The Strong and the Weak


Paul Tournier - 1963
    He sees that the pervading fear from which the spiritual recession of our time has come can be overcome not by automatic reactions but through Christian understanding. Dr. Tournier writes not only to bring some hope to the weak but also to benefit the strong, who feel vaguely that the victories they must constantly be trying to win sustain the atmosphere of violence, nervous tension, and threat of catastrophe under which we live in the modern world.

Harry Potter for Nerds: Essays for Fans, Academics, and Lit Geeks


Travis Prinzi - 2011
    Travis Prinzi, author of 'Harry Potter and Imagination' and webmaster at The Hog's Head, has tapped his Potter Pundit friends in Fandom and at better universities around the country for their insights about the literary magic of the seven novels, from their ring composition to the symbolism of the planets, from the Dante, Spencer, and MacDonald echoes to exploration of the meanings of magic and technology. Profound and far-reaching as these ideas are, the essays are all written in accessible style and tone. Serious readers of Harry Potter will delight in the conversation each chapter offers with another lover of the Hogwarts Saga and its greater depths.

I, Hogarth


Michael Dean - 2012
    Through Hogarth's lifelong marriage to Jane Thornhill, his inability to have children, his time as one of England's best portrait painters, his old age and unfortunate dip into politics, and his untimely death, I, Hogarth is the remarkable story told through the artist's eyes. Michael Dean blends Hogarth's life and work into a rich and satisfying narrative, recommended for fans of Hilary Mantel and Peter Ackroyd.

Wicked New Orleans: The Dark Side of the Big Easy


Troy Taylor - 2010
    Those first pioneering citizens of the Big Easy were thieves, vagabonds and criminals of all kinds. By the time Louisiana fell under American control, New Orleans had become a city of debauchery and corruption camouflaged by decadence. It was also considered one of the country's most dangerous cities, with a reputation of crime and loose morals. Rampant gambling and prostitution were the norm in nineteenth-century New Orleans, and over one-third of today's French Quarter was considered a hotbed of sin. Tales in this volume include that of the notorious Axeman who plagued the streets of the Crescent City in the early 1900s and Kate Townsend, a prostitute who was murdered by her own lover, a man who later was awarded her inheritance.

The War of the Austrian Succession


Reed Browning - 1993
    Browning explores the often-changing war aims of the major belligerents-Austria, France, Great Britain, Prussia, Piedmont-Sardinia, and Spain-and links diplomatic and military events to the political and social context from which they arose.

A Richer Heritage: Historic Preservation in the Twenty-First Century


Robert E. Stipe - 2003
    A Richer Heritage will be an essential, thought-provoking guide for professionals as well as administrators, volunteers, and policy makers involved in preservation efforts.An introduction traces the evolution of historic preservation in America, highlighting the principal ideas and events that have shaped and continue to shape the movement. The book also describes the workings--legal, administrative, and fiscal--of the layered federal, state, and local government partnership put in place by Congress in 1966. Individual chapters explore the preservation of designed and vernacular landscapes, the relationship between historic preservation and the larger environmental and land-trust movements, the role of new private and nonprofit players, racial and ethnic interests in historic preservation, and the preservation of our intangible cultural values. A concluding chapter analyzes the present state of the historic preservation movement and suggests future directions for the field in the twenty-first century. Contributors include preservationists, local-government citizen activists, an architect, landscape architects, environmentalists, an archaeologist, a real-estate developer, historians, a Native American tribal leader, an ethnologist, and lawyers.

Burma: A Nation at the Crossroads


Benedict Rogers - 2012
    Accused of crimes against humanity, they have brutally mistreated their people. Yet in the last couple of years, and in spite of sham elections, the pace of change has been breathtaking. Much is now hoped for. However, Burma is one of the most ethnically diverse nations in SE Asia: there are roughly seven major ethnic groups living along its borders. They have a long history of conflict with the government and have been cruelly treated by the current regime. Their future affects the country as a whole, as Benedict Rogers explains. Drawing heavily on his many fact-finding visits both inside Burma and along its frontiers, he gives a unique appraisal of the current ethnic situation and its implications for the nation as a whole. Wide-ranging, expertly researched, and full of brand new accounts of the courage and determination of the Burmese people, Burma: a nation at the crossroads explains the country's conflicted history, as well as its contemporary struggle for justice. Burma stands poised for freedom, or for further repression. No one can be sure. This fascinating and accessible book describes what is really happening inside this beautiful, secretive, and potentially prosperous country.

