Search results for ""Author "Demi"""

"Made in America" examines self-made men and women from a multicultural perspective. This text discusses the emergence of self-starters in relation to the changing consumer markets of the 20th century, and locates the new breed of entrepreneurs within the changing rhetoric of personal success, which shifted its emphasis over the past century from religious "character" to psychological "personality" to celebrity "image". The book concludes by surveying the life stories of enterprising celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Decker analyzes the autobiographical expressions of famous entrepreneurs - from Carnegie to Ross Perot - alongside more marginal ones in order to examine how mainstream society shapes and is shaped by the cultures of subordinate groups. In addition, he looks at the link between self-making and nation-building, and in doing so discovers the origins of another pervasive myth - the "American dream". Underlying Decker's study are these questions: what happened to the myth of self-making in America?; if it is dead, what caused its demise?; and if it lives on, what form has it taken? This text aims to uncover the richness, complexity, and diversity of self-styled success in America. By bringing gender, race, and ethnicity to bear on the myth of the "self-made man", it provides a reexamination of a traditional area of inquiry in American studies.

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With every touchdown, home run, and three-pointer, star athletes represent an American dream that only an elite group blessed with natural talent can achieve. However, Kimball concentrates on what happens once these modern warriors meet their untimely demise. As athletes die, legends rise in their place.The premature deaths of celebrated players not only capture and immortalize their physical superiority, but also jolt their fans with an unanticipated intensity. These athletes escape the inevitability of aging and decline of skill, with only the prime of their youth left to be remembered. But early mortality alone does not transform athletes into immortals. The living ultimately gain the power to construct the legacies of their fallen heroes. In Legends Never Die, Kimball explores the public myths and representations that surround a wide range of athletes, from Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio to Dale Earnhardt and Bonnie McCarroll. Kimball delves deeper than just the cultural significance of sports and its players; he examines how each athlete’s narrative is shaped by gender relations, religion, and politics in contemporary America. In looking at how Americans react to the tragic deaths of sports heroes, Kimball illuminates the important role sports play in US society and helps to explain why star athletes possess such cultural power.

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Is blood truly thicker than water? After a desperate search for her birth mother, fashionista Lily Rose is forced to confront her turbulent past. Love has set the tone for most of Lily Rose’s young life in Cumberland Falls, high in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. But her perfect world falls apart when her beloved adopted parents are tragically killed and she is sent to live at Red Rose Farm, in the Bluegrass. Lily starts high school and meets her first love, who introduces the idea of a much bigger world to Lily. This relationship spurs her to pursue the grit and glamour of the New York fashion world and a marriage that will nearly cause her demise.Lily Rose follows Lily as she grows into a New York fashion icon and battles abuse, power struggles, and infertility. In the shadows, we learn about the young woman who gave Lily up and how they will collide. Lily Rose is about love and marriage, infidelity, infertility, and identity. It also calls into questions the old adages blood is thicker than water and nothing is more important than family. Will Lily Rose ever find what she has been searching for? And most importantly, will she be able to stay true to herself in the process?

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When Germany occupied the originally ‘demilitarised’ Channel Islands in 1940, Hitler ordered the area to be staunchly fortified with colossal permanent structures like Battery Moltke on Jersey. As it was the only piece of the British Isles in Nazi control, he was determined that the islands should remain German forever. Churchill was equally obsessed, urging numerous commando raids and harebrained schemes for the invasion and liberation of the islands. But when France was freed in 1944, the Channel Islands were completely bypassed. German troops were cut off from their supplies and the island population began to starve. Occupied for almost the entire war, these quintessentially English islands serve as a fascinating microcosm of what Britain might have been like under Nazi rule. With one German soldier to every three islanders, resistance had to remain at a low level: possession of a radio merited a prison sentence. The Last Raid is an atmospheric account of life under German occupation, as well as the political manoeuvring behind the scenes. With the first detailed account in English of the Granville Raid, a unique German commando operation, Will Fowler combines the social experience of war with the military to form a fascinating chronicle of the fight for the Channel Islands during the Second World War.

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There is no rawer human experience than sex, and in a city as diverse as New York, sexual experiences come in many forms. In the pre-Giuliani days, temptation flooded Times Square on theater marquees and neon signs. Behind unmarked doors downtown, more adventurous experiences awaited for those in the know.In The Soft City, the ethnographer Terry Williams, with the help of accomplices and informants, ventures deep into the underground world of sex in New York. The book explores different aspects of the “perverse space” of the city: porn theaters, sex shops, peep shows, restroom cruising, sadomasochism clubs, swingers’ events, and many more. Featuring field notes taken between 1975 and the present, The Soft City documents the ways that New Yorkers on the social periphery have thought about and pursued sex, whether for recreation or to make a living. It also presents an unconventional account of New York City’s many transformations, showing how the soft city—its people and their unique character—evolved in response to official and social pressures. Featuring Williams’s unmistakable portraits of the demimonde as well as the accounts of other ethnographers challenging themselves to dive into the city’s hidden crannies, The Soft City is as irreproducible as it is provocative.

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During the Cold War, the U.S. built a series of alliances with Asian nations to erect a bulwark against the spread of communism and provide security to the region. Despite pressure to end bilateral alliances in the post-Cold War world, they persist to this day, even as new multilateral institutions have sprung up around them. The resulting architecture may aggravate rivalries as the U.S., China, and others compete for influence. However, Andrew Yeo demonstrates how Asia's complex array of bilateral and multilateral agreements may ultimately bring greater stability and order to a region fraught with underlying tensions. Asia's Regional Architecture transcends traditional international relations models. It investigates change and continuity in Asia through the lens of historical institutionalism. Refuting claims regarding the demise of the liberal international order, Yeo reveals how overlapping institutions can promote regional governance and reduce uncertainty in a global context. In addition to considering established institutions such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, he discusses newer regional arrangements including the East Asia Summit, Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the Belt and Road Initiative. This book has important implications for how policymakers think about institutional design and regionalism in Asia and beyond.

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Honorable Mention, Hamid Naficy Iranian Studies Book Award from the Association of Iranian Studies In the aftermath of the seventh-century Islamic conquest of Iran, Zoroastrians departed for India. Known as the Parsis, they slowly lost contact with their ancestral land until the nineteenth century, when steam-powered sea travel, the increased circulation of Zoroastrian-themed books, and the philanthropic efforts of Parsi benefactors sparked a new era of interaction between the two groups. Tracing the cultural and intellectual exchange between Iranian nationalists and the Parsi community during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Exile and the Nation shows how this interchange led to the collective reimagining of Parsi and Iranian national identity—and the influence of antiquity on modern Iranian nationalism, which previously rested solely on European forms of thought. Iranian nationalism, Afshin Marashi argues, was also the byproduct of the complex history resulting from the demise of the early modern Persianate cultural system, as well as one of the many cultural heterodoxies produced within the Indian Ocean world. Crossing the boundaries of numerous fields of study, this book reframes Iranian nationalism within the context of the connected, transnational, and global history of the modern era.

