Once the girls step inside the elegant building - surrounded by luxurious dresses and beautiful accessories - the hardships of their own lives are temporarily forgotten. Serving a variety of curious customers, from glamorous gypsy queens to genuine royalty and stuffy academics to the city's fashionable elite, the store is a place where these young women can forge successful careers, under the ever-watchful eye of flamboyant owner Mr Heyworth. Set against the backdrop of the closing years of the Second World War, and moving into the 1950s, The Shop Girls perfectly captures the camaraderie and friendship of four ambitious young women working together in a store that offered them an escape from the drudgery of their wartime childhoods. Each of the girls' stories will be individually published from July 2014 in fortnightly serialised ebooks, leading up to the release of the complete edition (with bonus material) in September.

    A dramatic series that captures, culture by culture, the information that never makes it into the history books: strange stories, mystic rites, angry gods, vision quests.

    After the shocking revelations of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail the authors, in their quest to determine the discrepancies between early and modern 'Christian' thought, found that they were forced to ask such questions as:*Was there more than one Christ?*Was Christ the founder of Christianity?*Were the disciples as peace-loving as it is traditionally assumed?*What links the Vatican, the CIA, the KGB, the Mafia, Freemasonry, P2, Opus Dei and the Knights Templar*What mysterious modern crusade implicates British industry, Churchill and de Gaulle, the EEC and Solidarity?The Messianic Legacy offers enthralling new investigations into the shadowy society of the 'Prieure de Sion' - 'The Guardians of the Holy Grail' - as the authors discover the murky world of politics, finance, freemasonry, and religion that exists beneath the most solid and conservative seeming of European institutions: the Church. The ominous global conspiracy of disinformations they uncovered ensures that The Messianic Legacy us an up-to-the-minute thriller and a work of biblical detection that is even more significant than The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.

    Drawing on shamanic practices from the world over, SHAMANISM AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE FOR DAILY LIFE addresses the needs of contemporary people who yearn to deepen their own innate mystical sensibilities. This inspirational book shows how to develop a personal spiritual practice by blending elements of shamanism with inherited traditions and current religious commitments. Contents include: The central role of power animals and spirit teachers.Visionary techniques for exploring the extraordinary in everyday life.Elements of childhood spirituality including songs, secret hiding places, power spots, and imaginary power figures.A journey to an ancestral shaman to recover lost knowledge.

    From magic's origin in the Shamanic tradition can religion, which, for the world's first civilizations, had no disctinction from magic. The book includes an international sweep of ancient cultural traditions and details the medieval phenomena of witch-hunts that still have resonance in modern society. In addition, the book examines the modern wicca movement, tracing the development fromt he 1900s and its links with the Celtic tradition.Illu strated with archival material, fine art illustrtaions of legendary magic workers, and special photography, this volume is a comprehensive examination of a timeless subject.

    Drawing on an incredible range of sources, including news reports, propaganda and training materials, official planning documents, wartime diaries, and memoirs, Roberts tells the fascinating and troubling story of how the US military command systematically spread—and then exploited—the myth of French women as sexually experienced and available. The resulting chaos—ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to outright rape and rampant venereal disease—horrified the war-weary and demoralized French population. The sexual predation, and the blithe response of the American military leadership, also caused serious friction between the two nations just as they were attempting to settle questions of long-term control over the liberated territories and the restoration of French sovereignty. While never denying the achievement of D-Day, or the bravery of the soldiers who took part, What Soldiers Do reminds us that history is always more useful—and more interesting—when it is most honest, and when it goes beyond the burnished beauty of nostalgia to grapple with the real lives and real mistakes of the people who lived it.

    His rule served as the bookends between what were essentially two Russian empires; the one that his forefathers carved out through imperial ambition and the one dictated by the zealous communists of the Soviet Union bent on socialist expansion. Nicholas was by most accounts a conflicted ruler; a man viewed as kind and generous in his mannerisms yet alleged to be greatly disconnected and apathetic toward the subjects he was supposed to rule over. Inside you will read about... - Nicholas and the Funeral Bride - The Coronation Tragedy - Bloody Sunday - Nicholas' Reluctant Reforms - Three Hundred Years of Romanov Rule - The Tsar and World War I - The Last Russian Tsar And much more! Find out how this last Russian tsar rose to power and oversaw the end of a 300-year family dynasty as it teetered, tottered, and finally fell over the edge of oblivion. This is the story of Tsar Nicholas II.

    Formations of Class & Gender demonstrates why class should be featured more prominently in theoretical accounts of gender, identity and power. Beverley Skeggs identifies the neglect of class, and shows how class and gender must be fused together to produce an accurate representation of power relations in modern society.The book questions how theoretical frameworks are generated for understanding how women live and produce themselves through social and cultural relations. It uses detailed ethnographic research to explain how `real′ women inhabit and occupy the social and cultural posit

    Spence reconstructs an extraordinary episode in the early intercourse between Europe and China. It is the story of John Hu, a lowly but devout Chinese Catholic, who in 1722 accompanied a Jesuit missionary on a journey to France--a journey that ended with Hu's confinement in a lunatic asylum. At once a triumph of historical detective work and a gripping narrative, The Question of Hu deftly probes the collision of tw ocultures, with their different definitions of faith, madness, and moral obligation.

