Search results for ""author john king""

From their ability to use energy from sunlight to make their own food, to combating attacks from diseases and predators, plants have evolved an amazing range of life-sustaining strategies. Written with the non-specialist in mind, John King's lively natural history explains how plants function, from how they gain energy and nutrition to how they grow, develop and ultimately die. New to this edition is a section devoted to plants and the environment, exploring how problems created by human activities, such as global warming, pollution of land, water and air, and increasing ocean acidity, are impacting on the lives of plants. King's narrative provides a simple, highly readable introduction, with boxes in each chapter offering additional or more advanced material for readers seeking more detail. He concludes that despite the challenges posed by growing environmental perils, plants will continue to dominate our planet.

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The Football Factory centres on Tom Johnson, a reasoned 'Chelsea hooligan' who represents a disaffected society operating by brutal rules. We are shown the realities of life - social degradation, unemployment, racism, casual violence, excessive drink and bad sex - and, perhaps more importantly, how they fall into a political context of surveillance, media manipulation and division. Graphic and disturbing, sometimes very funny, and deeply affecting throughout, The Football Factory is a vertiginous rush of adrenaline - the most authentic book yet on the so-called English Disease.

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This is an all new version of the popular PARALLEL TEXT series, containing eight pieces of contemporary fiction in the original Spanish and in English translation. Including stories by Fuentes, Molinas, Marquez and Cortazar, this volume gives a fascinating insight into Spanish and Latin American culture and literature as well as providing an invaluable educational tool.

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Very few diaries of directors and senior managers of the Big Four railways have survived to enter the public domain. There are, however, two notable Southern Railway diarists whose records have been available in archives for some years, but have been largely ignored by historians; Southern Railway General Manager Gilbert Szlumper and Director Leopold Amery. Their remarkable diaries are addressed in this insightful book, which gives a slightly different view of the company in contrast to the almost sanitised histories by some writers. The surviving diaries of Szlumper are far from complete. They begin in 1936 and continue into the war years, but there are several gaps. Throughout, Szlumper comments on individuals and developments, revealing little-known facts and the circumstances that meant he could never truly achieve his potential. Formally retiring in 1942, he died in 1969, after which his diaries entered the public domain. Leopold Amery was director of the Southern Railway from 1932. A Birmingham Member of Parliament for many years, he was a statesman of some stature, his high offices including Secretary of State for the Colonies in the 1920s. In his autobiography, Amery writes very little on the railway, although he does comment on its family atmosphere. His diaries, which are in the public domain in a Cambridge University archive, have been published in two volumes but Amerys fascinating business activities were omitted by the publisher, and like Szlumper he comments on individuals and developments. The diary information of these two exceptional men has been supplemented by information from the railway, state archives and other sources, and many of the photographs have never been published before.

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Antoine Sfeir's Columbia World Dictionary of Islamism is a major resource. Translated for the first time from the original French, this volume features more than two thousand entries on the history of Islamism and Islamic countries. It provides a balanced account of events and organizations, as well as philosophers, activists, militants, and other prominent figures, and offers a window into a movement that has irrevocably changed both Muslim and Western societies. The dictionary includes entries on the roots of Islamism and jihad in Africa, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Morocco, the Balkans, and the United States, among many other countries and locations. It profiles such key individuals as Louis Farrakhan; Tariq Ramadan; Abu Hamza Al-Masri; Algeria's Hassan Hattab, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood; Egypt's Hassan Al-Banna; and the leader of the Afghan Jombesh-i Melli Islami movement, Abdul Rashid Dostum; historical events such as the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole and Syria's Hama massacre; organizations and religious movements such as the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas, Morocco's Justice and Development Party, and Iran's Association for the Defense of the Values of the Islamic Revolution; and groups including Tablighi Jamaat (the Society of the Message), the World Association for Muslim Youth, and Lebanon's Al-Ahbash. A unique aspect of this dictionary is its examination of this antimodern incarnation of Islam and its efforts to claim (or reclaim) Muslim society, families, and professional environments. The volume considers such questions as whether activist Islam is "terrorist" and if it can coexist with Western societies; whether terrorism can be justified by the Quran; and what are the components of an international Islam. Antoine Sfeir, internationally renowned for his scholarship and expertise on this subject, remains sensitive to the differences between Islam and Islamism and approaches the ideology from geopolitical, sociological, and historical standpoints.

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A classic detective story that explores the last years of Hemingway's life, evoking both Cuba and this giant of American letters with enormous skill and wit. When the bones of a man murdered forty years earlier surface on the Havana estate of Ernest Hemingway, writer and ex-cop Mario Conde is called in to investigate. As he unearths the truth of the night of 3 October 1958, he is forced to come to terms with a very different side to his former literary hero.Padura Fuentes switches between Conde's world and that of Hemingway's Cuba four decades earlier; in the heat and rum haze, the two seem slowly to merge. In an extraordinary journey into the past and into the personality of one of the twentieth century´s most enigmatic and powerful writers, a masterful and totally convincing portrait emerges, as well as a riveting mystery that will keep you in suspense until the very final pages.

