understand those who are hurting, feel their stories, and redraw and renegotiate those social boundaries. Most of all, it gives us a way to heal and to fly over the world as Alice does.” In the end, Aliceheimer’s is indeed strangely and utterly uplifting.

Read more less

Buried in the 14th century BC but unearthed by Howard Carter in 1922, the objects entombed with Tutankhamun are an invaluable window into a long-extinct belief system. Seen today, they create an intricate picture of how the ancient Egyptian people viewed the perilous journey to paradise, a utopian Egypt that could only be entered following the final judgment. When acclaimed photographer Sandro Vannini started his work in Egypt in the late ’90s, a technological revolution was about to unfold. Emerging technologies enabled him to document murals, tombs, and artifacts in unprecedented detail. Using the time-consuming and strenuous multi-shot technique, Vannini produced complete photographic reproductions that revealed colors in their original tones with vivid intensity. Through these extraordinary images, we discover the objects’ quintessential features alongside the sophisticated and cleverly hidden details. In collaboration with a series of international exhibitions, starting with King Tut: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh at the California Science Center in March 2018, this comprehensive guide marks the centenary of Carter’s first excavations in the Valley of the Kings. These inestimable works endure through Vannini's photographs in their full, timeless splendor. From offerings and rituals to Osiris and eternal life, Vannini’s portfolio covers all facets of ancient Egyptian culture—but it is Tutankhamun’s unique legacy that dominates these images. With texts by the photographer, captions by specialist Mohamed Megahed, and chapter introductions from scholars in the field, King Tut. The Journey through the Underworld puts much-debated mysteries to rest. The learned yet accessible forewords come from distinguished Egyptologists including Salima Ikram and David P. Silverman. Insightful narratives, resplendent images, and a contemporary standpoint make this title a fitting tribute to the Boy King’s odyssey, illuminating an epoch that spanned an unimaginable 4,000 years.

Read more less

If the child is the father of the man, as William Wordsworth so famously declared, then what of the father that child grows to become? How does a daughter born of her mother’s death, as in the case of Mary Shelley, navigate the politics of production and reproduction within a loaded language of mythological allusion between generational authorships? How do the visual arts perpetuate or challenge cultural agendas, such as portraying patriarchal anxieties about the “effeminization” of homeland by the foreign “other”, or attempting, iconically, to “save the soul” of a nation? How do parents both encode and decode our world? With the rise of the cult of the child in the later 18th and 19th centuries, Romantic writers of Britain and Europe, and eventually of North America, were perfectly positioned to explore, by extension, what it meant to “parent,” whether it be in within the domestic or the political sphere.The essays in Romanticism and Parenting: Image, Instruction and Ideology offer a fresh, timely, and cutting edge contribution to the field of Romantic studies. The collection has its roots in conference proceedings from the 2005 Romanticism and Parenting Conference held at Seattle University in Seattle, Washington. Essays acknowledge traditional discussions of such quintessentially “Romantic” themes as the child, education and familial politics while building upon contemporary innovative arguments within the contexts of Romanticism. As a result, chapters in the collection range from examining didactic children’s literature to complicating constructions of the family politic at personal, communal and nationalistic levels. While challenging and deepening an understanding of Romantic studies, the collection also points to current, dynamic issues, such as the burgeoning discussion of the experience that actual parents face in academia. Consequently, the collection reveals how the Romantic period has come to profoundly influence our own current constructions of the politics of parenting.

