The Dasha Avatar is the Puranic story of the ten incarnations of Vishnu who descends to the terrestrial world to establish stability and order, time and again. The avatars occur in a sequence – the first was matsya or fish representing life in water, followed by kurma or turtle signifying life in water and on land, then varaha or boar alluding to terrestrial life and so on. The sequence of the avatars could be taken to symbolise various stages in the evolution of life culminating in the advent of the perfect being.

    This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding. Essential, and still eye-opening, Orientalism remains one of the most important books written about our divided world.

    In this classic work, now back in print, Olsen broke open the study of literature and discovered a lost continent—the writing of women and working-class people. From the excavated testimony of authors’ letters and diaries we learn the many ways the creative spirit, especially in those disadvantaged by gender, class and race, can be silenced. Olsen recounts the torments of Melville, the crushing weight of criticism on Thomas Hardy, the shame that brought Willa Cather to a dead halt, and struggles of Virginia Woolf, Olsen’s heroine and greatest exemplar of a writer who confronted the forces that would silence her. This 25th-anniversary edition includes Olsen’s now infamous reading lists of forgotten authors and a new introduction and author preface.

    But of their four children it was little Jnanadev who seemed to have a special inclination for the scriptures. In his brief life as a preacher Jnaneshwar, as he was called later, spread the message of Bhagwat Dharma or love of God and brotherhood of man. He was the founder of the Bhakti movement in Maharashtra. Jnaneshwar renounced the world at the age of twenty-one.

    It was introduced into public consciousness by media coverage of muggings in the United States and police anticipation of its appearance in Britain. Its ‘discovery’ in 1972 was followed by a crime control explosion. It received massive media coverage. Judges, politicians, and moralists presented it as an index of the growing tide of violence, of the breakdown of public morality, and of the collapse of law and order. Sentences for petty street crime jumped from six months to twenty years.This book examines the political, economic, and ideological dimensions of mugging—setting the problem of ‘crime’ in its wider historical context. It shows how the particular social definition of mugging constructed by the media and crime control agencies was able to connect with existing social anxieties in the population at large and argues that this has helped to legitimate a more coercive state role in a period of growing political, economic and racial conflict.

    Wherever there is an attack on the organization of society, there is an attack on its religion. The basic faith of a society means growth in terms of that faith, but any tampering with its basic structure is revolutionary activity. The life of a society is its creed; a dying creed faces desertion or subversion readily. Every creed, however healthy, is also under continual attack; the culture which neglects to defend and further its creedal base is exposing its heart to the enemy's knife. Because of its indifference to its creedal basis in Biblical Christianity, western civilization is today facing death and is in a life and death struggle with humanism.Today humanism is the creedal basis of the various democratic and socialistic movements. The clearer the humanism, the more direct its use of power, because it operates in terms of a consistency of principle. The conservatives attempt to retain the political forms of the Christian West with no belief in Biblical Christianity. Apart from vague affirmations of liberty, they cannot defend their position philosophically. They therefore become fact finders: they try to oppose the humanists by documenting their cruelty, corruption, and abuse of office. If the facts carry any conviction to the people, they lead them only to exchange one set of radical humanists for reforming radical humanists. It is never their faith in the system which is shaken, but only in a form or representative of that system. The success of the subversives rests on their attack on the creed of the establishment, and its replacement by a new creed.Then the foundations are provided, the general form of the building is determined. When the creed is accepted, the social order is determined. There can therefore be no reconstruction of the Christian civilization of the west except on Christian creedal foundations.

    From James P. O'Donnell's interviews with fifty eyewitnesses to the madness and carnage--everyone from Albert Speer to generals, staff officers, doctors, Hitler's personal pilot, telephone operators, and secretaries -- emerges an account that historian Theodore H. White has hailed as "superb . . . quite simply the most accurate and terrifying account of the nightmare and its end I have ever read.""A riveting, damned near incredible (but true) story."--Gerald Green, author of Holocaust

    So says the Marquis de Sade, philosopher and pornographer. His virtuous Justine, who keeps to the rules, is rewarded with rape and humiliation; his Juliette, Justine's triumphantly monstrous antithesis, viciously exploits her sexuality.With brilliance and wit, Angela Carter takes on these outrageous figments of de Sade's extreme imagination and transforms them into symbols of our time: The Hollywood sex goddesses, mothers and daughters, pornography, even the sacred shrines of sex and marriage lie devastatingly exposed before our eyes.Author Bio: Angela Carter (1940-1992) was best known for her subversive short stories, including her most famous collection, The Bloody Chamber. Carter translated the fairy tales of Charles Perrault, and wrote the screenplay for Neil Jordan's 1984 film, The Company of Wolves, based on her short story.

    

    Lasch’s identification of narcissism as not only an individual ailment but also a burgeoning social epidemic was groundbreaking. His diagnosis of American culture is even more relevant today, predicting the limitless expansion of the anxious and grasping narcissistic self into every part of American life.The Culture of Narcissism offers an astute and urgent analysis of what we need to know in these troubled times.

