Search results for ""Author Lee""

From an early age, Lee McKenzie had access to a motorsport world that most are rarely allowed into. From spending time in the paddock as a teen to becoming a highly respected Formula One journalist and presenter, Lee has been at the heart of motorsport for almost twenty years.On the frontline of one of the most watched sports on the planet and gaining the respect of F1 world champions with her tough but fair interview approach, Lee has shared experiences, hire cars, parties and friendships with a host of drivers from Michael Schumacher to Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel to Jenson Button.INSIDE F1 tells the stories of the careers of seven stars of the sport using her personal contact and interviews throughout the years. Lee's unique perspective takes us through the highs and lows, the controversies and crashes that led to some of the biggest and most memorable interviews in recent years. Lee's close relationship with the drivers makes INSIDE F1 an enthralling behind-the- scenes account of one of the biggest sports in the world.

Read more less

Today, consumers have more choice than ever before. It's no longer enough to simply provide a service - companies who want to stay in business must also provide impeccable service with such consistency, integrity and creativity that people who experience it will not only keep coming back for more, but recommend your business to their friends, families, and colleagues. The Customer Rules is entirely focused on one ultimate goal: to help you, no matter what your position or job title, secure the most revenue-boosting asset you could wish for: a reputation for excellent service. Lee Cockerell, former Executive Vice President of Operations at Disney World - a company which has redefined what a business can do for their customers - shows you how: from why you should 'Never say no - except No Problem' to asking yourself 'What Would Mum Do?'. His 39 easy-to-follow rules apply to any industry and any company, large, small, public, private, online or High Street. The principles revealed in this book, tried and tested in one of the world's happiest environments, can give you everything you need to truly connect with your customers.

Read more less

Doing Science With Python introduces readers to the most popular coding tools for scientific research, such as Anaconda, Spyder, Jupyter Notebooks, and JupyterLab, as well as dozens of important Python libraries for working with data, including NumPy, matplotlib, and pandas. No prior programming experience is required! You'll be guided through setting up a professional coding environment, then get a crash course on programming with Python, and explore the many tools and libraries ideal for working with data, designing visualisations, simulating natural events, and more.

Read more less

A lyrical meditation of a woodworker steadfastly repairing an historic home

Read more less

Build your own unique backyard playhouse. In this inspiring guide, Lee Mothes shows you how easy it is to construct the hideout of your kids’ dreams. With simple step-by-step instructions and plenty of innovative ideas to engage kids throughout the building process, the whole family can get involved in the fun. You’ll love constructing a personalized clubhouse with your kids, and your kids will enjoy playing in it for years to come. Just don’t forget the secret password.

Read more less

Investigative journalist Lee Smith's The Plot Against the President tells the story of how Congressman Devin Nunes uncovered the operation to bring down the commander-in-chief. While popular opinion holds that Russia subverted democratic processes during the 2016 elections, the real damage was done not by Moscow or any other foreign actor. Rather, this was a slow-moving coup engineered by a coterie of the American elite, the "deep state," targeting not only the president, but also the rest of the country. The plot officially began July 31, 2016 with the counterintelligence investigation that the FBI opened to probe Russian infiltration of Donald Trump's presidential campaign. But the bureau never followed any Russians. In fact, it was an operation to sabotage Trump, the candidate, then president-elect, and finally the presidency. The conspirators included political operatives, law enforcement and intelligence officials, and the press.The plot was uncovered by Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and his investigative team. They understood that the target of the operation wasn't just Trump, but rather the institutions that sustain our republic. A country where operatives use the intelligence and security services to protect their privileges by spying on Americans, coordinating with the press, and using extra-constitutional means to undermine an election then undo a presidency is more like the third world than the republic envisioned by the founding fathers. Without Nunes and his team, the plot against the president -- and against the country -- never would have been revealed. Told from the perspective of Nunes and his crack investigators -- men and women who banded together to do the right thing at a crucial moment for our democracy -- the story of the biggest political scandal in a generation reads like a great detective novel, feels like a classic cowboy movie. The congressman from the cattle capital of California really did fight corruption in Washington. Devin Nunes took on the "deep state."