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The construction of the European Community (EC) has widely been understood as the product of either economic self-interest or dissatisfaction with the nation-state system. In Europe United, Sebastian Rosato challenges these conventional explanations, arguing that the Community came into being because of balance of power concerns. France and the Federal Republic of Germany—the two key protagonists in the story—established the EC at the height of the cold war as a means to balance against the Soviet Union and one another. More generally, Rosato argues that international institutions, whether military or economic, largely reflect the balance of power. In his view, states establish institutions in order to maintain or increase their share of world power, and the shape of those institutions reflects the wishes of their most powerful members. Rosato applies this balance of power theory of cooperation to several other cooperative ventures since 1789, including various alliances and trade pacts, the unifications of Italy and Germany, and the founding of the United States. Rosato concludes by arguing that the demise of the Soviet Union has deprived the EC of its fundamental purpose. As a result, further moves toward political and military integration are improbable, and the economic community is likely to unravel to the point where it becomes a shadow of its former self.

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The collapse of Britain's powerful labor movement in the last quarter century has been one of the most significant and astonishing stories in recent political history. How were the governments of Margaret Thatcher and her successors able to tame the unions? In analyzing how an entirely new industrial relations system was constructed after 1979, Howell offers a revisionist history of British trade unionism in the twentieth century. Most scholars regard Britain's industrial relations institutions as the product of a largely laissez faire system of labor relations, punctuated by occasional government interference. Howell, on the other hand, argues that the British state was the prime architect of three distinct systems of industrial relations established in the course of the twentieth century. The book contends that governments used a combination of administrative and judicial action, legislation, and a narrative of crisis to construct new forms of labor relations. Understanding the demise of the unions requires a reinterpretation of how these earlier systems were constructed, and the role of the British government in that process. Meticulously researched, Trade Unions and the State not only sheds new light on one of Thatcher's most significant achievements but also tells us a great deal about the role of the state in industrial relations.

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Chinese intellectuals of the early twentieth century were attracted to realism primarily as a tool for social regeneration. Realism encouraged writers to adopt the stance of the independent cultural critic and drew into the compass of serious literature the disenfranchised "others" of Chinese society. As historical pressures forced new ideological commitments in the late twenties and thirties, however, writers grew suspicious both of the "individualism" implicit in the realist model and of the often superficial nature of the sympathies that their fiction evoked in the middle class. Anderson argues that realism must be defined negatively as a "discourse of limitations" and is of minimal utility in the Chinese search for political and cultural empowerment. He shows how hesitations about the realist model affect the fiction of four representative authors, Lu Xun, Ye Shaojun, Mao Dun, and Zhang Tianyi. He also considers the demise of critical realism in the face of a new collectivist understanding of Chinese reality. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

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Everybody’s Doin’ It is the eye-opening story of popular music’s seventy-year rise in the brothels, dance halls, and dives of New York City. It traces the birth of popular music, including ragtime and jazz, to convivial meeting places for sex, drink, music, and dance. Whether coming from a single piano player or a small band, live music was a nightly feature in New York’s spirited dives, where men and women, often black and white, mingled freely—to the horror of the elite. This rollicking demimonde drove the development of an energetic dance music that would soon span the world. The Virginia Minstrels, Juba, Stephen Foster, Irving Berlin and his hit “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” and the Original Dixieland Jass Band all played a part in popularizing startling new sounds. Musicologist Dale Cockrell recreates this ephemeral underground world by mining tabloids, newspapers, court records of police busts, lurid exposés, journals, and the reports of undercover detectives working for social-reform organizations, who were sent in to gather evidence against such low-life places. Everybody’s Doin’ It illuminates the how, why, and where of America’s popular music and its buoyant journey from the dangerous Five Points of downtown to the interracial black and tans of Harlem.

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The world of Beauty/Beauty is 'built from the nose/out, like a painting', accumulating its various feelings, ideas, objects, disappointments and joys to the point of almost overflowing. Preoccupied with demise and loss, as well as reimagination and regeneration, Rebecca Perry's debut collection has the duality and symmetry of its title at its core. Beauty/Beauty is a book with tenderness running through its veins, exploring salvation, reparation and the fullness of being alive; the difficulty of defining what love is, the heartbreak, the faraway friends, the overwhelming abundance of things in museums. It is alive with memories, with old loves hanging around in the corners of dark rooms, ghost mouths hidden inside the mouth you are kissing, and eulogies to dearly departed pets. Each poem creates its own tiny world to be lived in and explored; a stegosaurus is adored, a million silver spiders play dead, a list of flowers is not really a list of flowers, adorable dogs want to be friends, the flightless grow wings, and the stars turn green. Beauty/Beauty was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2017, and was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection.

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'A brilliant, funny and thought-provoking book' - Jonn Elledge'Compelling, provocative, and utterly brilliant' - Dr Estelle ParanqueTHIS PAPERBACK FEATURES ADDITIONAL MATERIAL ON HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH IIHow the monarchs of England and Scotland met their deaths has been a wonderful mixture of violence, infections, overindulgence and occasional regicide. In Mortal Monarchs, medical historian Dr Suzie Edge examines 1,000 years of royal deaths to uncover the plots, accusations, rivalries, and ever-present threat of poison that the kings and queens of old faced.From the "bloody" fascinating story behind Oliver Cromwell's demise and the subsequent treatment of his corpse and whether the arrow William II caught in the chest was an accident or murder, to Henry IV's remarkable skin condition and the red-hot poker up Edward II's rear end, Mortal Monarchs captivates, grosses-out and informs.In school many of us learned the dates they died and who followed them, but sadly never heard the varied - and oft-gruesome - way our monarchs met their maker. Featuring original medical research, this history forms a rich record not just of how these people died, but how we thought about and treated the human body, in life and in death.