    Disch—"Angouleme" was first published in 1978 to the intense interest of science fiction readers and the growing community of SF scholars. Recalling Nabokov's commentary on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Roland Barthes' commentary on Balzac's Sarazine, and Grabinier's reading of The Heart of Hamlet, this book-length essay helped prove the genre worthy of serious investigation. The American Shore is the third in a series of influential critical works by Samuel R. Delany, beginning with The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and Starboard Wine, first published in the late seventies and reissued over the last five years by Wesleyan University Press, which helped win Delany a Pilgrim Award for Science Fiction Scholarship from the Science Fiction Research Association of America. This edition includes the author's corrected text as well as a new introduction by Delany scholar Matthew Cheney.

    God wasn't finished working in the lives of His people after the waters of the Red Sea parted. Both past and future deliverance are celebrated in this solemn and joyful feast.Through Christ in the Passover, you'll trace God's involvement through the history of this holy day-from the first Passover, all the way to the modern Seder. And in the revised editions of this inviting book, Ciel and Moishe Rosen show you how the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah are forever interwoven with the Passover and its symbolism.

    He began to ask the people in the area questions and researched maps and books. Later, he traveled by bicycle, kayak and auto to collect more and more information. Eventually, he visited every street in The Bronx at least once. When he grew up, John met others who had similar interests in history and they formed The Bronx County Historical Society, all the while adding to his collection of street name histories. Many years went by until the new executive director of the Bronx County Historical Society persuaded him to compile his extensive collection of notes as a book. Eventually History in Asphalt: The Origin of Bronx Street & Place Names was published. People all around the country bought it, and it has since been revised and reprinted 3 times. In 1985, The City of New York bestowed a great honor to the penultimate Bronx historian and named John McNamara Square at Calhoun and Randall Avenues. The circle of history marches on.

    Although he was throughout his life interested in the philosophy of history and in various theoretical formulations, he concerned himself with these mainly in private reading and private discussion. Why then did he write this essay? He had read the works of Louis Althusser and found very little in them to affect his work. When Althusser appeared on the scene he made little impact on practising historians. For some reason however, he suddenly became a major force among graduate students and some young historians and literary scholars. Most historians would have been prepared to wait for the new influence to demonstrate its validity in the production of innovative work in history; not only did this not happen, but Althusser's followers - even some of the historians among them - began to declare that history was a non-discipline and that its study was of no value. It was the influence that Althusser's writings were having on scholarship that made Edward take on the uncongenial task of putting the case for history against his closed system.'The result is a major critique of Althusserian Marxism, or 'theoretical practice', entering closely into questions of epistemology and of the theory and practice of the historian. Around this detailed polemic, Thompson develops a constructive view of an alternative, socialist tradition, empirical and self-critical in method, and fully open to the creative practice evidenced by history - a tradition sharply opposed to much that now passes as 'Marxism'. In converging shafts of close analysis and Swiftian irony, the author defoliates Althusser's arcane, rationalist rhetoric and reinstates 'historicism', 'empiricism', 'moralism' and 'socialist humanism' in a different Marxist inheritance.The title of this essay echoes The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx's annihiliating attack on Proudhon, which, like Engels' Anti-Duhring, is a work read long after its subject has been consigned to oblivion.

    Probably more timely now than when first published, this is an important title for academic and public libraries." - Library Journal "Their book is judicious, sensible, well-researched and very frightening." - New York Times Book Review "It is a book of investigative reporting at its best." - New York Post "What Woodward and Bernstein were to Watergate, Conway and Siegelman may well be to the cults." - United Press International "Credible and chilling . . . The second edition of SNAPPING is as important a resource in understanding spreading societal chaos as the first edition was in explaining the chaos of cults." - Minneapolis Star-Tribune "Important. . . . this book provides a tool to exercise judgment, monitor incoming information, and interpret what has become an increasingly intrusive battle for our minds. . . . At its core, it is language that holds the key to our mental health or to our destruction. What George Orwell's 'Animal Farm' is to literature, 'SNAPPING' is to non-fiction." - Albuquerque Journal "In a prophetic vein. . . . SNAPPING is not only fascinating and frightening reading, it is also extremely well-written. . . . The escalating pattern of cult fanaticism and religious-political terror that the authors call a 'death spiral' seems to be widening. If we do nothing to understand and ultimately reverse that pattern, it will pull more and more innocent people into its vortex." - Cleveland Jewish News "For anyone threatened with snapping, this book is a dispassionate, valuable study of an often frightening phenomenon." - People "There is no doubt that Conway and Siegelman are opening the door on areas of human understanding that have never been examined and that are in urgent need of study." - New Society "SNAPPING is an exciting and responsible and original piece of research that has taught this old poop amazing new ways to think about the human mind." - Kurt Vonnegut "SNAPPING is by far the best and most scientific treatment of the cult problem yet published. For the scientist, politician, clergy or parent, it is valuable and wonderfully readable." - John G. Clark, M.D. Asst. Clinical Professor of Psychiatry Harvard Medical School "Conway and Siegelman . . . place cultic behavior in the wider context of the communication revolution of our time. . . Indeed, SNAPPING unfolds as a traveling detective investigation. . . . they very capably trace and analyze the course of the phenomenon and . . . contribute greatly to our understanding of it." - The Cult Observer "Conway and Siegelman are onto something important. . . . SNAPPING is a fascinating book with frightening implications." - Edward T. Hall, author of The Silent Language "[The] classic book on cults, still the best book ever. . . . Believe me, folks, these are the real experts." - Geraldo Rivera