Its essence is sharing. Therefore, Bill W. and Dr. Bob are always referred to within the Fellowship as the co-founders. So far, among the majority of A.A. members, the Ohio surgeon has been less well known than his partner. He died in 1950, when A.A. was only 15 years old. But his influence on the whole A.A. program is permanent and profound. This book gives a portrait of Dr. Bob as full-sale and balanced as possible—for the most part, in the words of those who knew him personally. The young man who grew up in Vermont became a hard-drinking college boy, then a medical student fighting the onset of his own alcoholism, a respected physician, a loving but increasingly unreliable family man, and at last a desperately ill drunk. He was without hope until he met a stockbroker from New York—Bill W., who urgently needed a fellow alcoholic to help him maintain his own sobriety. His story then becomes inextricably entwined with that of Alcoholics Anonymous: from a fledgling Fellowship to a powerful spiritual movement with a worldwide reach. Dr. Bob’s story remains instructional and inspiring to those who read it today.

    The Romans employed a tactic they routinely used to conquer and absorb other nations: they grafted their imperial rule onto the religion of the conquered. After 30 years of research, authors James S. Valliant and C.W. Fahy present irrefutable archaeological and textual evidence that proves Christianity was created by Roman Caesars in this book that breaks new ground in Christian scholarship and is destined to change the way the world looks at ancient religions forever. Inherited from a long-past era of tyranny, war and deliberate religious fraud, could Christianity have been created for an entirely different purpose than we have been lead to believe? Praised by scholars like Dead Sea Scrolls translator Robert Eisenman (James the Brother of Jesus), this exhaustive synthesis of historical detective work integrates all of the ancient sources about the earliest Christians and reveals new archaeological evidence for the first time. And, despite the fable presented in current bestsellers like Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus, the evidence presented in Creating Christ is irrefutable: Christianity was invented by Roman Emperors. ***** ”I have rarely encountered a book so original, exciting, accessible and informed on subjects that are of obvious importance to the world and to which I have myself devoted such a large part of my scholarly career studying. In this book they have rendered a startling new understanding of Christianity with a controversial theory of its Roman provenance that is accessible to the layman in a very powerful way. In the process, they present new and comprehensive archeological and iconographic evidence, as well as utilizing the widest and most cutting edge work of other recent scholars, including myself. This is a work of outstanding and original scholarship. Its arguments are a brilliant, profound and thorough integration of the relevant evidence. When they are done, the conclusion is inescapable and obviously profound.” Prof. Robert Eisenman, Author of James the Brother of Jesus and The New Testament Code "A fascinating and provocative investigative history of ideas, boldly exploring a problem that previous scholarship has not clearly or credibly addressed: how (and why!) the Flavian dynasty wove Christianity into the very fabric of Western civilization." -Mark Riebling, author of Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler

    Vera Kelly is struggling to make rent and blend into the underground gay scene in Greenwich Village. She's working night shifts at a radio station when her quick wits, sharp tongue, and technical skills get her noticed by a recruiter for the CIA. Next thing she knows she's in Argentina, tasked with wiretapping a congressman and infiltrating a group of student activists in Buenos Aires. As Vera becomes more and more enmeshed with the young radicals, the fragile local government begins to split at the seams. When a betrayal leaves her stranded in the wake of a coup, Vera learns war makes for strange and unexpected bedfellows, and she's forced to take extreme measures to save herself.An exhilarating page turner and perceptive coming-of-age story, WHO IS VERA KELLY? introduces an original, wry and whip-smart female spy for the twenty-first century.

    Violence swept through the island: assassins were sent to kill President Harry Truman, gunfights roared in eight towns, police stations and post offices were burned down. In order to suppress this uprising, the US Army deployed thousands of troops and bombarded two towns, marking the first time in history that the US government bombed its own citizens.Nelson A. Denis tells this powerful story through the controversial life of Pedro Albizu Campos, who served as the president of the Nationalist Party. A lawyer, chemical engineer, and the first Puerto Rican to graduate from Harvard Law School, Albizu Campos was imprisoned for twenty-five years and died under mysterious circumstances. By tracing his life and death, Denis shows how the journey of Albizu Campos is part of a larger story of Puerto Rico and US colonialism.Through oral histories, personal interviews, eyewitness accounts, congressional testimony, and recently declassified FBI files, War Against All Puerto Ricans tells the story of a forgotten revolution and its context in Puerto Rico's history, from the US invasion in 1898 to the modern-day struggle for self-determination. Denis provides an unflinching account of the gunfights, prison riots, political intrigue, FBI and CIA covert activity, and mass hysteria that accompanied this tumultuous period in Puerto Rican history.