Read more less

It is 1546: the last year of Henry VIII’s reign. What is the purpose of the top-quality portrait, painted then, of Elizabeth I aged about 13? It hangs today for all to see in Windsor Castle. Her clothes are a dazzling scarlet and gold and she wears many jewels; in fact, the gold material was reserved for top royalty. The only person in 1546 who could have commissioned such a portrait was her father, the King. Behind Elizabeth hang her bed-curtains. They signify that this is a betrothal portrait: a declaration that she is now ready to be married. Her destiny is a foreign Prince for a political alliance. She will soon be despatched abroad. It’s a tense year at Court. The King is ill and beset with suspicions. He lashes out at anyone he suspects of heresy or claims of royal descent. No-one dares mention the Succession, because it implies the King’s death. But it is uppermost in every mind at Court now. Prince Edward is only 8. His two half-sisters are the wrong sex to inherit. No-one is more aware of this than Edward’s two uncles, Jane Seymour’s brothers. They antagonise each other but share the aim of assuming power over the future child-king. The Catholic/Protestant divide is also volatile. Only Henry’s domineering character has kept dissent at bay in England so far. So, when this serene portrait was painted, the Court was silently simmering and scheming for future power. Elizabeth herself is the central character. She has spent nearly all her life in the royal country manors, away from London. She’s unaware of the hidden ferment at Court. Now she deeply dreads her imminent exile, which has come as a great shock to her. Her sheltered, confident childhood is coming to a sudden end.

Read more less

Brought together for the first time in one volume are three books by the titan of chess, Jose Capablanca. ----- One of the greatest chess prodigies of all time, he evolved the most perfect chess technique seen on a chessboard. A former World champion, and one of the most successful tournament players in the history of the game, Capablanca's uncanny position judgment empowered him to produce games that were masterful pieces of position play, and that culminated often in combinations of startling brilliancy. ----- My Chess Career. Written one year before he became chess champion of the world, this book relives in Capablanca's own words 35 of his greatest games and those events of his life relevant to his chess career. The seminal work of the Cuban genius who repeated the exploits of Morphy, suddenly bursting onto the European scene and annihilating the great masters who had hitherto dominated the international arena. This book captures the magic of Capablanca's early victory at San Sebastian 1911 and his second place - bowing only to Lasker - at St Petersburg 1914. ----- Chess Fundamentals.Capablanca's classic instructional manual first appeared in 1921, the year he defeated Emanuel Lasker for the world championship title. This handbook is packed with timeless advice on different aspects of practical play and illustrated by Capablanca's own games. ----- A Primer of Chess. Capablanca's introduction to chess is an ideal first chess book for players of all ages. In systematic fashion, Capablanca lucidly explains the rules and basic principles of this fascinating game, and illustrates these with a wide range of practical examples. ----- After capturing the world championship in in 1921, Capablanca was for a time regarded as practically invincible. Although he surprisingly lost his title to Alexander Alekhine in 1927, Capablanca remained a leading player until his death in New York in 1942.

Read more less

The Drift Crisis continues! In crumbling Alluvion, the goddess Triune’s city domain within the Drift, the heroes are thrust into the center of tensions between anxious factions at the heart of the Drift Crisis catastrophe! By agreeing to aid a desperate android priest of Casandalee, the heroes can start to help healing these divides. But first, they must curry the favor of a community of ysoki scrappers outside of the Dark, a neighborhood where technology doesn’t work that hasn’t been touched by light for decades. Exploring those murky streets, they confront undead menaces and otherworldly spirits of hatred and anger, eventually restoring light and power to the cursed region, and shining further illumination as to the origin of the Drift Crisis! “A Light in the Dark" is a Starfinder adventure for four 7th-level characters, launching the 3-volume Drift Hackers Adventure Path. Drift Hackers is the exciting conclusion of the Drift Crisis, an event taking place across the entire Starfinder game line, in which faster-than-light travel breaks down and the galaxy is thrown into chaos. In addition to the adventure itself, this book includes a player's guide filled with character creation advice and new gear designed just for Drift Hackers players, along with an Adventure Toolbox filled with new rule options and strange alien creatures. Each bi-monthly full-color softcover Starfinder Adventure Path volume contains a new installment of a series of interconnected science-fantasy quests that together create a fully developed plot of sweeping scale and epic challenges. Each 64-page volume also contains in-depth articles that detail and expand the Starfinder campaign setting and provide new rules, a host of exciting new monsters and alien races, a new planet to explore and starship to pilot, and more!