Read more less

The impeachment of Donald Trump-and the unsuccessful attempt to remove him from office-is a continuation of the four-year-long plot against the president. Beginning in late 2015, political operatives, intelligence officials, and the press pushed a conspiracy theory about Trump-he was a Russian asset and spied on his campaign and his presidency in order to undo an election.Because the ultimate goal of the anti-Trump operation is not simply to topple the president but rather to change the character and constitution of the country, the Deep State's machinations didn't stop even after Trump was cleared of charges of "colluding" with Moscow. Their efforts became even more fierce, more desperate, and more divisive, threatening to scar America permanently. In their zeal to bring down President Trump, Deep State conspirators had unwittingly revealed the origins of the anti-Trump operation and exposed corruption at the very highest levels of the Democratic party-including former Vice President Biden and his boss, Barack Obama.Lee Smith brings to this story the same incisive reporting and commentary that distinguished his runaway bestseller, The Plot Against the President. His investigation, identifying crimes and abuses committed by senior US officials, was later confirmed by a major Department of Justice report.For The Impeachment Plot, Smith again enjoys unrivalled and exclusive access to the main players defending America and uncovering Deep State crimes-including Congressman Devin Nunes and the president's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

Read more less

In this examination of Solzhenitsyn and his work, Lee Congdon explores the consequences of the atheistic socialism that drove the Russian revolutionary movement. Beginning with a description of the post-revolutionary Russia into which Solzhenitsyn was born, Congdon addresses the Bolshevik victory in the civil war, the origins of the concentration camp system, the Bolsheviks' war on Christianity and the Russian Orthodox Church, Solzhenitsyn's arrest near the war's end, his time in the labor camps, his struggle with cancer, his exile and increasing alienation from the Western way of life, and his return home. He concludes with a reminder of Solzhenitsyn's warning to the West—that it was on a path parallel to that which Russia had followed into the abyss.

Read more less

A prolific and award-winning writer, Lee Martin has put pen to paper to offer his wisdom, honed during thirty years of teaching the oh-so-elusive art of writing. Telling Stories is intended for anyone interested in thinking more about the elements of storytelling in short stories, novels, and memoirs. Martin clearly delineates helpful and practical techniques for demystifying the writing process and provides tools for perfecting the art of the scene, characterization, detail, point of view, language, and revision—in short, the art of writing. His discussion of the craft in his own life draws from experiences, memories, and stories to provide a more personal perspective on the elements of writing. Martin provides encouragement by sharing what he’s learned from his journey through frustrations, challenges, and successes. Most important, Telling Stories emphasizes that you are not alone on this journey and that writers must remain focused on what they love: the process of moving words on the page. By focusing on that purpose, Martin contends, the journey will always take you where you’re meant to go.

Read more less

The cloud promises cost savings, agility, and more. But the increasing complexity of modern IT systems often prevents businesses from realizing the outcomes they sought by moving to the cloud in the first place. At the core of this complexity is technical debt. Ad hoc decisions, traditional approaches, and "quick and dirty" solutions add up to fragile, more complex systems (and organizations)--reducing the pace of change, driving up costs, and degrading security. To succeed in the cloud, you first have to manage the problems IT complexity creates. This practical guide will help. If you're tasked with designing, delivering, or approving IT systems that support business growth, this book will teach you the principles and strategies you need to break out of silos, reassess traditional thinking, provide the business a better competitive position, and achieve cloud success across the company. You'll learn: How to assess your current IT environment to identify complexity-centered risks How to structure cross-functional teams to reduce friction points How to create a framework for IT investments that's aligned with your business goals How to measure your outcomes for continued success

Read more less

Welfare reform in the wake of austerity has fostered increased interest in self-help initiatives within the community sector. Amongst these, time banking, one of a number of complementary currency systems, has received increasing attention from policy makers as a means for promoting welfare reform. This book is the first to look at the concept of time within social policy to examine time banking theory and practice. By drawing on the social theory of time to examine the tension between time bank values and those of policy makers, it argues that time banking is a constructive means of promoting social change but is hindered by its co-option into neo-liberal thinking. This book will be valuable for academics/researchers with an interest in community-based initiatives, the third/voluntary sectors and theoretical analysis of social policy and political ideologies.