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The Nordic Tractor traces the history of tractor production in Sweden and Finland. The story goes back over 200 years to the 19th century when the industrial revolution was sweeping across Britain, and Sweden wanted to establish their own manufacturing powerhouses. This was an exciting and fast moving time for engineering and this book traces the ups, downs and eventual demise of some of the first manufacturers working to serve the particular needs of the agricultural and forestry industries in this densely forested and mountainous region. It then looks in depth at the companies who emerged from this, who learnt from their own and others' mistakes and built on the widespread technological advances of the time to build up names for themselves in Northern parts of Europe. Today, Valtra - now owned by AGCO - stands proudly as the last remaining agricultural tractor maker in Scandinavia, but The Nordic Tractor shows where their roots lie in the establishment and history of companies such as Bolinder, Munktells, Volvo and Valmet, who all stood out as being major players in the Nordic region. Including over 100 photos, many of which have been previously unpublished, this book will appeal to those with a specific interest in Nordic tractors, Nordic engineering and general Nordic history as well as the general tractor enthusiast.

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Stronghold is Tucker Malarkey’s enthralling account of an unlikely visionary, Guido Rahr, and his crusade to protect the world’s last bastion of wild salmon. One of the most determined creatures on earth, salmon have succeeded in returning from the sea to their birth rivers to spawn for hundreds of thousands of years – no matter what the obstacles. But our steady incursions into their habitats mean increasingly few are making it, pushing these fish to near extinction. In this improbable and inspiring story, we follow Guido on a wild and, at times, dangerous adventure from Oregon to Alaska, and then to one of the world’s last remaining wildernesses, in the Russian Far East. Along the way, Guido contends with scientists, conservationists, Russian oligarchs and corrupt officials – and befriends some unexpected allies – in an attempt to secure a stronghold for the endangered salmon, an extraordinary keystone of our ecosystem whose demise would reverberate across the planet. This book is a remarkable work of natural history, a clarion call for a sustainable future and a riveting insight into a fish whose future is closely linked to our own. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Adobe Garamond Pro'} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Adobe Garamond Pro'; min-height: 14.0px}

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From cowering, introverted founders of the alternative rock movement to one of the twenty best-selling American bands of all time, the story of R.E.M. covers three decades, two generations and the passions of millions. First, they lifted a humble, Southern college town into myth, re-calibrating rock music at the moment that it threatened to reach the point of terminal excess, and then, unsatisfied, they carried their progressive ideology right into the heart of mainstream popular culture, selling over 85 million records and winning universal acclaim along the way, totally without compromise. R.E.M. Album by Album tells that story, tracing the band from its formation in 1980 when four young men sought respite from the difficulties of real life by starting a covers band, right up until their eventual split in 2011, shedding new light on the lyrical and musical development of the band as artists, from their esoteric early masterpieces to the moment that they signed the world's largest ever recording contract. For the very first time, too, we examine the first decade after the band's demise, scrutinising the shifting sands of their legacy as the dust settles on one of pop music's most extraordinary careers.

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A deep and timely account of how American newspapers were produced and distributed on paper.Winner of the Best Book in Canadian Business History by the Canadian Business History AssociationPopular assessments of printed newspapers have become so grim that some have taken to calling them “dead tree media” as a way of invoking the medium’s imminent demise. There is a literal truth hidden in this dismissive expression: printed newspapers really are material goods made from trees. And, throughout the twentieth century, the overwhelming majority of trees cut down in the service of printing newspapers in the United States came from Canada. In Dead Tree Media, Michael Stamm reveals the international history of the commodity chains connecting Canadian trees and US readers. Drawing on newly available corporate documents and research in archives across North America, Stamm offers a sophisticated rethinking of the material history of the printed newspaper. Tracing its industrial production from the forest to the newsstand, he provides an account of the obscure and often hidden labor involved in this manufacturing process by showing how it was driven by not only publishers and journalists but also lumberjacks, paper mill workers, policymakers, chemists, and urban and regional planners. Stamm describes the 1911 shift in tariff policy that gave US publishers duty-free access to Canadian newsprint, providing a tremendous boost to Canadian paper manufacturers and a significant subsidy to American newspaper publishers. He also explains how Canada attracted massive American foreign investment in paper mills around the same time that US publishers were able to gain greater access to Canada’s vast spruce forests. Focusing particularly on the Chicago Tribune, Stamm provides a new history of the rise and fall of both the mass circulation printed newspaper and the particular kind of corporation in the newspaper business that had shaped many aspects of the cultural, political, and even physical landscape of North America. For those seeking to understand the travails of the contemporary newspaper business, Dead Tree Media is essential reading.

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Amid a display of sunshine-yellow electric appliances in a model home at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon squared off on the merits of their respective economic systems. One of the signature events of the cold war, the impromptu Kitchen Debate has been widely viewed as the opening skirmish in a propaganda war over which superpower could provide a better standard of living for its citizens. However, as Greg Castillo shows in Cold War on the Home Front, this debate and the American National Exhibition itself were, in fact, the culmination of a decade-long ideological battle fought with refrigerators, televisions, living room suites, and prefab homes.The first in-depth history of how domestic environments were exploited to promote the superiority of either capitalism or socialism on both sides of the Iron Curtain, Cold War on the Home Front reveals the tactics used by the American government to seduce citizens of the Soviet bloc with state-of-the-art consumer goods and the reactions of the Communist Party. Beginning in 1950, the U.S. State Department sponsored home expositions in West Berlin that were specifically designed to attract residents of East Berlin, featuring dream homes with modernist furnishings that presented an idealized vision of the lifestyle enjoyed by the consumer-citizen in the West. In response, Party authorities in East Germany staged socialist home expositions intended to evoke the domestic ideal of a cultured proletariat.Castillo closely follows the course of this escalating rivalry between competing consumer cultures through the 1950s, concluding that the Soviet bloc's inability to make good on the claim that it could emulate goods and living standards offered by the West was a contributing factor in communism's eventual demise. Using a mosaic of sources ranging from recently declassified government documents to homemaking journals and popular fiction, Cold War on the Home Front contributes an engaging new perspective on midcentury modernist style and its political uses at the dawn of the cold war.