    Dismissed by critics and academics, condemned by parents and politicians, fervently embraced by legions of fans, heavy metal music attracts and embodies cultural conflicts that are central to our society. Walser explores how and why heavy metal works, both musically and socially, and at the same time uses metal to investigate contemporary formations of identity, community, gender, and power.

    The Batavia expedition: Australian divers uncover a grim tale of shipwreck, mutiny and massacre.

    For centuries, it allowed Colombians to settle their mountainous, geographically unique region--one of the most challenging on the planet. Colombia's complicated history reflects the beautiful, wild and impossible geography of its largest river: in places, it is placid and calm; in other moments, tortured and unpredictable. A cultural wellspring of music, poetry and literature, in dark times the Magdalena also served as the nation's graveyard. As the country enters a momentous period of revitalization, Wade Davis explores the three major sections of the river, alto, medio, and bajo, evoking each singular landscape and the people he meets there in poetic, nuanced writing, accompanied by his own striking photography.At once an absorbing adventure and an inspiring story of hope and redemption, Magdalena gives us a rare, kaleidoscopic picture of the past and present of a nation often reduced to unfair clichés of drug cartels and violence. Through many years of uncertainty, however, the Magdalena never abandoned its people, always returning as a life-giving force, the source of much of Colombia's wealth--and its dreams.Seamlessly weaving together memoir, history, and a remarkable tale of a nation rising to bring about transformational change, Wade Davis tells the story of this magnificent river with passion and love, and in doing so, tells the epic story of Colombia.

    In his parents' house, he finds a cache of documents-articles, maps, photographs-and unwittingly begins to unearth his father's obsession with the disappearance of a local man. Suddenly he comes face-to-face with the ghosts of Argentina's dark political past and with the long-hidden memories of his family's underground resistance against an oppressive military regime. As the fragments of the narrator's investigation fall into place-revealing not only a part of his father's life he had tried to forget but also the legacy of an entire generation- My Fathers' Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain tells a completely original story of family and remembrance. It is an audacious accomplishment by an internationally acclaimed voice poised to garner equal acclaim in America.

    There are good reasons that language fascinates us so. It not only defines humans as a species, placing us head and shoulders above even the most proficient animal communicators, but it also beguiles us with its endless mysteries. For example: * How did different languages come to be? * Why isn’t there just a single language? * How does a language change, and when it does, is that change indicative of decay or growth? * How does a language become extinct? Dr. John McWhorter, one of America’s leading linguists and a frequent commentator on network television and National Public Radio, addresses these and other questions as he takes you on an in-depth, 36-lecture tour of the development of human language, showing how a single tongue spoken 150,000 years ago has evolved into the estimated 6,000 languages used around the world today.An accomplished scholar, Professor McWhorter is also a skilled popularizer, whose book The Power of Babel was called "startling, provocative, and remarkably entertaining," by the San Diego Union-Tribune.The London Times called him "a born teacher." And Steven Pinker, best known as the author of The Language Instinct, offered this praise for the book: "McWhorter’s arguments are sharply reasoned, refreshingly honest, and thoroughly original."Course Lecture Titles1. What Is Language? 2. When Language Began 3. How Language Changes—Sound Change 4. How Language Changes—Building New Material 5. How Language Changes—Meaning and Order 6. How Language Changes—Many Directions 7. How Language Changes—Modern English 8. Language Families—Indo-European 9. Language Families—Tracing Indo-European 10. Language Families—Diversity of Structures 11. Language Families—Clues to the Past 12. The Case Against the World’s First Language 13. The Case For the World’s First Language 14. Dialects—Subspecies of Species 15. Dialects—Where Do You Draw the Line? 16. Dialects—Two Tongues in One Mouth 17. Dialects—The Standard as Token of the Past 18. Dialects—Spoken Style, Written Style 19. Dialects—The Fallacy of Blackboard Grammar 20. Language Mixture—Words 21. Language Mixture—Grammar 22. Language Mixture—Language Areas 23. Language Develops Beyond the Call of Duty 24. Language Interrupted 25. A New Perspective on the Story of English 26. Does Culture Drive Language Change? 27. Language Starts Over—Pidgins 28. Language Starts Over—Creoles I 29. Language Starts Over—Creoles II 30. Language Starts Over—Signs of the New 31. Language Starts Over—The Creole Continuum 32. What Is Black English? 33. Language Death—The Problem 34. Language Death—Prognosis 35. Artificial Languages 36. Finale—Master Class

