He turned his eye to the world, to the cultures and the people around him, and saw reflections of himself. In this collection, he works in both free verse and traditional forms, rendering scenes of exquisite detail that pry into the hearts of his characters and reveal the contradictions that bind father to son, lover to lover, and person to person. From the broken hills and drowsy river valleys around Paducah, Kentucky, to Houston diners and Gulf Coast shrimp boats, to the tropical cityscape of Miami, Bolton creates vivid scenes in which his characters confront the loneliness and the "little music" of their lives. With a richly musical voice and an ear for the cadences of everyday speech, Bolton gives his readers not the trappings of love and grief, but the very things themselves, rendered in lines that reverberate with the authority of sincerity and truth.

    This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states.In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.” This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scott’s work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen.

    In this magisterial new work, Giovanni Arrighi shows how China’s extraordinary rise invites us to read The Wealth of Nations in a radically different way than is usually done. He examines how the recent US attempt to bring into existence the first truly global empire in world history was conceived in order to counter China’s spectacular economic success of the 1990s, and how the US’s disastrous failure in Iraq has made the People’s Republic of China the true winner of the US War on Terror. In the 21st century, China may well become again the kind of noncapitalist market economy that Smith described, under totally different domestic and world-historical conditions.

    The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy offers a powerful criticism of the inconsistencies of representative democracy. First published in 1923, it has often been viewed as an attempt to destroy parliamentarism; in fact, it was Schmitt's attempt to defend the Weimar constitution. The introduction to this new translation places the book in proper historical context and provides a useful guide to several aspects of Weimar political culture. The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

    A dying businessman is cured of cancer. Undeniable miracles are following a rusty station wagon on its journey west. But the person behind them is no charismatic religious figure. He’s the six-year-old son of a poor single mother and the possessor of a gift he can’t explain. To multitudes, however, Toby Matthews is about to become a New Age messiah--and to unscrupulous opportunists, a ticket to undreamed-of wealth. But one person besides his young mother will see Toby for who he really is. Thomas York, a gifted but searching divinity student, finds in Toby a kindred spirit--brilliant, intuitive, hungry for truth. And as an evil beyond their comprehension unfolds, Truth will become their only weapon against a terrifying enemy unseen by all except Toby.A taut supernatural thriller, The Prodigy probes the influence of the invisible realm on the world around us and the indomitable power of the Light that shines in the darkness.

    We sabotage our relationships and undermine our chances; we focus on the wrong partners and run away from real possibility. We find it difficult to be trusting, vulnerable, faithful, and honest. No matter how great the desire, we don't know how to move forward.Getting to commitment is about growth and change. It is about getting the love you deserve. You will learn how to recognize and overcome the eight greatest obstacles to lasting connection, how to focus on real possibility, and how to make and keep the relationships that matter most. Whether you are facing your own commitment issues or the issues of a reluctant partner, there is a way to both understand and resolve these conflicts. Falling in love and staying in love requires its own kind of heroism, because it takes real courage to make a commitment to lasting love. This book is about finding that courage.

    One weekend, Mark escapes to Moganshan, a dilapidated mountaintop village built by foreigners in the early 1900s as a summer retreat. Mark falls in love with the place and decides to restore one of the villas, as if he were in Tuscany or Provence.

    The book contains some of Nietzsche's most sustained discussions of art and morality, knowledge and truth, the intellectual conscience and the origin of logic.Most of the book was written just before Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the last part five years later, after Beyond Good and Evil. We encounter Zarathustra in these pages as well as many of Nietzsche's most interesting philosophical ideas and the largest collection of his own poetry that he himself ever published.Walter Kaufmann's English versions of Nietzsche represent one of the major translation enterprises of our time. He is the first philosopher to have translated Nietzsche's major works, and never before has a single translator given us so much of Nietzsche.From the Paperback edition.

    Ram Charan, expert in corporate governance and best-selling author, packs this book with useful tools and techniques to take boards and their companies to a higher level of performance. Charan puts his finger on a growing problem for boards: the disconnect between directors' efforts and their results. The added time and attention boards invest is not translating into better governancea that is, governance that adds value to the business. Boards That Deliver gets beyond the rhetoric of corporate governance reform. It captures the tried-and-true practices used by high-performance boards. In contrast to experts who base prescriptions on number-crunching exercises, Charan identifies the real problems that drain directors' time and suppress their best judgmentsa and explains clearly and succinctly how boards can solve those problems. These battle-tested solutions help boards achieve what rules and regulations alone cannota to get succession right, refine a winning strategy, and design a rational CEO compensation package.Good governance requires leadership. Boards That Deliver is the no-nonsense guide for directors and CEOs who are rising to the leadership challenge to make their boards a competitive advantage.