Read more less

Lee Bacon’s The Fall of the Robots is the thrilling and hilarious sequel to The Last Human––which is in the works to be a major motion picture from the producers of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse—about a world where robots and humans coexist . . . though the peace between them may not last long.   It’s been a few months now since XR_935 met Emma, a human girl who wasn’t supposed to exist. Robots thought they’d eliminated all humans, but some have survived all these years. Now, robots and humans live side by side, and the world is so much better for it. They’ve formed a new society, living together as equals.   Even if XR doesn’t always understand humans, it is impressed by their creativity and ingenuity––especially considering all the terrible things that robots did to humans all those years ago. But some humans are not so quick to forgive. A group known as

Read more less

Emma Vaile is the most powerful ghostkeeper in centuries. Which is great when she's battling the wraith-master Neos, but terrible when she's flirting with fellow ghostkeeper (and love interest) Bennett. When ghostkeepers fall in love, the weaker one loses all power, and that's something Bennett is not willing to accept. Heartbroken and alone, Emma tries to lose herself in school. A new team of ghostkeepers has arrived - one a snarky teen boy, the other a visiting scholar - and Emma finds solace in training for the battle against Neos. But as the team grows stronger, they are threatened by an unknown force. As chilling and page-turning as Deception, this sequel will grab readers and hold them to the last page. No one is safe from suspicion as Emma closes in on the traitor.

Read more less

Organized thematically as an A to Z reference encyclopedia across 4 volumes, this comprehensive resource on health psychology provides a concise overview of the ever-expanding interdisciplinary field. The first volume of The Wiley Encyclopedia of Health Psychology covers the biological bases of health behavior, providing information on topics in the broad areas of neuroscience and biopsychology relevant to health behavior. Volume II addresses topics related to theories and data derived from social psychology including health or prevention related behaviors, stress and coping, and the design and evaluation of behavioral interventions. The third volume examines the applied aspects of the field of health psychology including practical topics that clinical health psychologists face in the workplace, issues related to unhealthy behaviors that individuals engage in, behavioral aspects of medical problems, and issues related to the comorbidity of psychiatric disorders and chronic health problems. Volume IV examines special issues in health psychology covering various historical, philosophical, and conceptual issues. It also considers issues related to diversity and underrepresented/underserved groups. As a whole, this 4-volume set: Delves into topics related to Health Psychology across the subfields of Biopsychology, Social Psychology, Clinical Psychology Appeals to the broader field of Behavioral Medicine, including medical and allied health fields Examines the interconnections between biology, psychology, and socio-environmental factors The Wiley Encyclopedia of Health Psychology is an ideal resource for college and university libraries as well as for professional psychologists and other health care professionals interested in the relationship of psychological and physical well being.

Read more less

In August 1972, Newsweek proclaimed that “the person in Washington who has done the most for the women’s movement may be Richard Nixon.” Today, opinions of the Nixon administration are strongly colored by foreign policy successes and the Watergate debacle. Its accomplishments in advancing the role of women in government have been largely forgotten. Based on the “A Few Good Women” oral history project at the Penn State University Libraries, A Matter of Simple Justice illuminates the administration’s groundbreaking efforts to expand the role of women—and the long-term consequences for women in the American workplace. At the forefront of these efforts was Barbara Hackman Franklin, a staff assistant to the president who was hired to recruit more women into the upper levels of the federal government. Franklin, at the direction of President Nixon, White House counselor Robert Finch, and personnel director Fred Malek, became the administration’s de facto spokesperson on women’s issues. She helped bring more than one hundred women into executive positions in the government and created a talent bank of more than a thousand names of qualified women. The Nixon administration expanded the numbers of women on presidential commissions and boards, changed civil service rules to open thousands more federal jobs to women, and expanded enforcement of antidiscrimination laws to include gender discrimination. Also during this time, Congress approved the Equal Rights Amendment and Nixon signed Title IX of the Education Amendments into law. Featuring a new forward by Sara Eisen, this updated edition of A Matter of Simple Justice celebrates the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States through the story of Barbara Hackman Franklin and those “few good women” and shows how the advances that were made in this time by a Republican presidency both reflected the national debate over the role of women in society and took major steps toward equality in the workplace for women.