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It was one of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century and Tolstoy called it "the greatest of all novels." Yet today Victor Hugo's Les Miserables is neglected by readers and undervalued by critics. In The Temptation of the Impossible, one of the world's great novelists, Mario Vargas Llosa, helps us to appreciate the incredible ambition, power, and beauty of Hugo's masterpiece and, in the process, presents a humane vision of fiction as an alternative reality that can help us imagine a different and better world. Hugo, Vargas Llosa says, had at least two goals in Les Miserables--to create a complete fictional world and, through it, to change the real world. Despite the impossibility of these aims, Hugo makes them infectious, sweeping up the reader with his energy and linguistic and narrative skill. Les Miserables, Vargas Llosa argues, embodies a utopian vision of literature--the idea that literature can not only give us a supreme experience of beauty, but also make us more virtuous citizens, and even grant us a glimpse of the "afterlife, the immortal soul, God." If Hugo's aspiration to transform individual and social life through literature now seems innocent, Vargas Llosa says, it is still a powerful ideal that great novels like Les Miserables can persuade us is true.

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'The most approachable and exhilarating Latin American writer of our times.' Robert McCrum, ObserverIn the past, culture was a kind of vital consciousness that constantly rejuvenated and revivified everyday reality. Now it is largely a mechanism of distraction and entertainment. From one of the world's great literary intelligences, Notes on the Death of Culture is an examination and indictment of this transformation - an impassioned and essential critique of our time, with essays on the disappearance of eroticism, on culture politics and power, and the frivolity and banality of entertainment in Western culture.

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The present confrontation of Communist China and the United States, on which the future of peace in Asia hinges, is merely the latest phase in a continuing historical process--the remaking of China's ancient society under the stimulus of Western contact. How does it happen that a century of foreign trade and missionary evangelism, of modern education and the training of Chinese students in Western ways, has now resulted in a seeming rejection of the West? What has been the real nature of "China's response to the West" during the past century of our contact?This volume gives the first inside account, on so broad a scale, of how China's leaders reacted to the invasion of Western arms and goods, persons and ideas, during the three generations from the Opium War to the rise of the Kuomintang. In 28 chapters, with translations of 65 key documents, the authors trace the stages by which the scholar-officials of the Middle Kingdom were brought to recognize successively the need for Western arms to defend their country, Western technology for making arms, modern science to support technology, its application in modern industry to strengthen the nation, and all the attendant new ideas which led them eventually into great movements for institutional reform, political revolution, and ideological reconstruction.From the famous Commissioner un's first study of Western geography during his anti-opium crusade, through the efforts of Li Hungchang and others at "self-strengthening" by industrialization, down to the critical thought of Dr. Hu Shih and the eclecticism of Sun Yat-sen in the early 20th century, the writings of China's leaders ring the changes on a central theme how to remake their heritage and create a modern nation capable of meeting the West on equal terms. The provincial viceroys, the Reformers of 1898, the Boxers in 1900, the old Empress Dowager, and the eager students studying abroad, each in their own way, all grapple with this absorbing problem. The varied Chinese responses to the West in the formative century here analyzed give us a new insight into the springs of social action among one-fifth of mankind.The companion volume, for the research specialist, provides Notes and Sources, Bibliography, and a Glossary of Chinese names and terms, essential bases for further exploration of this new field.

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On 14 July 1958, with the fall of the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq, a chapter of Iraq's history ended. In the wake of this revolution - a revolution that eventually brought to power the Ba'ath party of Saddam Hussein - the ancien regime of Iraq found itself both persecuted and imprisoned. Mohammed Fadhel Jamali, a former foreign minister and prime minister of Iraq, was no exception. In this remarkable firsthand account of his time in power he reveals the diplomatic wrangling at the heart of the Iraqi monarchist regime, and offers incisive analysis of Iraq's role at both regional and international levels. The Middle East in the 1950s was a time when Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser's pan-Arab nationalism caught the political and intellectual attention of policymakers, politicians and 'the man on the street' alike. Here, Jamali outlines how these ideas were put into practice. But despite the intentions of the idea of pan-Arabism,this post-World War II era was nonetheless beset with discord and diplomatic difficulties. Inside the Arab Nationalist Struggle thus explores Iraq's relations with other Arab states and the wider Middle East, as well as its policies towards the nascent Israeli state and the newly created Palestine 'problem'. As foreign minister in the years immediately after the end of World War II, Jamali was uniquely placed to give an insight into the formative years of the United Nations. He had participated in the San Francisco Founding Conference of the United Nations and signed the United Nations Charter in the name of Iraq. He also lead the Iraqi delegation at the Asian-African Conference at Bandung in April 1955, and was present at many of the negotiations that culminated in the Baghdad Pact, an alliance in which Iraq, Iran and Pakistan had pledged to collaborate with the UK and the US in the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union. His recollections and analysis thus function as a vital resource for those trying to understand the roots and development of the Cold War and the ways in which Cold War diplomacy affected the Middle East.

