At first glance, she seems like an ordinary twelve-year-old.But not quite. For Maya knows the truth about time. Every night she travels to an alternative world known as Eternity, where she trains so she might become a Defender of the Light and keep time ticking.Under the watchful eyes of the freakishly tall, enigmatic Noah, Maya has no problems keeping up her double life. Till, that is, she and her friend Lev unwittingly stumble upon an ancient conspiracy.What is the “Idea” Prophecy? Who are the Warriors of the Shadow and what do they want with Lev? Is Noah all he seems or is there something he is hiding?The answers could change Maya’s life—and the world as we know it—for ever.On the brink of childhood and adolescence, Maya sets out on an extraordinary adventure. Along the way, she discovers powers she never knew she had, perils she never wanted to face, and the true meaning of friendship.

    Sherman systematically photographed more than 200 families, groups, and individuals while they were being held by customs for special investigations. This volume collects and provides an essential revaluation of Sherman's striking portraits, which predate August Sander's cataloging efforts by several years. A historical document of unprecedented worth, "Augustus F. Sherman: Ellis Island Portraits" includes almost one-hundred portraits taken from 1905 through 1920. The subjects are frequently dressed in elaborate national costumes or folk dress, emphasizing the variety and richness of the cultural heritage that came together to form the United States. Romanian shepherds, German stowaways, Russian vegetarians, Greek priests, and Ghanaian women in elaborately patterned dresses, are treated with equal gravitas. The resulting body of work presents a unique and powerful picture of the stream of immigrants who came through Ellis Island. In its time, the material contributed to the larger project of ethnographic categorization and typology typical of the early twentieth century, much as Edward S. Curtis's portraits romanticized the "last Indians" or John Thomson's "Street Life in London" identified and codified social class in the late 1800s. Though originally taken for his own personal study, Sherman's work appeared in the public eye as illustrations for publications with titles such as "Alien or American," and hung on the walls of the custom offices as cautionary or exemplary models of the new American species. In this book, Peter Mesenh ller, Research Associate with theRautenstrauch-Joest-Museum of Anthropology in Cologne, Germany, provides new critical context and analysis of this rich collection, but also addresses the individual images as powerful, engaging photographs created by a master portraitist. The publication is accompanied by a traveling exhibition that will open at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum in the summer of 2005.

    He lives and works in Paris as a musician, composer, musicologist, teacher, author and translator.

    After all, it is only natural to experience some discomfort, displeasure, anxiety, even disgust in the face of a phenomenon that may summon painful memories and provoke fears about the future. Yet, there is no denying that death, once tamed as an abstract notion or concept, can become a powerful tool for social analysis. It can thus become a fascinating area of study, likely to reveal much about the culture, mentalities and social structure of a given society. This is what this exhibition and its catalogue hope to attain. Their objective is to try to pinpoint, through hopefully representative examples, the ways in which death has been perceived by the Muslim population of Ottoman Istanbul throughout five centuries of existence, and to understand the role it may have played in the life of the Imperial capital."To maintain a certain consistency, this publication has been limited to the period from 1453 to 1922 and deals uniquely with the culture and mentalities of the Muslim population within the boundaries of the Ottoman capital, Istanbul. Underlying the work is the notion of change in Ottoman death culture over this five-century period with a particular emphasis on the significant transformations which occurred in the 19th century. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach to balance the varying viewpoints on death contributed by ethnography, urban history, anthropology, political history and philology, this work is designed as a collection of case studies regrouped under a number of general headings, including amongst others, Death and the City, Empire and Death, the Birth of the Ottoman Tombstone, Suicide, Dealing with Death, Women, Aspects of Modernity, and State, Nation and Death.