Read more less

A wide range of special librarians from banking, finance, and government provide descriptive accounts of their respective collections in this comprehensive volume. They provide an introduction to some of the major library and archival resources available to bankers, financiers, and investors, as well as offer access to the historian and scholar doing research in some aspect of business. The collections represented include the Federal Reserve System, the Joint Bank-Fund Library of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, Standard & Poor’s, the Wells Fargo Corporation, the Lippincott Library of the Wharton School, and more.

Read more less

This unique book is a graphic novel and performance poem, a mixed-media musical cartoon, an animated feature film come to life. Lee Breuer’s La Divina Caricatura is in the pataphysical tradition of Alfred Jarry—if Jarry had been a Dante fan. In this play we meet unforgettable characters: Rose the Dog, who thinks she is a woman; her lover John, a junkie filmmaker; Ponzi Porco, PhD, a pig in love with the New York Times; and the Warrior Ant, who, to impress his father, Trotsky the Termite, declares the “perpetual revolution” of the bugs of the fifth world. Each a soul on its own pilgrimage, seldom with a Virgil or a Beatrice to guide them, they often try to guide each other, only to get more lost. A dazzling, comic, potent mix of ideas and character, invention and reality, the plays in La Divina Caricatura reinvigorate the stage for our time.

Read more less

The Last Taxi Driver is a darkly comic novel about a day in the life of an exhausted, middle-aged cabbie about to lose his job to Uber, his girlfriend to lethargy, and his ability to stand upright to chronic back spasms. Lou - a lapsed novelist and UFO enthusiast who has returned to his home state of Mississippi after decades away - drives for a ramshackle taxi company that operates on the outskirts of a college town among the trailer parks and housing projects. With Lou's way of life fast vanishing, an ex-dispatcher resurfaces in town on the lam, triggering a bedlam shift which will test Lou's sanity and perhaps cost him his life. Against this backdrop, Lou has to keep driving, and driving - even if that means aiding and abetting the host of criminal misfits haunting the back seat of his Town Car. Written by a former cabbie, The Last Taxi Driver careens through the highways and backroads of North Mississippi as Lou becomes increasingly somnambulant and his fares increasingly eccentric. Equal parts Bukowski and Portis, Durkee's novel is an homage to a dying American industry.

Read more less

This is an inspirational journey from footballer to trader. Goals To Gold tells the fascinating and unexpected story of one man's journey from top-flight football to the cut-and-thrust world of the financial markets. This book also explores the relationship between sports and trading success - making it the perfect book for any sports fan who's ever wondered whether they could make a go of it in the markets. Lee Sandford spent 17 years as a professional footballer, playing for Portsmouth, Stoke City, Sheffield United and Reading. But when his career was over, he didn't retire to a pundit's sofa or the golf course. He entered another fiercely competitive world: the stock market. Goals to Gold tells the story of his days as a footballer and subsequent time as a trader, laying bare the sobering facts of a life scattered with huge achievements, near misses and big disappointments. Part exploration of the unseen side of football and part introduction to financial trading, it shows how the important qualities in football and trading alike are hard work, determination, patience and sticking to your strategy even when the studs-up tackles are flying.Packed with real-life, behind-the-scenes stories involving promotion, relegation and trophies in football and trading through booms and busts in the markets, Goals to Gold is a gripping and revealing read - perfect for football fan and trader alike.

Read more less

Edmund Husserl, founder of the phenomenological movement, is usually read as an idealist in his metaphysics and an instrumentalist in his philosophy of science. In Nature’s Suit, Lee Hardy argues that both views represent a serious misreading of Husserl’s texts. Drawing upon the full range of Husserl’s major published works together with material from Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts, Hardy develops a consistent interpretation of Husserl’s conception of logic as a theory of science, his phenomenological account of truth and rationality, his ontology of the physical thing and mathematical objectivity, his account of the process of idealization in the physical sciences, and his approach to the phenomenological clarification and critique of scientific knowledge. Offering a jargon-free explanation of the basic principles of Husserl’s phenomenology, Nature’s Suit provides an excellent introduction to the philosophy of Edmund Husserl as well as a focused examination of his potential contributions to the philosophy of science. While the majority of research on Husserl’s philosophy of the sciences focuses on the critique of science in his late work, The Crisis of European Sciences, Lee Hardy covers the entire breadth of Husserl’s reflections on science in a systematic fashion, contextualizing Husserl’s phenomenological critique to demonstrate that it is entirely compatible with the theoretical dimensions of contemporary science.