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Art Nouveau thrived from the late 1890s through the First World War. The international design movement reveled in curvilinear forms and both playful and macabre visions and had a deep impact on cinematic art direction, costuming, gender representation, genre, and theme. Though historians have long dismissed Art Nouveau as a decadent cultural mode, its tremendous afterlife in cinema proves otherwise. In Cinema by Design, Lucy Fischer traces Art Nouveau's long history in films from various decades and global locales, appreciating the movement's enduring avant-garde aesthetics and dynamic ideology. Fischer begins with the portrayal of women and nature in the magical "trick films" of the Spanish director Segundo de Chomon; the elite dress and decor design choices in Cecil B. DeMille's The Affairs of Anatol (1921); and the mise-en-scene of fantasy in Raoul Walsh's The Thief of Bagdad (1924). Reading Salome (1923), Fischer shows how the cinema offered an engaging frame for adapting the risque works of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. Moving to the modern era, Fischer focuses on a series of dramatic films, including Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (1975), that make creative use of the architecture of Antoni Gaudi; and several European works of horror-The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), Deep Red (1975), and The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears (2013)-in which Art Nouveau architecture and narrative supply unique resonances in scenes of terror. In later chapters, she examines films like Klimt (2006) that portray the style in relation to the art world and ends by discussing the Art Nouveau revival in 1960s cinema. Fischer's analysis brings into focus the partnership between Art Nouveau's fascination with the illogical and the unconventional and filmmakers' desire to upend viewers' perception of the world. Her work explains why an art movement embedded in modernist sensibilities can flourish in contemporary film through its visions of nature, gender, sexuality, and the exotic.

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This book tells captivating stories of misadventures of two renowned theoretical physicists in the Soviet Union. The first part is devoted to Friedrich (Fritz) Houtermans, an outstanding Dutch-Austrian-German physicist who was the first to suggest that the source of stars' energy is thermonuclear fusion, and also made a number of other important contributions to cosmochemistry and geochemistry. In 1935, Houtermans, a German communist, in an attempt to save his life from Hilter's Gestapo, fled to the Soviet Union. He took up an appointment at the Kharkov Physico-Technical Institute, working there for two years with the Russian physicist Valentin P Fomin. In the Great Purge of 1937, Houtermans was arrested in December by the NKVD (Soviet Secret Police, KGB's predecessor). He was tortured, and confessed to being a Trotskyist plotter and German spy, out of fear of threats against his wife Charlotte. However, Charlotte had already escaped from the Soviet Union to Denmark, after which she went to England and finally the USA. As a result of the Hilter-Stalin Pact of 1939, Houtermans was turned over to the Gestapo in May 1940 and imprisoned in Berlin.The second part consists of two essays that narrate the life story of Yuri Golfand, one of the codiscoverers of supersymmetry, a major discovery in theoretical physics in the 20th century. In 1973, just two years after the publication of his seminal paper, he was fired from the Lebedev Physics Institute in Moscow. Because of his Jewish origin he could find no job. Under such circumstances, he applied for an exit visa to Israel, but his application was denied. Yuri Golfand became a refusnik and joined the Human rights movement, along with two other prominent physicists, Andrei Sakharov and Yuri Orlov. To earn his living, he had to do manual work, repeatedly being intimidated by KGB. Only 18 years later, shortly before the demise of the Soviet Union, did he obtain permission to leave the country, emigrating to Israel in 1990.These personal life stories of two outstanding theorists are interwined with the tragedies of the 20th century and make for compelling reading.

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'D'Ancona makes his case well... The book is well written and thoughtful' -- The Times'A heartfelt attempt to renew liberal ideals for the coming decades... How sorely our public debate needs others to express themselves similarly.' -- Henry Mance, Financial Times'An urgent and exhilarating account of how populism, prejudice & polarisation have corrupted objective truth and public discourse. D'Ancona's sparkling prose provides an explanation of how we got here and, crucially, how we might get out.' -- James O'Brien'A book so rich in thought, wisdom and persuasion I find myself sharing the ideas within it with everyone I meet... In the much-mourned absence of Christopher Hitchens, d'Ancona is fast becoming the voice of enlightenment for our bewildered age.' -- Emily Maitlis'A tonic for our times that blows open any complacency following Trump's defeat that the demise of populism and nativism is inevitable. In beautifully written prose, D'Ancona puts forward hopeful ideas and timely inspiration for a progressive politics to replace it.' -- David Lammy'A brilliant, lucid, fearless tract, just what the historical moment ordered.' -- Andrew O'Hagan'D'Ancona's regular practical suggestions help to take it beyond mere theory and into the real world... Decision-makers would do well to read it.' -- Charlotte Henry, TLS***This is a call to arms. The old tools of political analysis are obsolete - they have rusted and are no longer fit for purpose. We've grown lazy, wedded to the assumption that, after ruptures such as Brexit, the pandemic, and the rise of the populist Right, things will eventually go 'back to normal'.Award-winning political writer Matthew d'Ancona invites you to think afresh: to seek new ways of challenging political extremism, bombastic populism and democratic torpor on both Left and Right. In this ground-breaking book, he proposes a new way of understanding our era and plots a way forward. With rigorous analysis, he argues that we need to understand the world in a new way, with a framework built from the three I's: Identity, Ignorance and Innovation.

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An illustrated overview of the Hundred Years War, the longest-running and the most significant conflict in western Europe in the later Middle Ages. There can be no doubt that military conflict between France and England dominated European history in the 14th and 15th centuries. The Hundred Years War is of considerable interest both because of its duration and the number of theatres in which it was fought. Drawing on the latest research for this new edition, Hundred Years War expert Professor Anne Curry examines how the war can reveal much about the changing nature of warfare: the rise of infantry and the demise of the knight; the impact of increased use of gunpowder and the effect of the war on generations of people. Updated and revised for the new edition, with full-colour maps and 50 new images, this illustrated introduction provides an important reference resource for the academic or student reader as well as those with a general interest in late medieval warfare.

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The Place of Confluent Education in the Human Potential Movement relates the twenty-seven year Confluent Education Program at the University of California-Santa Barbara to the broad Human Potential Movement, in which the program is considered to be deeply embedded. The origins of confluent education within the human potential movement are traced from Aristotle to its current form; followed by a sustained and coherent critique of confluent education; and concludes with its institutional, professional, and cultural legacy and summarizes the lessons to be learned from the history of this innovative form of Humanistic Education. This book fills out in detail the historical, cultural and philosophical context of confluent education, while providing a complete account of its origins, both remote and modern, and a sustained, coherent critique which are necessary for securing its identity. Finally, the demise of the program is interpreted using empirical methodology, a multivariate analysis of the highly selective character of the students and survey research from students, professors, academic administrators, and classroom teachers, which document the perceived strength and weaknesses of the program and the human potential movement per se.

