In Where There's a Will, Stephen M. Silverman shows just how different with a peek at the wills of the richest, most celebrated people of all time, and he provides the intimate scoop on what their heirs had to say about it. Discover what secret pact Clark Gable made in 1942 and took to his grave - only to be exposed when his will was read. Learn why it took more than a year for Liza Minnelli to raise the $37,500 needed to bury the ashes of her mother, Judy Garland, and what treasures were left to the heirs of Babe Ruth, James Dean, John Jacob Astor, Ernest Hemingway, and Ayn Rand once those wills cleared probate. From Marilyn Monroe and Andy Warhol to John Lennon, Jim Morrison, John Steinbeck, Rita Hayworth, and Jack Dempsey, Where There's a Will . . . is an utterly engrossing read sure to captivate tycoons and gossip addicts alike with its fascinating tales of how the other half bequeaths.

    It saves lives, manipulates lives, and prioritizes some lives over others. It provides comfort, makes profits, justifies violence, and promises resolution to body-mind loss. Clare grapples with this knot of contradictions, maintaining that neither an anti-cure politics nor a pro-cure worldview can account for the messy, complex relationships we have with our body-minds.The stories he tells range widely, stretching from disability stereotypes to weight loss surgery, gender transition to skin lightening creams. At each turn, Clare weaves race, disability, sexuality, class, and gender together, insisting on the nonnegotiable value of body-mind difference. Into this mix, he adds environmental politics, thinking about ecosystem loss and restoration as a way of delving more deeply into cure.Ultimately Brilliant Imperfection reveals cure to be an ideology grounded in the twin notions of normal and natural, slippery and powerful, necessary and damaging all at the same time.

    This book includes one of the sanest and most convincing arguments that I have read for experimentation in the writing of ethnography, which is supported by the text itself as an exemplar of a modest, theoretically unpretentious experiment that works very well indeed." George E. Marcus, Rice University"While a few Californians may be aware of the Tongan immigrant population in their midst, most Americans are unaware that the United States is a major terminus for the people of Tonga, an island nation in the South Pacific. Small examines Tongan migration to the United States in a 'transnational' perspective, stressing that many of the new migrant populations seem successfully to manage dual lives, in both the old country and the new. To that end, she describes life in contemporary Tongan communities and in U.S. settings." Library JournalThis book documents the momentous social phenomena of mass migration from agricultural ex-colonies and ex-protectorates to the industrial world. Cathy A. Small provides the poignant perspective of one extended family and one village in the Kingdom of Tonga, an independent island nation in the South Pacific which has lost one third of its population to migration since the mid-1960s. Moving between Tonga and California, Small chronicles the experiences of a family from the village of 'Olunga. Some members stayed and some migrated to California, in successive waves in the 1960s-1990s. Through their lives, she presents a striking picture of Tongan culture in the United States. Returning to 'Olunga with family members and their American-born children, Small shows what happened to village life and to kin relationships thirty years after migration began.

    Four years ago, the GOP dominated politics at every level in Colorado. Republicans held both Senate seats, five of seven congressional seats, the governor’s mansion, the offices of secretary of state and treasurer, and both houses of the state legislature. After the 2008 election, the exact opposite was true: replace the word Republicans with Democrats in the previous sentence, and you have of one the most stunning reversals of political fortune in American history.This is also the story of how it will happen—indeed, is happening—in other states across the country. In Colorado, progressives believe they have found a blueprint for creating permanent Democratic majorities across the nation. With discipline and focus, they have pioneered a legal architecture designed to take advantage of new campaign finance laws and an emerging breed of progressive donors who are willing to commit unprecedented resources to local races. It’s simple, brilliant, and very effective.Rob Witwer is a former member of the Colorado House of Representatives and practices law in Denver.Emmy award–winning journalist Adam Schrager covers politics for KUSA-TV, the NBC affiliate in Denver. Schrager and his family live in the Denver area. He is the author of The Principled Politician: Governor Ralph Carr and the Fight against Japanese Internment