Read more less

European literary, artistic, and anthropological representation has long viewed the Pacific as the site of heterosexual pleasures. The received wisdom of these accounts is based on the idea of female bodies unrestrained by civilization. In a revisionist history of the Pacific zone and some of its preeminent Western imaginists, Lee Wallace suggests that the fantasy of the male body, rather than of the free-loving female, provides the underlying libidinal structure for many of the classic "encounter" narratives from Cook to Melville. The subject of Sexual Encounters is sexual fantasy, particularly male homoerotic fantasy found in the literature and art of South Sea exploration, colonization, and settlement. Working at the boundaries of a number of disciplines such as queer theory, anthropology, postcolonial studies, and history, Wallace engages in subversive readings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Pacific voyage journals (Cook in Hawaii and a Russian expedition to the Marquesas), an argument concerning Gauguin's treatment of female figures, and a discussion of homosexuality and Samoan male-to-female transgenderism. These phenomena, Wallace asserts, demonstrate the continuity and dissonance between Western and Pacific sexual categories. She reconstructs Pacific history through the inevitable entanglement of metropolitan and indigenous sexual regimes and ultimately argues for the importance of the Pacific in defining modern sexual categories.

Read more less

Martin Heidegger is among the most important philosophers of the Twentieth Century. Within the continental tradition, almost every great figure has been deeply influenced by his work. For this reason, a full understanding of the course of modern philosophy is impossible without at least a basic grasp of Heidegger. Unfortunately, his work is notoriously difficult, both because of his innovative ideas and his difficult writing style. In this compelling book, Lee Braver cuts through the jargon to present Heidegger’s ideas in clear English, using illuminating examples and explications of thorny passages. In so doing, he offers readers an accessible overview of Heidegger’s entire career. The first half of the book presents a guide through Being and Time, Heidegger’s early masterpiece, while the second half covers the key themes of his later writing, including technology, subjectivity, history, nihilism, agency, and the nature of thought itself. As Heidegger’s later work is deeply engaged with other philosophers, Braver explains the relevance of Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Nietzsche for Heidegger’s thought. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars trying to find their way through Heidegger’s difficult ideas. Anyone interested in Twentieth Century continental philosophy must come to terms with Heidegger, and this book is the ideal place to begin.

Read more less

Bob Dylan’s contribution to popular music is immeasurable. Venerated as rock’s one true genius, Dylan is considered responsible for introducing a new range of topics and new lyrical complexity into popular music. Without Bob Dylan, rock critic Dave Marsh once claimed, there would be no popular music as we understand it today. As such an exalted figure, Dylan has been the subject of countless books and intricate scholarship considering various dimensions of both the man and his music. This book places new emphasis on Dylan as a rock star. Whatever else Dylan is, he is a star – iconic, charismatic, legendary, enigmatic. No one else in popular music has maintained such star status for so long a period of time. Showing how theories of stardom can help us understand both Bob Dylan and the history of rock music, Lee Marshall provides new insight into how Dylan’s songs acquire meaning and affects his relationship with his fans, his critics and the recording industry. Marshall discusses Dylan’s emergence as a star in the folk revival (the “spokesman for a generation”) and the formative role that Dylan plays in creating a new type of music – rock – and a new type of star. Bringing the book right up to date, he also sheds new light on how Dylan’s later career has been shaped by his earlier star image and how Dylan repeatedly tried to throw off the limitations and responsibilities of his stardom. The book concludes by considering the revival of Dylan over the past ten years and how Dylan’s stardom has developed in a way that contains, but is not overshadowed by, his achievements in the 1960s.

Read more less

Nature is no longer the leading cause of death; society is. This makes health care one of the most important political issues today. This book looks at the reasons behind the declining condition of our bodies, as governments across the world choose to neglect the health of the majority of their citizens. Using hard data taken from service users, Lee Humber constructs a sharp analysis that gets to the heart of inequality in health care today, showing that 'wealthy means healthy'. Life expectancy for many in the UK and US is worse than it was 100 years ago, and more and more communities across the world can expect shorter and less healthy lives than their parents. Humber also suggests radical strategies for tackling this degenerative situation, providing a compelling vision for how we can shape our health and that of future generations.