Read more less

Research shows that online education, when designed and facilitated well, is as effective as traditional campus-based instruction. Despite the evidence, many faculty perceive online education as inferior to traditional instruction—and are often quite vocal in their skepticism. Simultaneously, however, more and more students are seeking online courses and degree programs.Thrive Online: A New Approach to Building Expertise and Confidence as an Online Educator is an invitation for the rising tide of online educators who are relatively new to teaching online, and also for those more experienced instructors who are increasingly frustrated by the dominant bias against online education.Readers will find:• An approach that empowers online educators to thrive professionally using a set of specific agentic behaviors• Strategies for approaching conversations about online learning in new ways that inform the skeptics and critics• Strategies that celebrate the additional skills and proficiencies developed by successful online educators• Guidance for educators who want to feel natural and fluent in the online learning environment• Guidance for enhancing the user-centered nature of online spaces to create student-centered learning environments• Encouragement for online educators to pursue leadership opportunitiesThe internet is changing how people communicate and learn. Thrive Online: A New Approach to Building Expertise and Confidence as an Online Educator offers guidance, inspiration and strategies required to adapt and lead higher education through this change. This book is for higher education instructors who are seeking community, a sense of belonging, and the professional respect they deserve. Thriving is not a reaction to our environment, but rather a state of being we can create intentionally for ourselves.The time has come to change the conversation about online education. Add your voice – join the community and #ThriveOnline.

Read more less

'I loved it!' Marian Keyes'Laugh-out-loud funny, sharp as a tack and compulsively readable ... I loved it.' Louise O'Neill'I loved The Snag List. It's a sharp, funny story of female friendship at its best, with characters you'll fall in love with.' Beth O'Leary'Astutely observed, whip-smart and very, very funny.' Sarah Breen'Laugh-out-loud hilarious ... White's pages fizz with earthy wit and [Marian] Keyes fans will definitely find plenty to enjoy here' Sunday IndependentIf you could go back and follow the road not taken ... would you?For thirty-somethings Lindy, Ailbhe and Roe, the move to new, hyper-polished, luxury housing development Monteray Valley feels like slow death by Netflix, neighbourhood Whatsapp groups and Saturday nights in. The potential for exciting new possibilities seems to be withering faster than you can say 'postnatal dryness' as the women's lives are consumed by other halves and domestic obligations.Lindy's realising that her ambitions have been hijacked by her son's career. He's eleven.Meanwhile, despite years of self-sabotage, Ailbhe 'has it all': a successful business, a husband, a baby. If only having it all didn't also include having a fairly colossal secret.Then there's Roe who is busy trying for a baby -- a risky business when you're not sure you want one.Compiling a snag list to send to their builder sees the new friends contemplating their own personal snag lists -- their regrets and unfulfilled dreams - and inspires a business idea that's about to see life in Monteray Valley get a lot more interesting.Getting a second chance to carpe diem is irresistible, but can do-overs ever really work? And will revisiting past regrets threaten the lives they've made now?

Read more less

"Sundin's novels set the gold standard for historical war romance, and When Twilight Breaks is arguably her most brilliant and important work to date."--Booklist starred review "Sundin is a must-buy . . . and her latest World War II tale positively crackles with tension."--Library Journal starred review Munich, 1938. Evelyn Brand is an American foreign correspondent as determined to prove her worth in a male-dominated profession as she is to expose the growing tyranny in Nazi Germany. To do so, she must walk a thin line. If she offends the government, she could be expelled from the country--or worse. If she fails to truthfully report on major stories, she'll never be able to give a voice to the oppressed--and wake up the folks back home. In another part of the city, American graduate student Peter Lang is working on his PhD in German. Disillusioned with the chaos in the world due to the Great Depression, he is impressed with the prosperity and order of German society. But when the brutality of the regime hits close, he discovers a far better way to use his contacts within the Nazi party--to feed information to the shrewd reporter he can't get off his mind. This electric standalone novel from fan-favorite Sarah Sundin puts you right at the intersection of pulse-pounding suspense and heart-stopping romance. "Sundin combines suspense and romance to great effect . . . Inspirational fans who like high-octane action will enjoy this thrilling story."--Publishers Weekly "Sundin masterfully combines action and attraction to generate multilayered thrills while exploring such themes as individual freedom versus the common good, gender and racial discrimination, and the polarization of viewpoints, which all have deep relevance today."--Booklist starred review