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Native American characters have been the most malleable of metaphors for filmmakers. The likeable Doc of Stagecoach (1939) had audiences on the edge of their seats with dire warnings about “that old butcher, Geronimo.” Old Lodgeskins of Little Big Man (1970) had viewers crying out against the demise of the noble, wise chief and his kind and simple people. In 1995 Disney created a beautiful, peace-loving ecologist and called her Pocahontas. Only occasionally have Native Americans been portrayed as complex, modern characters in films like Smoke Signals. Celluloid Indians is an accessible, insightful overview of Native American representation in film over the past century. Beginning with the birth of the movie industry, Jacquelyn Kilpatrick carefully traces changes in the cinematic depictions of Native peoples and identifies cultural and historical reasons for those changes. In the late twentieth century, Native Americans have been increasingly involved with writing and directing movies about themselves, and Kilpatrick places appropriate emphasis on the impact that Native American screenwriters and filmmakers have had on the industry. Celluloid Indians concludes with a valuable, in-depth look at influential and innovative Native Americans in today’s film industry.

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On a hot summer day in 1876, George Armstrong Custer led the Seventh Cavalry to the most famous defeat in U.S. military history. Outnumbered and exhausted, the Seventh Cavalry lost more than half of its four hundred men, and every soldier under Custer's direct command was killed.It's easy to understand why this tremendous defeat shocked the American public at the time. But with "Custerology", Michael A. Elliott tackles the far more complicated question of why the battle still haunts the American imagination today. Weaving vivid historical accounts of Custer at Little Bighorn with contemporary commemorations that range from battle reenactments to the unfinished Crazy Horse memorial, Elliott reveals a Custer and a West whose legacies are still vigorously contested. He takes readers to each of the important places of Custer's life, from his Civil War home in Michigan to the site of his famous demise, and introduces us to Native American activists, Park Service rangers, and devoted history buffs along the way. Throughout, Elliott shows how Custer and the Indian Wars continue to be both a powerful symbol of America's bloody past and a crucial key to understanding the nation's multicultural present.

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A major study of the collapse of the Soviet Union—showing how Gorbachev’s misguided reforms led to its demise “A deeply informed account of how the Soviet Union fell apart.”—Rodric Braithwaite, Financial Times “[A] masterly analysis.”—Joshua Rubenstein, Wall Street Journal In 1945 the Soviet Union controlled half of Europe and was a founding member of the United Nations. By 1991, it had an army four million strong with five thousand nuclear-tipped missiles and was the second biggest producer of oil in the world. But soon afterward the union sank into an economic crisis and was torn apart by nationalist separatism. Its collapse was one of the seismic shifts of the twentieth century. Thirty years on, Vladislav Zubok offers a major reinterpretation of the final years of the USSR, refuting the notion that the breakup of the Soviet order was inevitable. Instead, Zubok reveals how Gorbachev’s misguided reforms, intended to modernize and democratize the Soviet Union, deprived the government of resources and empowered separatism. Collapse sheds new light on Russian democratic populism, the Baltic struggle for independence, the crisis of Soviet finances—and the fragility of authoritarian state power.

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Shortlisted for the Wolfson History PrizeA Sunday Times Paperback of the YearThe Ottoman Empire has long been depicted as the Islamic-Asian antithesis of the Christian-European West. But the reality was starkly different: the Ottomans' multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious domain reached deep into Europe's heart. In their breadth and versatility, the Ottoman rulers saw themselves as the new Romans. Recounting the Ottomans' remarkable rise from a frontier principality to a world empire, Marc David Baer traces their debts to their Turkish, Mongolian, Islamic and Byzantine heritage; how they used both religious toleration and conversion to integrate conquered peoples; and how, in the nineteenth century, they embraced exclusivity, leading to ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the dynasty's demise after the First World War. Upending Western concepts of the Renaissance, the Age of Exploration, the Reformation, this account challenges our understandings of sexuality, orientalism and genocide. Radically retelling their remarkable story, The Ottomans is a magisterial portrait of a dynastic power, and the first to truly capture its cross-fertilisation between East and West.

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Los Angeles: the 1970s. Disco is king and the nightclubs are full of young, beautiful people with Saturday night fever. From the Sunset Strip to Hollywood Boulevard, a new era is dawning. But below the glitz and glamor, a darkness lurks. Chloe Mendoza knows darkness. She is a nagualii, a half-demon created by the gods of Central and South America, a daughter of the Court of Feathers, a group of demigods who ruled Mesoamerica before the Spanish arrived. Now, she is a member of Monster Hunter International’s latest team, based in the L.A. Basin. Business is good in the City of Angels, but soon Chloe gets a message from the Court of Feathers, warning her of a Dark Master who is building up its power in the region. Whatever it is, it brings death and carnage with it. Time to boogie. The Monster Hunter Memoirs: Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge Monster Hunter Memoirs: Sinners Monster Hunter Memoirs: Saints Monster Hunter Memoirs: Fever The Monster Hunter series: Monster Hunter International Monster Hunter Vendetta Monster Hunter Alpha Monster Hunter Legion Monster Hunter Nemesis Monster Hunter Siege Monster Hunter Guardian Monster Hunter Bloodlines

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In the Kangra Valley of India's western Himalaya, farmers have for centuries relied on community-managed kuhl systems - intricate networks of collectively built and maintained irrigation channels - for their rice and wheat farming. Over the years, earthquakes and floods have repeatedly destroyed villagers' kuhls. More recently, increasing nonfarm employment has drawn labor away from kuhl maintenance and from farming itself. Prevailing theories of common property resource management suggest that such conditions should cause the kuhls to die out; instead, most have beentransformed and remain alive and well. In this book, Mark Baker offers a comprehensive explanation for the durability of the kuhls of Kangra in the face of recurring environmental shocks and socioeconomic change. In addition to describing how farmers use and organize the kuhls, he employs varied lines of theory and empirical data to account for the persistence of most kuhls (and the demise of a few) in the late twentieth century. Into his explanatory framework he incorporates the history of regional politics and economics as they affected kuhls during the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods; the role of state involvement in kuhl construction and management; the benefits of exchanges of labor and water among members of networked kuhls; and the ways in which kuhl systems are embedded in and reproduce core cultural beliefs and practices. Scholars interested in common property resource regimes have long focused on self-organizing, community-based irrigation systems. Yet their theories cannot entirely account for the durability of common property regimes under the extreme conditions of ecological stress, economic change, and social differentiation that exist in Kangra. Baker adds new dimensions to such theories by reaching beyond them to incorporate "exogenous" factors such as the roles statemaking practices play in common property resource regimes, the importance of networks in buffering individual resource regimes from environmental stress, and the ways in which regimes are sites for reproducing and occasionally contesting the relations that constitute place and region. In doing so, he advances a new way of thinking about community-based systems of resource management--a timely subject given recent trends in many countries toward the devolution of authority over natural resource management from government to rural communities.