    It is translated from the Spanish by Australian translator Alice Whitmore All My Goodbyes is a novel told in overlapping vignettes, which follow the travels of a young Argentinian woman across Europe (Malaga, Madrid, Heidelberg, Berlin) and back to Argentina (Buenos Aires, Patagonia) as she flees from situation to situation, job to job, and relationship to relationship. Within the complexity of the narrator's situation, a backstory emerges about a brutal murder in Patagonia which she may or may not be implicated in, but whether this is the cause of her flight is never entirely clear - she is driven as much by psychological concerns, her relationship with her father, uncertainty about her identity and purpose in life.The novella is, as the title suggests, a catalogue of goodbyes, the result of a decade-long cycle of self-inflicted alienation which the narrator, despite herself, seems fated to perpetuate. In its structure it recalls the rich Argentinian tradition of Cortazar and Borges; its language is by turns stark and elaborate, brutal in its economy and yet poetic in its imagery.

    thought-provoking and meditative, Lingis's work is above all touching, and offers a refreshingly idiosyncratic antidote to the idle talk that so often passes for philosophical writing." --Radical Philosophy..". striking for the clarity and singularity of its styles and voices as well as for the compelling measure of genuine philosophic originality which it contributes to questions of community and (its) communication." --Research in PhenomenologyArticulating the author's journeys and personal experiences in the idiom of contemporary continental thought, Alphonso Lingis launches a devastating critique, pointing up the myopia of Western rationalism. Here Lingis raises issues of undeniable urgency.

    Buckley Jr., was the foremost architect of the conservative movement that swept the American political landscape from the 1960s to the early 2000s. When Buckley launched National Review in 1955, conservatism was a beleaguered, fringe segment of the Republican Party. Three decades later Ronald Reagan-who credited National Review with shaping his beliefs-was in the White House. Buckley and his allies devised a new-model conservatism that replaced traditional ideals with a passionate belief in the free market, religious faith, and an aggressive stance on foreign policy.Buckley was an eloquent writer and brilliant polemicist whose works are still required texts for conservatives. His TV show Firing Line and his campaign for mayor of New York City made him a celebrity; his wit and zest for combat made conservatism fun. But Buckley was far more than a controversialist. Deploying his uncommon charm, shrewdly building alliances, and refusing to compromise on core principles, he almost single-handedly transformed conservatism from a set of retrograde attitudes into a revolutionary force. Scholar Carl T. Bogus gives us the most authoritative biography ever published of this vital, larger-than-life figure.

    With echoes of Richard Hofstadter and Edmund Wilson, Krauze explores the Latin American intellectual traditionby deftly animating its decisive figures, from Octavio Paz to Che Guevara, José Vasconcelos toHugo Chávez, and inscribing them upon a vivid landscape of patriotism,opportunism, morality, and avarice—and of love, honor, loyalty, and identity. Redeemersdelivers an unparalleled explication of the roots of ideology and action inLatin America today.

    In it the narrator, who could be Aira himself (born the same year, in the same place, a writer who is now also living PBK in Buenos Aires) revisits down his childhood memories. Beginning with an enigmatically beautiful black father who gathered linden flowers to make a sleep-inducing tea, and continuing on to an irrational and physically deformed mother of European descent, the narrator also catalogs his best childhood friends and the many gossiping neighbors. Aira creates a colorful mosaic of an epoch in Argentina when the poor, under the guiding hand of Eva Pero´n, aspired to a newfound middle class. Moving from anecdote to anecdote, alternating between the touching, amusing, and sometimes surreal, we are comforted by the fact that for Aira “everything is allegory.”This is a charming novella—evocative, reflexive, amusing, intelligent—that invites the reader to look further into Aira’s great body of work.

    Jonathan M. Katz, the only full-time American news correspondent in Haiti, was inside his house when it buckled along with hundreds of thousands of others. In this visceral, authoritative first-hand account, Katz chronicles the terror of that day, the devastation visited on ordinary Haitians, and how the world reacted to a nation in need.More than half of American adults gave money for Haiti, part of a monumental response totaling $16.3 billion in pledges. But three years later the relief effort has foundered. It’s most basic promises—to build safer housing for the homeless, alleviate severe poverty, and strengthen Haiti to face future disasters—remain unfulfilled. The Big Truck That Went By presents a sharp critique of international aid that defies today’s conventional wisdom; that the way wealthy countries give aid makes poor countries seem irredeemably hopeless, while trapping millions in cycles of privation and catastrophe. Katz follows the money to uncover startling truths about how good intentions go wrong, and what can be done to make aid “smarter.”With coverage of Bill Clinton, who came to help lead the reconstruction; movie-star aid worker Sean Penn; Wyclef Jean; Haiti’s leaders and people alike, Katz weaves a complex, darkly funny, and unexpected portrait of one of the world’s most fascinating countries. The Big Truck That Went By is not only a definitive account of Haiti’s earthquake, but of the world we live in today.