Read more less

Now a major TV series on Prime Video The ninth novel in the Wheel of Time series - one of the most influential and popular fantasy epics ever published.Rand al'Thor, the Dragon Reborn, is slowly succumbing to the taint that the Dark One has placed upon the saidin - the male half of the True Source. His Asha'man followers are also showing signs of the insanity that once devastated the world and brought the Age of Legends to an end. And as Rand falters, the Shadow falls across a stricken land. In the city of Ebou Dar the Seanchan, blind to the folly of their cause, marshal their forces and continue their relentless assault. In Shayol Ghul the Forsaken join together to destroy the Dragon. Rand's only chance is to hazard the impossible and remove the taint from the saidin. But to do so he must master a power from the Age of Legends that none have ever dared to risk - a power that can annihilate Creation and bring an end to Time itself.'Epic in every sense' Sunday Times'With the Wheel of Time, Jordan has come to dominate the world that Tolkien began to reveal' New York Times'[The] huge ambitious Wheel of Time series helped redefine the genre' George R. R. Martin'A fantasy phenomenon' SFXThe Wheel of Time series:Book 1: The Eye of the WorldBook 2: The Great HuntBook 3: The Dragon RebornBook 4: The Shadow RisingBook 5: The Fires of HeavenBook 6: Lord of ChaosBook 7: A Crown of SwordsBook 8: The Path of DaggersBook 9: Winter's HeartBook 10: Crossroads of TwilightBook 11: Knife of DreamsBook 12: The Gathering StormBook 13: Towers of MidnightBook 14: A Memory of LightPrequel: New SpringLook out for the companion book: The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time

Read more less

The electrifying follow-up to Dave Eggers' New York Times Bestseller The Circle'Gulpable fictive entertainment . . . Eggers is a wonderful storyteller with an alert and defiant vision' ObserverWhen the world's largest search engine / social media company merges with the planet's dominant e-commerce site, it creates the richest and most dangerous-and, oddly enough, most beloved-monopoly ever known: The Every.Delaney Wells is an unlikely new hire. A former forest ranger and unwavering tech skeptic, she charms her way into an entry-level job with one goal in mind: to take down the company from within. With her compatriot, the not-at-all-ambitious Wes Kavakian, they look for the company's weaknesses, hoping to free humanity from all-encompassing surveillance and the emoji-driven infantilization of the species. But does anyone want what Delaney is fighting to save? Does humanity truly want to be free?Studded with unforgettable characters and lacerating set-pieces, The Every blends satire and terror, while keeping the reader in breathless suspense about the fate of the company - and the human animal.'More playful and satirical than Orwell . . . it scores as a series of brilliant set pieces and a devastating overall critique.' Sunday Times'Part of the genius of this remarkable piece of satire, riven as it is with horribly plausible ideas and horribly good jokes. . . . What Eggers does so well is make The Every alluring as well as alarming...' The Times'You read it and think: yes, this is set in the future but it is actually going on here and now. It is an urgent and necessary book. It's also fun. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar' The ScotsmanThe Circle was a New York Times bestseller in 2013