    Does the story of Roundheads and Restoration have something to do with the origins of experimental sci-ence? Schaffer and Shapin believed it does.Focusing on the debates between Boyle and his archcritic Thomas Hobbes over the air-pump, the authors proposed that solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order. Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild.The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens--facts, interpretations, experiment, truth--were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said.

    Twelve powerful works of fiction, including Pushkin's "The Queen of Spades," Gogol's "The Overcoat," Turgenev's "The District Doctor," Dostoyevsky's "White Nights," Tolstoy's "How Much Land Does a Man Need?," plus "The Clothes Mender" by Leskov, "The Lady with the Toy Dog" by Chekhov, "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl" by Gorky, "Lazarus" by Andreyev, and more.

    Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages to the witch-hunts and the rise of mechanical philosophy, Federici investigates the capitalist rationalization of social reproduction. She shows how the battle against the rebel body and the conflict between body and mind are essential conditions for the development of labor power and self-ownership, two central principles of modern social organization."It is both a passionate work of memory recovered and a hammer of humanity's agenda." Peter Linebaugh, author of The London Hanged"

    Random violence, mass migration, disease, and starvation were the only way of life. This is the picture of the Dark Ages that most historians promote. But archaeology tells a different story. Peter S. Wells, one of the world's leading archaeologists, surveys the archaeological record to demonstrate that the Dark Ages were not dark at all. The kingdoms of Christendom that emerged starting in the ninth century sprang from a robust, previously little-known, European culture, albeit one that left behind few written texts. This recently recognized culture achieved heights in artistry, technology, craft production, commerce, and learning. Future assessments of the period between Rome and Charlemagne will need to incorporate this fresh new picture.

    The fascinating "Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error" (and alternate titles; 1975, translation 1978) may be the best-known of his works, as well as the most controversial among historians, based as it is on village gossip recorded by Inquisitors. Perhaps more representative are detailed studies of a popular demonstration / riot in "Carnival in Romans" ("Le Carnaval de Romans," 1979), and of folktale themes as transmitted in popular and literary versions from the south of France, in "Love, Death and Money in the Pays D'Oc" ("L'argent, l'amour et la mort en pays d'Oc," 1980), in which social stresses and personal anxieties come together.Underlying much of this production, however, and perhaps giving Ladurie the confidence to interpret the notoriously difficult inquisitorial records, is this less-inspiring sounding early work, "Les Paysans de Languedoc" of 1966, here translated under an equally plain and literal title, which appeared in English only three years after the original French edition. In any case, it clearly underlies his later investigations of provincial culture and society.This is a sophisticated analysis of primarily economic records from one of the traditional provinces of southern France, covering mainly the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. It deals with the basics of ordinary life -- production, consumption, property, and taxes, and how they interacted. There are interesting confirmations of what can go wrong when people act without much guidance from economic theory in determining self-interest. For example, wide-spread cutting of wages in a time of rising prices reduced income and purchases, ultimately putting meat beyond the reach of most consumers. This was a catastrophe for some of the same employers, who were cattle-raisers (or owners of grazing land) with a diminishing market. (If I understand Ladurie's tables and charts correctly -- and this involves some interpretation on the part of a non-professional -- the typical response to their falling profits was to cut wages again, again reducing the cash in circulation, and reinforcing the cycle in a time when markets for most goods, especially perishable ones, were strictly local.)It is definitely not light reading, but Ladurie is not above adding characterizations (such as "tight-fisted fellows") to otherwise anonymous groups of property-owners and employers, sacrificing a little of the appearance of objectivity for the sake of human interest. Generally speaking, Ladurie draws such positions from the hard data, and the attentive reader may well reach the same conclusion; I remain happier about the practice from a literary point of view than an historical one."Peasants of Languedoc" represents a major move toward understanding the history of people left out of official histories, although the original description as "total history" is rather misleading. Taken together with Ladurie's later cultural studies, however, it does mark a considerable advance.This review by Ian M. Slater "aylchanan" was copied from Amazon.com. (There was no prior default book description.)

    In Dancing on Our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence activist, editor, and educator Leanne Simpson asserts reconciliation must be grounded in political resurgence and must support the regeneration of Indigenous languages, oral cultures, and traditions of governance.Simpson explores philosophies and pathways of regeneration, resurgence, and a new emergence through the Nishnaabeg language, Creation Stories, walks with Elders and children, celebrations and protests, and meditations on these experiences. She stresses the importance of illuminating Indigenous intellectual traditions to transform their relationship to the Canadian state.Challenging and original, Dancing on Our Turtle's Back provides a valuable new perspective on the struggles of Indigenous Peoples.