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John King Fairbank was the West's doyen on China, and this book is the full and final expression of his lifelong engagement with this vast ancient civilization. It remains a masterwork without parallel. The distinguished historian Merle Goldman brings the book up to date, covering reforms in the post-Mao period through the early years of the twenty-first century, including the leadership of Hu Jintao. She also provides an epilogue discussing the changes in contemporary China that will shape the nation in the years to come.

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This book is the result of many years of experience of the authors in guiding physics projects. It aims to satisfy a deeply felt need to involve students and their instructors in extended experimental investigations of physical phenomena. Over fifty extended projects are described in detail, at various levels of sophistication, aimed at both the advanced high school, as well as first and second year undergraduate physics students, and their instructors. Carrying out these projects may take anything from a few days to several weeks, and in some cases months. Each project description starts with a summary of theoretical background, proceeds to outline goals and possible avenues of exploration, suggests needed instrumentation, experimental setup and data analysis, and presents typical results which can serve as guidelines for the beginner researcher. Separate parts are devoted to mechanics, electromagnetism, acoustics, optics, liquids, and thermal physics. An additional appendix suggests twenty further ideas for projects, giving a very brief description for each and providing references for pursuing them in detail. We also suggest a useful library of basic texts for each of the topics treated in the various parts.

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This book examines the social, political, and cultural factors that have and continue to influence the evolution of the urban waterfront as seen through production created from art and design practices. Reaching beyond the disciplines of architecture and urban design, Occupation:Boundary distills the dual roles art and culture have played in relation to the urban waterfront, as mediums that have recorded and instigated change at the threshold between the city and the sea. At the moment in time that demands innovative approaches to the transformation of urban waterfronts, and strategies to foster resilient boundaries, architect Cathy Simon recounts her career building at and around the water’s edge and in service of the public realm. In so doing, the work of contemporary architects is presented, while the origins and principles of a guiding design philosophy are located in meditations on art and observations on coastal cities around the world. The port cities of New York and San Francisco emerge as case studies that structure the reflections and mediate a narrative that is at once a professional and personal memoir, richly illustrated with images and drawings. Comprising three parts, the first two corresponding parts of Occupation:Boundary draw connections between the past and present by tracing the rise and fall of urban, industrial ports and providing context—in the forms of textual and visual media—for their recent transformations. Such reinterpretations, achieved via design, often serve the public through environmentally conscious strategies realized through inventive approaches to cultural and recreational programs. The work of visual artists, both historical and contemporary, appears alongside architecture, poetry, and literary references that illustrate and draw connections between each of these sections. The third section features select architectural work by the author, framed by critic John King and the architect and urbanist Justine Shapiro-Kline. Introduced with a foreword by the prominent landscape architect Laurie Olin, Occupation:Boundary draws on artistic and cultural intuitions and the experience of an architect whose practice negotiates the boundary between urban contexts and the bodies of water that sustain them. Together, the instincts, reflections, and architectural production collected here evidence the role of art and design in the creation of an equitable and inviting public realm.

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As the Ch’ing government’s Inspector General of the Maritime Customs Service, Robert Hart was the most influential Westerner in China for half a century. These journal entries continue the sequence begun in Entering China’s Service and cover the years when Hart was setting up Customs procedures, establishing a modus operandi with the Ch’ing bureaucracy, and inspecting the treaty ports. They culminate in Hart’s return visit to Europe with the Pin-ch’un Mission and his marriage in Northern Ireland.Richard Smith, John King Fairbank, and Katherine Bruner interleave the segments of Hart’s journals with lively narratives describing the contemporary Chinese scene and recounting Hart’s responses to the many challenges of establishing a Western-style organization within a Chinese milieu.

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In "Tribal Leadership", management consultants Dave Logan and John King show corporate leaders how they can use tribes - the groups that naturally form within any company - to maximize productivity and profit within their own firms. Based on a rigorous eight-year study that covered more than two dozen companies and 24,000 people, "Tribal Leadership" includes interviews with leading business figures such as Brian France, chairman and CEO of NASCAR, and Dilbert creator Scott Adams, and shows leaders from companies of any size and of any industry that the health and success of their firms ultimately depend on the hundreds of tribes within.

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