    

    Chi Lin becomes the Fourth Wife – the ghost bride in the House of Wu, a respectable Ming Dynasty household. But to keep her honor, Chi Lin assumes her role under the stern command of her mother-in-law and the disdainful eye of the First Wife. Still, as Mistress Purple Sage, Chi Lin survives, managing to bring fresh breath into this ancient household. Women in Fourteenth Century China played a subservient role. Most accepted their lot and worked within a man’s world, supporting their husbands, revering their fathers and elders, and assuring their children followed the same dauntless path. Still, within the narrow confines of a subservient life, there was always a place to leave a mark and make a difference for the future.Master Wu’s Bride is a journey seen from a woman’s point of view — a woman who held secrets and cultivated them to everyone’s advantage. From yesterday’s stale cabbage, Chi Lin manages to cultivate her world to bloom. Come take this journey with Mistress Purple Sage, the ghost bride. Come take this journey that many women in a host of cultures still take today in the shadow of inequality’s quagmire.

    One man has it-and no one knows who...Mitchell Swain is the richest man in the world--until he announces the "ultimate technological breakthrough." The world stops for the press conference-and sees him assassinated.No one knows what he was going to say.Almost no one.Jennifer Rayne intends to find out. A leading journalist covering high-tech, she was scheduled to interview Swain after the press conference. Instead, she investigates his murder.What she finds is a scientist to whom Swain has funneled billions...A desperate U.S. government following the same clues...And a bizarre technology which promises invincibility, immortality, and the ability to destroy any enemy--or the earth itself.Mankind has entered the final arms race.It will last two days.As this breathlessly fast-paced nanothriller unfolds, readers are taken on a stunning tour de force of nanotechnology's promises and perils--until the fate of the earth itself hangs in the balance...* Winner of Nanotechnology Now's Editor's Choice Award *

    Perhaps most surprisingly, Pomeranz demonstrates that the Chinese and Japanese cores were no worse off ecologically than Western Europe. Core areas throughout the eighteenth-century Old World faced comparable local shortages of land-intensive products, shortages that were only partly resolved by trade.Pomeranz argues that Europe's nineteenth-century divergence from the Old World owes much to the fortunate location of coal, which substituted for timber. This made Europe's failure to use its land intensively much less of a problem, while allowing growth in energy-intensive industries. Another crucial difference that he notes has to do with trade. Fortuitous global conjunctures made the Americas a greater source of needed primary products for Europe than any Asian periphery. This allowed Northwest Europe to grow dramatically in population, specialize further in manufactures, and remove labor from the land, using increased imports rather than maximizing yields. Together, coal and the New World allowed Europe to grow along resource-intensive, labor-saving paths.Meanwhile, Asia hit a cul-de-sac. Although the East Asian hinterlands boomed after 1750, both in population and in manufacturing, this growth prevented these peripheral regions from exporting vital resources to the cloth-producing Yangzi Delta. As a result, growth in the core of East Asia's economy essentially stopped, and what growth did exist was forced along labor-intensive, resource-saving paths--paths Europe could have been forced down, too, had it not been for favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas.

    Readers will learn essential skills like how to haggle, exchange currencies, cross the street, decipher menus, say useful phrases in Chinese, and more. The guide comes complete with survival tips on etiquette, a map, and resource lists. Don’t leave home for China without it!Veteran travelers Qin and Larry Herzberg are Chinese language and culture professors at Calvin College in Michigan.

    It is also an extraordinary love story that lasted half a century.The first major biography with access to family letters and archives. Mordecai Richler was an outsized and outrageous novelist whose life reads like fiction.Mordecai Richler won multiple Governor General's Literary Awards, the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, among others, as well as many awards for his children's books. He also wrote Oscar-nominated screenplays. His influence was larger than life in Canada and abroad. In Mordecai, award-winning novelist and journalist Charlie Foran brings to the page the richness of Mordecai's life as young bohemian, irreverent writer, passionate and controversial Canadian, loyal friend and deeply romantic lover. He explores Mordecai's distraught childhood, and gives us the "portrait of a marriage" — the lifelong love affair with Florence, with Mordecai as beloved father of five. The portrait is alive and intimate — warts and all.