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During the Civil War and Reconstruction, the pejorative term ""scalawag"" referred to white southerners loyal to the Republican Party. With the onset of the federal occupation of New Orleans in 1862, scalawags challenged the restoration of the antebellum political and social orders. Derided as opportunists, uneducated ""poor white trash,"" Union sympathizers, and race traitors, scalawags remain largely misunderstood even today. In The Louisiana Scalawags, Frank J. Wetta offers the first in-depth analysis of these men and their struggle over the future of Louisiana. A significant assessment of the interplay of politics, race, and terrorism during Reconstruction, this study answers an array of questions about the origin and demise of the scalawags, and debunks much of the negative mythology surrounding them.Contrary to popular thought, the southern white Republicans counted among their ranks men of genuine accomplishment and talent. They worked in fields as varied as law, business, medicine, journalism, and planting, and many held government positions as city officials, judges, parish officeholders, and state legislators in the antebellum years. Wetta demonstrates that a strong sense of nationalism often motivated the men, no matter their origins.Louisiana's scalawags grew most active and influential during the early stages of Reconstruction, when they led in founding the state's Republican Party. The vast majority of white Louisianans, however, rejected the scalawags' appeal to form an alliance with the freedmen in a biracial political party. Eventually, the influence of the scalawags succumbed to persistent terrorism, corruption, and competition from the white carpetbaggers and their black Republican allies. By then, the state's Republican Party consisted of white political leaders without any significant white constituency. According to Wetta, these weaknesses, as well as ineffective federal intervention in response to a Democratic Party insurgency, caused the Republican Party to collapse and Reconstruction to fail in Louisiana.

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Across nineteenth-century New England, antiquarians and community leaders wrote hundreds of local histories about the founding and growth of their cities and towns. Ranging from pamphlets to multivolume treatments, these narratives shared a preoccupation with establishing the region as the cradle of an Anglo-Saxon nation and the center of a modern American culture. They also insisted, often in mournful tones, that New England’s original inhabitants, the Indians, had become extinct, even though many Indians still lived in the very towns being chronicled. In Firsting and Lasting, Jean M. O’Brien argues that local histories became a primary means by which European Americans asserted their own modernity while denying it to Indian peoples. Erasing and then memorializing Indian peoples also served a more pragmatic colonial goal: refuting Indian claims to land and rights. Drawing on more than six hundred local histories from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island written between 1820 and 1880, as well as censuses, monuments, and accounts of historical pageants and commemorations, O’Brien explores how these narratives inculcated the myth of Indian extinction, a myth that has stubbornly remained in the American consciousness. In order to convince themselves that the Indians had vanished despite their continued presence, O’Brien finds that local historians and their readers embraced notions of racial purity rooted in the century’s scientific racism and saw living Indians as “mixed” and therefore no longer truly Indian. Adaptation to modern life on the part of Indian peoples was used as further evidence of their demise. Indians did not—and have not—accepted this effacement, and O’Brien details how Indians have resisted their erasure through narratives of their own. These debates and the rich and surprising history uncovered in O’Brien’s work continue to have a profound influence on discourses about race and indigenous rights.

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Death of the Moguls is a detailed assessment of the last days of the “rulers of film.” Wheeler Winston Dixon examines the careers of such moguls as Harry Cohn at Columbia, Louis B. Mayer at MGM, Jack L. Warner at Warner Brothers, Adolph Zukor at Paramount, and Herbert J. Yates at Republic in the dying days of their once-mighty empires. He asserts that the sheer force of personality and business acumen displayed by these moguls made the studios successful; their deaths or departures hastened the studios’ collapse. Almost none had a plan for leadership succession; they simply couldn't imagine a world in which they didn’t reign supreme.Covering 20th Century-Fox, Selznick International Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, RKO Radio Pictures, Warner Brothers, Universal Pictures, Republic Pictures, Monogram Pictures and Columbia Pictures, Dixon briefly introduces the studios and their respective bosses in the late 1940s, just before the collapse, then chronicles the last productions from the studios and their eventual demise in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He details such game-changing factors as the de Havilland decision, which made actors free agents; the Consent Decree, which forced the studios to get rid of their theaters; how the moguls dealt with their collapsing empires in the television era; and the end of the conventional studio assembly line, where producers had rosters of directors, writers, and actors under their command.Complemented by rare, behind-the-scenes stills, Death of the Moguls is a compelling narrative of the end of the studio system at each of the Hollywood majors as television, the de Havilland decision, and the Consent Decree forced studios to slash payrolls, make the shift to color, 3D, and CinemaScope in desperate last-ditch efforts to save their kingdoms. The aftermath for some was the final switch to television production and, in some cases, the distribution of independent film.

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‘In this wide ranging and comprehensive survey of the designed landscapes of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, James Bartos argues convincingly that ornamental wildernesses should be viewed as distinctive design features which, when linked across an extensive terrain, took on the character of the whole landscape. As a result of this striking analysis, our understanding of the celebrated layouts at Wrest Park, Chiswick and Stowe, and many more besides, must be revised. Contrary to the received wisdom that wildernesses led inexorably to the more informal parkscapes associated with William Kent and Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, it was only when they were dismantled in the mid-eighteenth century to provide more loosely controlled, open glades and greensward that the English Landscape Style emerged. This ground-breaking study ranges in its literary compass from classical authors through contemporary writers on gardens and gardening to modern critical authorities, while its visual focus on design manuals and individual gardens and landscapes is presented through a wealth of engraved prints, maps and present day photographs. Bartos considers the making, planting and maintenance of wildernesses, their continental precedents, thematic resonances – Classical, Biblical, Druidic, Patriotic – and the eventual development of these often numinous spaces into mature gardens followed by their inevitable demise. The book has all the attributes of a true wilderness – surprise, variety and, above all, delight – is engagingly written and a tour de force of meticulous scholarship.’ Professor Timothy Mowl FSA The Ornamental Wilderness in the English Garden reinterprets the English formal garden of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries through the perspective of a typical feature of those gardens, the ornamental grove, called a wilderness. In its mature form, the wilderness constituted most of the garden, shady and private, a place for retreat as well as social activity, with a seeming naturalness achieved through artifice, where cultural incident and nature were equally appreciated.

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Max Wolf Valerio crafts a raw, gripping, and poetic account of life before, during, and after injecting testosterone. Valerio's detailed observations about a lesbian transitioning from female to a heterosexual male highlights the physical and emotional differences between women and men, and alternately challenges and confirms readers' assumptions about gender.Valerio presents his story in three parts: the height of his transition, in which he witnesses his own increased energy and sex drive while struggling with gaining confidence in his male self and bearing witness to his own demise as a woman; life before testosterone, when as Anita, a self-identified lesbian out for fourteen years, he confronts startling moments of awareness of a deeper, earlier dream of who he really is; and life after testosterone, when the experience of living in the world as a man is at once a homecoming and a confirmation that male behavior is at least partly rooted in biology. 