Before the Storm


Melanie Clegg - 2012
    Although they initially take the city of light by storm, they soon discover that the glittering facade of social success hides a multitude of sins and iniquities while their own dark secrets could well destroy everything that they have worked so hard to achieve...Based on The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton, Before the Storm is a tale of passion, betrayal and true love set against the backdrop of the opulent and often treacherous worlds of Georgian London, Versailles and Revolutionary Paris.‘It was a blissfully warm day. The worst of the heat wave was now over and a light flower scented breeze blew leaves into the pavilion where the party drowsily lazed against cushions, idling listening as Eugène d’Aigueville played his guitar, his eyes fixed on Venetia, who smiled lazily back at him.Comte Edmond reclined in between Phoebe and Eliza, none of them spoke but the air around them shimmered with tension as both girls subtly did their best to claim his attention for themselves. Phoebe had long since realised that she was fighting a losing battle though and that although he very much enjoyed flirting with her, it was Eliza that he looked for first whenever he walked into a room.Eliza did not share this view though and kept thinking about Venetia’s wedding day when Phoebe, radiant with sexual confidence had told her that she wouldn’t let her chastity stand in the way of making a good match for herself. She curled her hands into fists every time Comte Edmond and her friend left the room together and tried not to think about what they might be doing. He’d tried to kiss her once, but she’d shoved him away. Perhaps that was a mistake? She looked across at him now as he gazed up at Phoebe and her heart sank.‘Who is that woman?’ Phoebe said suddenly, shielding her blue eyes as she looked back towards the house.Venetia followed her gaze and gave a nervous laugh. ‘It’s your landlady, Eliza,’ she said, with a quick look at Edmond, who immediately sat up and automatically began to retie his loosened cravat. ‘Madame de Saint-Georges.’They all stood up and instinctively, Eliza, Phoebe and Venetia stood close together as Corisande de Saint-Georges hurried across the lawn towards them. She had dressed to impress in a shimmering, rich lace trimmed blue and white striped silk gown, with wide skirts pulled back from flounced flower sprigged white silk underskirts. A huge muslin fichu was arranged around her shoulders and on her elaborately curled, ringleted and backcombed powdered hair was a vast ribbon and flower bedecked white straw hat.‘Goodness me, she really means business,’ Venetia murmured as they watched this vision of elegance and high fashion approach. She looked back over her shoulder at Edmond, who was standing uneasily behind them, looking as if he desperately wished he could run away. ‘I wonder what she wants?’

Art in Theory, 1648–1815: An Anthology of Changing Ideas


Charles Harrison - 1991
    Like its highly successful companion volumes, Art in Theory, 1815–1900 and Art in Theory, 1900–1990, its primary aim is to provide students and teachers with the documentary material for informed and up-to-date study. Its 240 texts, clear principles of organization and considerable editorial content offer a vivid and indispensable introduction to the art of the early modern period.Harrison, Wood, and Gaiger have collected writing by artists, critics, philosophers, literary figures, and administrators of the arts, some reprinted in their entirety, others excerpted from longer works. A wealth of material from French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and Latin sources is also provided, including many new translations.Among the major themes treated are early arguments over the relative merits of ancient and modern art, debates between the advocates of form and color, the beginnings of modern art criticism in reviews of the Salon, art and politics during the French Revolution, the rise of landscape painting, and the artistic theories of Romanticism and Neo-classicism.Each section is prefaced by an essay that situates the ideas of the period in their historical context, while relating theoretical concerns and debates to developments in the practice of art. Each individual text is also accompanied by a short introduction. An extensive bibliography and full index are provided.

The Encyclopedia of New Wave


Daniel Bukszpan - 2012
    Originating as a less-aggressive sister movement to punk, New Wave encompassed a wide range of styles, from Brit pub-rock to electronica, synth-pop, and even ska. The Encyclopedia of New Wave comprehensively captures this eclectic music, all of which enthralled the newly emergent MTV generation. With its tendency toward romantic minimalism, dark dance beats, and gender-bending antics, New Wave changed the course of popular musical history, as well as fashion and art.

