Search results for ""Author Michael Blake""

The book that inspired the epic movie, Dances With Wolves, and its sequel, The Holy Road, together in one volume for the first time. 1863. The last occupant of Fort Sedgewick, Lieutenant John Dunbar watches over the American frontier. A thousand miles back east, his comrades are locked in battle with the Confederates, but out here he is alone. His desolate posting will bring him into contact with the lords of the southern plains – the Comanche. He has no knowledge of their customs but Dunbar is intrigued by these people and begins a transformation from which he emerges a different man. A man called Dances With Wolves. The story continues, 11 years later in The Holy Road. Times are hard for the Comanche. The white man is closing in from all directions, claiming land, driving the tribes on to reservations. Should the Comanche fight or make peace? Misunderstanding and duplicity lead to raids and atrocities on both sides that can have only one conclusion. The man that was John Dunbar must go to war again.

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Maize is the world's most productive food and industrial crop, grown in more than 160 countries and on every continent except Antarctica. If by some catastrophe maize were to disappear from our food supply chain, vast numbers of people would starve and global economies would rapidly collapse. How did we come to be so dependent on this one plant? Maize for the Gods brings together new research by archaeologists, archaeobotanists, plant geneticists, and a host of other specialists to explore the complex ways that this single plant and the peoples who domesticated it came to be inextricably entangled with one another over the past nine millennia. Tracing maize from its first appearance and domestication in ancient campsites and settlements in Mexico to its intercontinental journey through most of North and South America, this history also tells the story of the artistic creativity, technological prowess, and social, political, and economic resilience of America's first peoples.

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Political controversy about migration is becoming more frequent, more heated, and for certain groups, decidedly more urgent. This raises pressing questions not only in the realms of policy-making and public discourse, but also for philosophical accounts of migration. Do liberal states have the right to exclude unwanted outsiders, or should all borders be open? How should we begin to theorize the morality of refugee and asylum policy? If states can exclude unwanted outsiders, what ethical principles govern the determination of who gets in? Justice, Migration, and Mercy offers a way in which these questions might be answered by providing a vision of how we can understand the political morality of migration. Michael Blake offers a novel, and plausible, account of the right to exclude on which that right is grounded on a more fundamental right to avoid unwanted forms of political relationship. Far from simply justifying exclusion, however, Blake examines the best justifications for exclusion in an effort to determine its limits. In doing so, he challenges the current global realities of migration which ensure open borders for a select few and closed borders for the majority, most often the most marginalized in society. His account sheds light on more specific questions of justice in migration, such as the permissibility of travel bans and carrier sanctions. He also offers a particular vision about how to go beyond questions of right and liberal justice, towards a declaration of the sort of community we wish to be. Blake then identifies the moral notion of mercy as a central one for the moral analysis of migration, a move which leads to the conclusion that we ought to show mercy and justice in constructing migration policy as well as in public debate.

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