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In May 2019, the United Nations released the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services which warned that human activities will drive nearly one million species to extinction in a few decades. The primary reasons for this are habitat loss and biodiversity demise caused by changing climate, pollution, introducing nonindigenous species, clearing land, over population, and consumption. Given this situation, humans must change course as both human wellbeing and the wellbeing of other-than-human species are imbricated in one another. One way humanity can accomplish the needed transformation is to move beyond an anthropocentric view of life by embracing a transpecies approach that is premised upon interconnected flourishing.Transpecies design, as outlined in this book, offers a new approach to regenerating the natural environment while honoring biodiversity. Rather than presenting the human experience as the goal of design, transpecies design takes the i

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The first decade of the twenty-first century marked the demise of the current world order. Despite widespread acknowledgement of these disruptive crises, the proposed response from the mainstream remains the same. Against the confines of this increasingly limited politics, a new paradigm has emerged. Fully Automated Luxury Communism claims that new technologies will liberate us from work, providing the opportunity to build a society beyond both capitalism and scarcity. Automation, rather than undermining an economy built on full employment, is instead the path to a world of liberty, luxury and happiness. For everyone.In his first book, radical political commentator Aaron Bastani conjures a new politics: a vision of a world of unimaginable hope, highlighting how we move to energy abundance, feed a world of nine billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology and build meaningful freedom for everyone. Rather than a final destination, such a society heralds the beginning of history.Fully Automated Luxury Communism promises a radically new left future for everyone.

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At a time when most Westerners fled the carnage in Iran, David Burnett was one of the few to stay and document the breathtakingly sudden fall of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in December 1978, and the chaotic political maneuvering that would culminate in the triumph of the Ayatollahs and the birth of the Islamic Republic. 44 Days re-creates a coup that led to our long hostage crisis, President Jimmy Carter’s political demise, and an enmity still blazing after thirty years. Burnett’s vivid images of the dizzying events and emotions of that turbulent time illustrate his narrative of the monarchy’s destruction, the last-ditch efforts to salvage a secular government, and the establishment of a hard-line regime dominated by religious leaders and the rule of Islamic law. Accompanying Burnett’s account is a penetrating foreword by commentator Christiane Amanpour, herself Iranian-born, as well as an essay by celebrated New York Times reporter John Kifner, who shares his own experience of revolution in Iran and reflects upon its decades-long aftermath.

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Luci LaBang is a star: for decades this flamboyant drag artist has cast a spell over screen and stage. Now she's the leading lady in a smash hit pantomime.When Luci's co-star meets with a mysterious accident, a new ingenue shimmers onto the scene, and Luci is immediately smitten with the fantastically beautiful Luda and her sinister charm.Luda begs Luci to share the secrets of her stardom and to reveal the hidden tricks of her trade. For Luci LaBang is a mistress of the Glamour, an arcane discipline that draws on sex, drugs, and the occult for its trancelike, transformative effects.But as Luci tutors her young protégée, their fellow actors and crew members begin meeting with untimely ends. Now Luci wonders if Luda has mastered the Glamour all too well.What follows is an intoxicating descent into the demimonde of Gasglow, a fantastical city of dreams, and into the nightmarish heart of Luda herself: a femme fatale, a phenomenon, a monster, and, perhaps, the

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Luci LaBang is a star: for decades this flamboyant drag artist has cast a spell over screen and stage. Now she’s the leading lady in a smash hit pantomime. When Luci’s co-star meets with a mysterious accident, a new ingenue shimmers onto the scene, and Luci is immediately smitten with the fantastically beautiful Luda and her sinister charm. Luda begs Luci to share the secrets of her stardom and to reveal the hidden tricks of her trade. For Luci LaBang is a mistress of the Glamour, an arcane discipline that draws on sex, drugs, and the occult for its trancelike, transformative effects. But as Luci tutors her young protégée, their fellow actors and crew members begin meeting with untimely ends. Now Luci wonders if Luda has mastered the Glamour all too well. What follows is an intoxicating descent into the demimonde of Gasglow, a fantastical city of dreams, and into the nightmarish heart of Luda herself: a femme fatale, a phenomenon, a monster, and, perhaps, the brightest star of them all.

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In the woollen industry’s heyday Gloucestershire had over 200 mills, producing cloth which was transported to markets all over the world: to Europe, Hudson’s Bay, India; it clothed the British Army and was used for coronations and even the Pope’s robes. The author’s previous and much-consulted work, Gloucestershire Woollen Mills, has long been out of print, making the time ripe for a fresh appraisal of this fascinating period in history. Wool & Water traces the origins of the water-powered industry from the late twelfth century to its demise, with two mills remaining in the twentieth century. Themes discussed include the organisation of the ‘domestic’ industry until the mid-eighteenth century; the development of the factory; fluctuations in trade and, finally, competition from Yorkshire. Containing previously unpublished material and unique illustrations from private collections, plus a comprehensive gazetteer of the county’s textile mill sites, Wool & Water is the ideal book for those interested in the industrial heritage of Gloucestershire.

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The story of Rome’s richest man, who died a humiliating desert death in search of military glory “A perfectly paced biography.”—Tom Holland, Times Literary Supplement Marcus Licinius Crassus (115–53 BCE) was a modern man in an ancient world, a pioneer disrupter of finance and politics, and the richest man of the last years of the Roman republic. Without his catastrophic ambition, this trailblazing tycoon might have quietly entered history as Rome’s first modern political financier. Instead, Crassus and his son led an army on an unprovoked campaign against Parthia into what are now the borderlands of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, losing a battle at Carrhae which scarred Roman minds for generations. After Crassus was killed, historians told many stories of his demise. Some said that his open mouth, shriveled by desert air, had been filled with molten gold as testament to his lifetime of greed. His story, skillfully told by Peter Stothard, poses both immediate and lasting questions about the intertwining of money, ambition, and power.