Read more less

Privacy matters because it shields us from possible abuses of power. Human beings need privacy just as much as they need community. Our need for socialization brings with it risks and burdens which in turn give rise to the need for spaces and time away from others. To impose surveillance upon someone is an act of domination. The foundations of democracy quiver under surveillance. Given how important privacy is for individual and collective wellbeing, it is striking that it has not enjoyed a more central place in philosophy. The philosophical literature on privacy and surveillance is still very limited compared to that on justice, autonomy, or equality-and yet the former plays a role in protecting all three values. Perhaps philosophers haven't attended much to privacy because for most of the past two centuries there have been strong enough privacy norms in place and not enough invasive technologies. Privacy worked for most people most of the time, which made thinking about it unnecessary. It's when things stop working that the philosopher's attention is most easily caught-the owl of Minerva spreading its wings only with impending dusk. With the spread of machine learning, a kind of AI that often uses vast amounts of personal data, and a whole industry dedicated to the trade of personal data becoming one of the most popular business models of the 21st century, it's time for philosophy to look more closely at privacy. This book is intended to contribute to a better understanding of privacy from a philosophical point of view-what it is, what is at stake in its loss, and how it relates to other rights and values. The five parts that compose this book respond to five basic questions about privacy: Where does privacy come from? What is privacy? Why does privacy matter? What should we do about privacy? Where are we now?

Read more less

What is love's real intent? Why can love be so ruthlessly selective? How is it related to sex, beauty, and goodness? And is the child now the supreme object of love? In addressing these questions, Simon May develops a radically new understanding of love as the emotion we feel towards whomever or whatever we experience as grounding our life--as offering us a possibility of home in a world that we supremely value. He sees love as motivated by a promise of "ontological rootedness," rather than, as two thousand years of tradition variously asserts, by beauty or goodness, by a search for wholeness, by virtue, by sexual or reproductive desire, by compassion or altruism or empathy, or, in one of today's dominant views, by no qualities at all of the loved one. After arguing that such founding Western myths as the Odyssey and Abraham's call by God to Canaan in the Bible powerfully exemplify his new conception of love, May goes on to re-examine the relation of love to beauty, sex, and goodness in the light of this conception, offering among other things a novel theory of beauty--and suggesting, against Plato, that we can love others for their ugliness (while also seeing them as beautiful). Finally, he proposes that, in the Western world, romantic love is gradually giving way to parental love as the most valued form of love: namely, the love without which one's life is not deemed complete or truly flourishing. May explains why childhood has become sacred and excellence in parenting a paramount ideal--as well as a litmus test of society's moral health. In doing so, he argues that the child is the first genuinely "modern" supreme object of love: the first to fully reflect what Nietzsche called "the death of God." Readers will find Love "Excitingly new, yet immediately recognizable--that's the paradox at the very heart of love, and it is what Simon May has achieved." --Los Angeles Review of Books

Read more less

Perfect for fans of A MAN CALLED OVE, THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL and THE LITTLE PARIS BOOKSHOP Newly retired Philip returns home to Cologne and is thrown into emotional turmoil upon bumping into his long-lost sweetheart. In the midst of a domestic crisis, Ricarda confides in Philip that she is looking for somewhere to live. And there and then, Philip suggests that she move in with him - he is setting up a flatshare. Will she join him with his mischievous dachshund named Ralf?To his surprise, Ricarda agrees, leaving Philip to scramble together a crew of retires in time for spring, for the most unlikely of social experiments. There's grumpy cigarette-smoking grandfather Harry; quiet and discreet Eckart, curiously carting around his late wife's headstone; Uschi, brimming with life, harbouring a passion for leotards and aerobics, along with sausages and outrageous knitting patterns; and then, ever-practical and warm-hearted Ricarda, towards whom Phillip is developing real feelings. Despite their differences, the flatmates thrive and embark on a series of new adventures. But when Uschi falls unwell, familiar cracks begin to show and this uniquely spirited club of friends must work together in order to survive - and truly blossom.Read what people are saying about The Vintage Springtime Club'Such a wonderful, uplifting story. When I finished I felt a warm frisson of emotion enveloping me. It's difficult to believe this is Beatrice's first novel' (Kraftireader) 'This gentle book is full of warmth and is an easy enjoyable read' (Portobello Book Blog)'A charming debut novel' (Alba Forcadell)'A wonderful tale of life, friendship and love that kept me hooked until the very end' (Reading Room With a View)

Read more less