    But to the women locked up there it was something else. A Living Hell. More than 4,000 internees were held there from January 1942 until February 1945.'Living Hell' is their harrowing story. The book is based on the diaries of Isla Corfield. An Englishwoman whose comfortable life in Shanghai was suddenly disrupted by the outbreak of World War Two, she fled with her daughter Gill on an evacuee ship.But the ship was captured by the Japanese -- and Isla and Gill would have to struggle to survive as prisoners of war in both Santo Tomas and Los Banos internment camps.In the communities of the camps, Isla and her daughter experienced the extremes of both friendship and loss. Cut-off from information about the war and with no end to their internment in sight, the pair experience starvation, disease and desperation.Finally liberated by the Americans after four years, Isla's story is both humbling and life-affirming - the story of one brave Englishwomen's battle to survive against terrible odds.It is one of the great untold stories of World War Two. "An incredible story of bravery and will-power." - Robert Foster, best-selling author of 'The Lunar Code'. Celia Lucas is a writer of children’s fiction and biography. She is a journalist, feature writer and public relations consultant. Winner of Tir na Nog Prize 1988 she has also collaborated on a TV series with husband Ian Skidmore. Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent digital publisher.

    He also talks about the philosophy behind total football, the driving force behind the great Dutch side of the 1970s, and a style of football many top teams attempt to emulate today. Then there was the eight years of success as manager of Barcelona, one of the most stressful jobs in the game, and back to Ajax, where, with his emphasis on youth and home-grown talent, he put together another team of superb ability.

    In this smart and funny fan’s guide Hample explains the ins and outs of pitching, hitting, running, and fielding, while offering insider trivia and anecdotes that will surprise even the most informed viewers of our national pastime.What is the difference between a slider and a curveball?At which stadium did “The Wave” first make an appearance? How do some hitters use iPods to improve their skills?Which positions are never played by lefties?Why do some players urinate on their hands?Combining the narrative voice and attitude of Michael Lewis with the compulsive brilliance of Schott’s Miscellany, Watching Baseball Smarter will increase your understanding and enjoyment of the sport–no matter what your level of expertise. Zack Hample is an obsessed fan and a regular writer for minorleaguebaseball.com. He's collected nearly 3,000 baseballs from major league games and has appeared on dozens of TV and radio shows. His first book, How to Snag Major League Baseballs, was published in 1999.

    But if you assert that male homosexuality is a cultural practice, expressive of a unique subjectivity and a distinctive relation to mainstream society, people will immediately protest. Such an idea, they will say, is just a stereotype--ridiculously simplistic, politically irresponsible, and morally suspect. The world acknowledges gay male culture as a fact but denies it as a truth.David Halperin, a pioneer of LGBTQ studies, dares to suggest that gayness is a specific way of being that gay men must learn from one another in order to become who they are. Inspired by the notorious undergraduate course of the same title that Halperin taught at the University of Michigan, provoking cries of outrage from both the right-wing media and the gay press, "How To Be Gay" traces gay men's cultural difference to the social meaning of style.Far from being deterred by stereotypes, Halperin concludes that the genius of gay culture resides in some of its most despised features: its aestheticism, snobbery, melodrama, adoration of glamour, caricatures of women, and obsession with mothers. The insights, impertinence, and unfazed critical intelligence displayed by gay culture, Halperin argues, have much to offer the heterosexual mainstream.

    It has been stifled by this myopic focus on the present, which is short-sighted and assimilationist.Cruising Utopia seeks to break the present stagnancy by cruising ahead. Drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, José Esteban Muñoz recalls the queer past for guidance in presaging its future. He considers the work of seminal artists and writers such as Andy Warhol, LeRoi Jones, Frank O'Hara, Ray Johnson, Fred Herko, Samuel Delany, and Elizabeth Bishop, alongside contemporary performance and visual artists like Dynasty Handbag, My Barbarian, Luke Dowd, Tony Just, and Kevin McCarty in order to decipher the anticipatory illumination of art and its uncanny ability to open windows to the future.In a startling repudiation of what the LGBT movement has held dear, Muñoz contends that queerness is instead a futurity bound phenomenon, a "not yet here" that critically engages pragmatic presentism. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, Cruising Utopia argues that the here and now are not enough and issues an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.