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Learn what went on behind closed doors in the Tudor court. Illegitimate children, adulterous queens, impotent kings, and a whole dynasty resting on their shoulders. Sex and childbirth were quite literally a matter of life or death for the Tudors - Elizabeth of York died in childbirth, two of Henry VIII's queens were beheaded for infidelity, and Elizabeth I's elective virginity signalled the demise of a dynasty. Amy Licence guides the reader through the births of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York's two sons, Arthur and Henry, Catherine of Aragon's subsequent marriages to both of these men, Henry VIII's other five wives and his mistresses, and the sex lives of his daughters. This book details the experiences of all these women, from fertility, conception and pregnancy through to the delivery chamber, on to maternal and infant mortality. Each woman's story is a blend of specific personal circumstances, set against their historical moment: for some the joys were brief, for others it was a question that ultimately determined their fates.

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The year is 1142, and all England is in the iron grip of a civil war. And within the sheltered cloisters of the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, there begins a chain of events no less momentous than the political upheavals of the outside world. First, there is the sad demise of Richard Ludel, Lord of Eyton, whose ten year old son and heir, also named Richard, is a pupil at the Abbey. Supported by the Abbot Radulfus, the boy refuses to surrender his new powers to Dionysia, his furious, formidable grandmother. A stranger to the region is the hermit Cuthred, who enjoys the protection of Lady Dionysia, and whose young companion Hycacinth, befriends Richard. Despite his reputation for holiness, Cuthred''s arrival heralds a series of mishaps for the monks. When Richard disappears and a corspe is found in Eyton forest, Brother Cadfael is once more forced to leave the tranquility of his herb garden and devote his knowledge of human nature to tracking down a ruthless murderer.

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The third book in the bestselling spin off series from Percy Jackson and the Olympians - now a major Disney+ series!ONE FATAL PROPHECY. SEVEN BRAVE DEMIGODS. A QUEST TO FIND - AND CLOSE - THE DOORS OF DEATH. Annabeth felt as if someone had draped a cold washcloth across her neck. She heard that whispering laughter again, as if the presence had followed her from the ship.She looked up at the Argo II. Its massive bronze hull glittered in the sunlight. Part of her wanted to kidnap Percy right now, get on board and get out of here while they still could.She couldn't shake the feeling that something was about to go terribly wrong. She couldn't risk losing Percy again.Return to the World of Percy Jackson in the best-selling, brand-new adventure featuring the original hero in Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Chalice of the Gods – out now!And don't miss the trio's next adventure in Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Wrath of the Triple Goddess, coming soon!

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Change is coming, but are the people of Camptounfoot ready for it? For generations, the oldest village in Scotland has remained little changed but now it is 1853 and the railway is coming to Camptounfoot.Shy and beautiful Emma Jane Wylie is determined to fight for the realisation of her father’s dream – the construction of the railway bridge that will carry the new track southwards. Her father’s demise puts Emma in charge. But during the two years of its construction, the project is beset by drama and tragedy: cholera rages, the men down tools, murder and conspiracy are in the air – and then a landslide threatens to destroy all their endeavours. Inspired by her father’s vision, and with a strength of mind and resolve at odds with her Victorian upbringing, Emma Jane takes on the world – and is determined to win. The first book in the A Bridge In Time series, this dramatic and riveting saga of survival is perfect for fans of Anna Jacobs and Tessa Barclay.

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This seminal narrative on time is a commentary on strategic ways we all can live meaningful lives. As we all journey as travelers through life, time like a shadow, is our constant companion. It lives in us, as we live in time. It is our most precious unreplenishable commodity that begins its first tick at conception with a terrestrially undetermined expiration date. How we orchestrate the journey from the cradle to the grave typifies our lifestyle, which reflects and identifies whether meaning and purpose were discovered. When meaning and purpose are discovered, time is prioritized each day and lived with meaningful specificity. This book is an inspirational and motivational appeal. It depicts how the gift of life intersects poignantly with the gift of time in a purposeful way within each individual. It provides existential strategies on how to live life abundantly between the parameters of our birth and the certainty of our demise. Each chapter provides pertinent anecdotal descriptives that will captivate your attention and encourage you so that you are equipped with the relevant prescriptions to pull the trigger in the direction of your destiny. We all have the capacity to live meaningful lives by cultivating a Samaritan spirit because what we do for others and community leaves a legacy and what is done for self you take with you. A great literary scholar once said that “there are two important days in the life of each individual… the day you were born and the day you figured out why”. This book is a step in that direction.

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Pairing archive photos of the 'Big Easy' with their modern counterparts, New Orleans Then and Now shows how the city has preserved its rich architectural heritage to become a must-see tourist destination. While New York has Dutch and English forebears, New Orleans has the French and Spanish to thank for creating a unique blend of eighteenth and nineteenth century architecture that has made it one of the most photographed cities in the world. Then there is the madness of Mardi Gras and the lure of its international jazz festival that has helped give it the nicknames; “the City that Care Forgot” and “the Big Easy.” Before the rise of the railroads it was the most prosperous city in the South.The city fell early in the Civil War, in 1862, but the dwindling importance of cotton and the Mississippi that led to the city’s real demise in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Today, tourism is an important industry and despite the inundation of floodwater from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, visitors have flocked back to the city. New Orleans Then and Now features the must-see sites of the French Quarter; Bourbon Street, once frequented by a streetcar named Desire, the Old Absinthe House, the Napoleon House, the haunted LaLaurie Mansion and the beautiful ironwork of the LaBranche buildings. It also shows the St.Louis Cathedral and the Higgins boatyard which played a crucial role in winning World War II.

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Set against a backdrop of the current political and cultural upheaval in the US and Eastern Europe, The Unmade World is a thoughtful, scope-y literary novel with a dose of suspense that moves from Poland to California to the Hudson Valley and back to Poland. It covers a decade in the lives of an American journalist and a Polish small businessman turned petty criminal and the wrenching aftermath of an accidental, tragic encounter between these two on a snowy night in 2006 on the outskirts of Krakow. The accident costs the lives of the American journalist Richard Brennan’s wife and daughter, an event that colors the rest of his life. It also leads to a downward spiral for Bogdan Baranowsk, leaving emotional scars as he suffers the seemingly inevitable loss of his business, his home, and his wife. The Unmade World is a story of ordinary, otherwise decent people from various backgrounds and circumstances who must learn how to live with the personal grief, sense of guilt, and the emotional consequences of violence. Along the way, the novel grapples with a spectrum of cultural and political issues. It includes a murder mystery wrapped around the corruption of major college sports, the pressures on immigrants and refugees in both the US and Poland, the fallout of political change, economic upheavals and armed conflicts--including the horrific destruction of Luhansk, Ukraine in 2014. It also references the 2016 presidential campaign, cultural politics in the American university, and the demise of print journalism, etc., though never in a dogmatic or overtly partisan way.

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