Read more less

Cinema and the Wealth of Nations explores how media principally in the form of cinema was used during the interwar years by elite institutions to establish and sustain forms of liberal political economy beneficial to their interests. It examines the media produced and circulated by institutions such as states, corporations, and investment banks, as well as the emergence of a corporate media industry and system supported by state policy and integral to the establishment of a new consumer system. Lee Grieveson sketches a genealogy of the use of media to encode liberal political and economic power across the period that saw the United States eclipse Britain as the globally hegemonic power and the related inauguration of new forms of liberal economic globalization. But this is not a distant history. Cinema and the Wealth of Nations examines a foundational conjuncture in the establishment of media forms and a media system instrumental in, and structural to, the emergence and expansion of a world system that has been-and continues to be-brutally violent, unequal, and destructive.

Read more less

Jack Reacher finds trouble in Texas in the fifth novel in Lee Child’s #1 New York Times bestselling series.DON'T MISS REACHER ON PRIME VIDEO! Thumbing across the scorched Texas desert, Jack Reacher has nowhere to go and all the time in the world to get there. Cruising the same stretch of two-lane blacktop is Carmen Greer. For Reacher, the lift comes with a hitch. Carmen’s got a wild story to tell—all about her husband, her family secrets, and a hometown that’s purely gothic. She’s also got a plan. Reacher’s part of it. And before the sun sets, this ride could cost them both their lives.

Read more less

Jack Reacher hunts the hunter in the third novel in Lee Child’s #1 New York Times bestselling series.DON'T MISS REACHER ON PRIME VIDEO!Ex military policeman Jack Reacher is enjoying the lazy anonymity of Key West when a stranger shows up asking for him. He’s got a lot of questions. Reacher does too, especially after the guy turns up dead. The answers lead Reacher on a cold trail back to New York, to the tenuous confidence of an alluring woman, and the dangerous corners of his own past.

Read more less

Jack Reacher finds himself in bad company in the second novel in Lee Child’s #1 New York Times bestselling series.DON'T MISS REACHER ON PRIME VIDEO!Jack Reacher is an innocent bystander when he witnesses a woman kidnapped off a Chicago street in broad daylight. In the wrong place at the wrong time, he’s kidnapped with her. Chained together, locked in the back of a stifling van, and racing across America to an unknown destination for an unknown purpose, they’re at the mercy of a group of men demanding an impossible ransom. Because this mysterious woman is worth more than Reacher ever suspected. Now he has to save them both—from the inside out—or die trying....

Read more less

This volume brings together Lee Patterson’s essays published in various venues over the past twenty-seven years. As he observes in his preface, “The one persistent recognition that emerged from writing these otherwise quite disparate essays is that whatever the text . . . and whoever the people . . ., the values at issue remain central to contemporary life.” Two dialectics are at work in this book: that between the past and the present and that between the individual and the social, and both have moral significance. The first two chapters are methodological; the first is on the historical understanding of medieval literature and the second on how to manage the inseparability of fact and value in the classroom. The next three chapters take up three "less-read" late medieval writers: Sir John Clanvowe, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate. Each is used to illuminate a social phenomenon: the nature of court culture, the experience of the city, and Henry V's act of self-making. The following chapter explicitly links past and present by arguing that the bearing of the English aristocrat comes from a tradition beginning with Beowulf and later reinvoked in response to nineteenth-century imperialism. The next three chapters are the most literary, dealing with Chaucer and with literary conventions in relation to a number of texts. The final chapter is on the man Patterson considers one of the most important of our medieval ancestors, Francis of Assisi.

Read more less

Astonishingly, Israeli lesbians and gays have been able to achieve many political goals that still elude America's gay community. Israel's Supreme Court has mandated same-sex spousal benefits; the military, which never barred gays to begin with, has removed its last official restrictions; Israel's parliament boasts a Subcommittee for the Prevention of Sexual Orientation Discrimination; and school curricula are gay-friendly-all of this in a country where religious interests wield extraordinary power and whose identity today is the object of fierce struggle. Between Sodom and Eden, the first book to explore this rapidly changing landscape, is based on interviews with over one hundred Israelis, as well as Palestinians. Lee Walzer explores how, within a decade, Israel has evolved from a society that marginalized homosexuals to one that offers some of the most extensive legal protections in the world. He traces the political, religious, and social factors that make Israel a gay rights trendsetter, examining the interplay between Judaism and homosexuality, the growing prominence of gay themes in Israeli literature, film, music, and television, and the role of the media in advancing lesbian and gay political progress.