D'Alembert's Principle


Andrew Crumey - 1996
    Cunningly structured and as satisfying as an intricate piece of clockwork, it plays with narrative, revels in ideas and succeeds in being both fey and sharp, detached and compassionate. At a time when fiction gives all to the tired virtual realities of sex and violence, internets, Agas and middle-class Angst, it is a brilliant reminder of the power of the imagination to surprise, delight and open windows."David Coward in The Times Literary Supplement"Crumey does produce excellent post-modernist novels, each as concentric and cunning as the others. This is a triptych starting with D'Alembert penning his imagined memoirs. The literary equivalent of an Escher, the story has no identifiable end or beginning. Clever, entertaining, engaging

Scar Culture


Toni Davidson - 1999
    Bored by the hack work of standard therapy, he wants to make his name through radical intervention. He sets up elaborate hallucinogenic and regression experiments designed to take his patients back to the scene of the crimes against them in an attempt to rebuild them from the ground up. But in playing therapeutic god, ripping away at their psychic scars, he's courting disaster. A brilliant debut novel that is destined to challenge the way we think about psychotherapy, Scar Culture is breathtaking, at times shocking, provocative, humane, sharp-witted and always riveting, marking the arrival of an extraordinary new voice.

Grizzly Heart: Living Without Fear Among the Brown Bears of Kamchatka


Charlie Russell - 2002
    But Charlie Russell, who has had a forty-year relationship with bears, holds the controversial belief that it is possible to live with and truly understand bears in the wild. And for five years now, Russell and his partner, artist and photographer Maureen Enns, have spent summers on the Kamchatka peninsula, located on the northeast coast of Russia, and home of the densest population of brown bears in the world.Grizzly Heart tells the remarkable story of how Russell and Enns have defied the preconceptions of wildlife officials and the general public by living unthreatened -- and respected -- among the grizzlies of Kamchatka. In an honest and immediate style, Russell tells of the trials and successes of their years in the field, from convincing Russian officials to allow them to study, to adopting three bear cubs left orphaned when their mother was killed by a hunter (and teaching these cubs how to survive in the wild), to raising environmental awareness through art.Through a combination of careful study and personal dedication, Russell and Enns are persuading people to reconsider the age-old image of the grizzly bear as a ferocious man-eater and perpetual threat. Through their actions, they demonstrate that it is possible to forge a mutually respectful relationship with these majestic giants, and provide compelling reasons for altering our culture."We have been able to live beautifully with these animals, with no serious threat, because of what we've learned. Hopefully, sharing what we learn will help people -- and be a big help to our bears, too."

Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground


Susan McKay - 2021
    Based on almost 100 brand-new interviews, and told with McKay’s trademark passion and conviction, this is essential reading.Containing interviews with politicians, former paramilitaries, victims and survivors, business people, religious leaders, community workers, young people, writers and others, it tackles controversial issues, such as Brexit, paramilitary violence, the border, the legacy of the Troubles, same-sex marriage and abortion, RHI, and the possibility of a United Ireland, and explores social justice issues and campaigns, particularly the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights.

Conversion and Discipleship: You Can't Have One without the Other


Bill Hull - 2016
    The end result is that the disciple becomes the kind of person who naturally does what Jesus did.How the church understands salvation and the gospel is the key to recovering a biblical theology of discipleship. Our doctrines of grace and salvation, in some cases, actually prevent us from creating an expectation that we are to be disciples of Jesus. A person can profess to be a Christian and yet still live under the impression that they don’t need to actually follow Jesus. Being a follower is seen as an optional add-on, not a requirement. It is a choice, not a demand. Being a Christian today has no connection with the biblical idea that we are formed into the image of Christ.In this ground-breaking new book, pastor and author Bill Hull shows why our existing models of evangelism and discipleship fail to actually produce followers of Jesus. He looks at the importance of recovering a robust view of the gospel and taking seriously the connection between conversion—answering the call to follow Jesus—and discipleship—living like the one we claim to follow.