    Here are accounts of revealing one's sexual identity to parents, siblings, friends, co-workers and, in one notable instance, to a stockbroker. Men tell of their first sexual encounters from their preteens to their thirties, with childhood friends who rejected or tenderly embraced them, with professors, with neighbors, with a Broadway star. These are poignant, sometimes unexpectedly funny tales of romance and heartbreak, repression and liberation, rape and first love defining moments that shaped their authors' lives. Arranged chronologically from Manhattan in the Forties to San Francisco in the Nineties, these essays ultimately form a documentary of changing social and sexual mores in the United States--a literary, biographical, sociological and historical tour de force.

    With a breath-taking sweep spanning Rome to the modern day, popular historian and author Dominic Selwood challenges the traditional version of some of the best-known events of the past. From ancient Christianity to the voyages of Columbus, and from the medieval Crusades to ISIS and the modern Middle East, this book debunks dozens of historical myths. You will learn that: – Magna Carta was an infamous failure in medieval times – Richard the Lionheart was a cruel and dreadful king – The Knights Templar were heretical, and have left a genuinely baffling mystery – The painter of the Turin Shroud was found in the 1300s – Christopher Columbus never saw America – The first computer coder was a woman, a century before Alan Turing – The man who unleashed mustard gas in the World War One trenches won the Nobel Prize for chemistry – One incredible Spanish spy saved D-Day ... and lots more. This book will challenge everything you think you know about history!

    The century that followed was an era of vigorous expansion and large-scale projects, of rapidly changing culture and commerce, as huge numbers of people arrived in the shining city, drawn by its immense wealth and power and its many diversions. Borrowing a phrase from Daniel Defoe, Jerry White calls London this great and monstrous thing, the grandeur of its new buildings and the glitter of its high life shadowed by poverty and squalor."A Great and Monstrous Thing" offers a street-level view of the city: its public gardens and prisons, its banks and brothels, its workshops and warehouses and its bustling, jostling crowds. White introduces us to shopkeepers and prostitutes, men and women of fashion and genius, street-robbers and thief-takers, as they play out the astonishing drama of life in eighteenth-century London. What emerges is a picture of a society fractured by geography, politics, religion, history and especially by class, for the divide between rich and poor in London was never greater or more destructive in the modern era than in these years.Despite this gulf, Jerry White shows us Londoners going about their business as bankers or beggars, reveling in an enlarging world of public pleasures, indulging in crimes both great and small amidst the tightening sinews of power and regulation, and the hesitant beginnings of London democracy."

    The book also includes some of her best fiction pieces.

    Nothing will ever compare to the amphetamine rush of my young life and the night I was nearly buggered by my girlfriend’s uncle in the Potteries...The opening line of Stuart Cosgrove’s Young Soul Rebels sets up a compelling and intimate story of northern soul, Britain’s most fascinating musical underground scene, and takes the reader on a journey into the iconic clubs that made it famous – The Twisted Wheel, The Torch, Wigan Casino, Blackpool Mecca and Cleethorpes Pier – the bootleggers that made it infamous, the splits that threatened to divide the scene, the great unknown records that built its global reputation and the crate-digging collectors that travelled to America to unearth unknown sounds.The book sweeps across fifty years of British life and places the northern soul scene in a social context – the rise of amphetamine culture, the policing of youth culture, the north–south divide, the decline of coastal Britain, the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry, the rise of Thatcherism, the miners’ strike, the rave scene and music in the era of the world wide web Books have been written about northern soul before but never with the same erudition and passion.

    It traces her passionate and indignant response to the excitement of the early days of the French Revolution and then her uneasiness at its later bloody phase. It reveals her developing understanding of women's involvement in the political and social life of the nation and her growing awareness of the relationship between politics and economics and between political institutions and the individual. In personal terms, the works show her struggling with a belief in the perfectibility of human nature through rational education, a doctrine that became weaker under the onslaught of her own miserable experience and the revolutionary massacres. Janet Todd's introduction illuminates the progress of Wollstonecraft's thought, showing that a reading of all three works allows her to emerge as a more substantial political writer than a study of The Rights of Woman alone can reveal.