Read more less

Love in a Dead Language is a love story, a translation of an Indian sex manual, an erotic farce, and a murder mystery. The hero of this protean comedy, Leopold Roth, complains, "I am a tenured full professor of Indian studies and a Sanskrit scholar, and yet never, never in my life, have I made love to an Indian woman." Imagining that such an intimacy would provide a deeper and truer understanding of what he has spent his academic life mastering, a happily married Roth becomes obsessed with Lalita Gupta, nubile student and avatar of his fantasies of a sexually idyllic ancient realm. Although this California-born Indian girl has no interest in India, the past, or him, Roth sets out to seduce her and, at the same time, to teach her who she is in terms of the history of Indian culture. To that end he begins to translate the Kamasutra for her, interspersing that translation with a confessional commentary. By inventing a bogus summer study abroad program, the professor is able to abduct Lalita to the land of her ancestors. After an emotionally tumultuous summer, Roth returns home only to be suspended from teaching, left by his wife, and beaten to death with a Sanskrit dictionary. Roth's murder leaves the completion of his translation to graduate student Anang Saighal. The voices of Saighal, Roth, Professor Lee Siegel, Vatsyayana, author of the Kamasutra, with a chorus of other victims and celebrants of sexual desire, constitute an outrageous operatic portrayal of romantic love. Love in a Dead Language exposes the complicities between the carnal and the intellectual, the erotic and the exotic, the false and the true. It is as raunchy as it is erudite, as hilarious as it is poignant, and as entertaining as it is profound.

Read more less

When Lee Siegel went to India to do research for a book on Sanskrit horror literature, a friend in New Delhi told him about an itinerant teller of ghost and vampire tales, a man with clusters of amulets around his neck and a silk top hat with peacock plumes on his head. Siegel set out in search of the old man—called Brahm Kathuwala—to hear his stories and to learn about his uncommon life. But what started out as a study of other people's stories became a compelling story itself. City of Dreadful Night is an astonishing work of fiction, a tangle of tales that transports the reader from the Medieval India of magicians, witches, and vampires, through the British India of Brahm Kathuwala's childhood, into the chaos and political terror of contemporary India. Vividly recreating Indian literary and oral traditions, Siegel weaves a web of possession, reincarnation, and magical transformation unlike any found in the Western tradition. Flesh-eating demons, Rajiv Gandhi's assassin, even Bram Stoker and Dracula populate the serpentine narrative, which intermingles stories about the characters with the terrifying tales they tell.Siegel pursues Brahm Kathuwala from the ghastly lights of the cremation ground at Banaras through villages all over north India. Brahm's life story is revealed through countless tales along the way. We learn that he was raised, and abandoned, by two mothers—one the destitute floor sweeper who bore him; the other her employer, a wealthy Irish woman who read and reread to him the story of Dracula. We hear of his marriage to the daughter of a cremation ground attendant, his battles against her demonic possession, and their painful parting. We come to understand the daily life and motivations of this "horror professional," who uses terrifying tales to ward off the evil he himself fears.This unorthodox book is more than a story; it blends scholarship, fantasy, travelogue, and autobiography—fusing and overlapping historical accounts and newscasts, literary texts and films, dreams and nocturnal tales. Siegel uses imagination to explore the relation of real terror to horror fiction and to contemplate the ways fear and disgust become thrilling elements in stories of the macabre. This book is the product of Siegel's deep knowledge of both Indian and Western literary and philosophical traditions. It is also an attempt to come to grips with the omnipresence of political and religious terror in contemporary India. Shocking, original, beautifully written, City of Dreadful Night offers readers a captivating immersion in the wonder and terror of India, past and present.

Read more less

Most people only consider the Mississippi River when they cross it or when it inconveniently abandons its banks. But every year, millions of tons of cargo are transported by towboats on the river. In this volume, Captain Lee Hendrix provides unique insight on people who work and live on and near the Mississippi River.

Read more less