The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Narrative


Mary Prince - 1831
    Subjected to bodily and sexual abuse by subsequent masters, she was bought and sold several times before she was ultimately freed.The first black woman to break the bonds of slavery in the British colonies and publish a record of her experiences, Prince vividly recalls her life in the West Indies, her rebellion against physical and psychological degradation, and her eventual escape in 1828 in England. Her straightforward, often poetic account of immense anguish, separation from her husband, and struggle for freedom inflamed public opinion during a period when stormy debates on abolition were common in both the United States and England.This edition also includes a substantial supplement by Thomas Pringle, the original editor, as well as another brief slave account: “The Narrative of Asa-Asa, a Captured African.”Essential reading for students of African-American studies, Mary Prince’s classic account of determination and endurance aids in filling the many gaps in black women’s history.

Theogony / Works and Days


Hesiod
    The Theogony contains a systematic genealogy of the gods from the beginning of the world and an account of their violent struggles before the present order was established. The Works and Days, a compendium of moral and practical advice for a life of honest husbandry, throws a unique and fascinating light on archaic Greek society, ethics, and superstition. Hesiod's poetry is the oldest source for the myths of Prometheus, Pandora, and the Golden Age.Unlike Homer, Hesiod tells us about himself and his family (he lived in central Greece in the late eighth century BC). This new translation by a leading expert combines accuracy with readability.

Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction


Nick Montfort - 2003
    Twisty Little Passages (the title refers to a maze in Adventure, the first interactive fiction) is the first book-length consideration of this form, examining it from gaming and literary perspectives. Nick Montfort, an interactive fiction author himself, offers both aficionados and first-time users a way to approach interactive fiction that will lead to a more pleasurable and meaningful experience of it.Twisty Little Passages looks at interactive fiction beginning with its most important literary ancestor, the riddle. Montfort then discusses Adventure and its precursors (including the I Ching and Dungeons and Dragons), and follows this with an examination of mainframe text games developed in response, focusing on the most influential work of that era, Zork. He then considers the introduction of commercial interactive fiction for home computers, particularly that produced by Infocom. Commercial works inspired an independent reaction, and Montfort describes the emergence of independent creators and the development of an online interactive fiction community in the 1990s. Finally, he considers the influence of interactive fiction on other literary and gaming forms. With Twisty Little Passages, Nick Montfort places interactive fiction in its computational and literary contexts, opening up this still-developing form to new consideration.

Opening the Xbox: Inside Microsoft's Plan to Unleash an Entertainment Revolution


Dean Takahashi - 2002
    It has already eclipsed motion pictures to become one of the largest and fastest growing markets in history and a lamplight illuminating where the future of entertainment is headed. In an effort to grab a chunk of that market, Microsoft—an absolute newcomer to the gaming industry—has put billions of dollars on the line in a gamble to build the fastest, most mature, most advanced video game console ever: the Xbox. Is this new Microsoft venture just another experiment that, like WebTV, was launched to much fanfare but will be quickly forgotten? Or will it become the next Windows, finding its way into the homes and lives of millions of people around the world?In Opening the Xbox, award-winning journalist and gaming-industry expert Dean Takahashi guides you deep into the amazing story of this much-anticipated game console. Through exclusive interviews with top executives at Microsoft, exhaustive research, and a penetrating investigation, he unveils the tumultuous story behind the development of the project and how it could change the entertainment industry forever. Inside, you'll discover that what started as Project Midway, spearheaded by Jonathan "Seamus" Blackley and three of his renegade cohorts, turned into Xbox—a multibillion-dollar enterprise that became Microsoft's largest internal startup ever and a personal pet project of Bill Gates. The colorful infighting, the cutthroat tactics used to lure partners, and the race to vanquish bitter rivals Sony and Nintendo are all laid bare in this unvarnished, high-tech drama. It's a story like no other, full of heroes and villains, plot twists and intrigue—all before the backdrop of Microsoft's grand ambition to move from the office into the living room.If you're like the millions of gamers, investors, and business spectators who anxiously anticipated the Xbox, then you don't want to miss the explosive, exclusive, behind-the-scenes story in Opening the Xbox.

Itchy, Tasty: An Unofficial History of Resident Evil


Alex Aniel - 2021
    Itchy, Tasty narrates the development of each Resident Evil game released between 1996 and 2006, interspersed with fascinating commentary from the game creators themselves, offering unique insight into how the series became the world-conquering franchise it is today.

Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy


Simon Blackburn - 1999
    Written expressly for "anyone who believes there are big questions out there, but does not know how to approach them," Think provides a sound framework for exploring the most basic themes of philosophy, and for understanding how major philosophers have tackled the questions that have pressed themselves most forcefully on human consciousness.

The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History


Robert Darnton - 1984
    When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730's held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously funny that they choked with laughter when they reenacted it in pantomime some twenty times? Why in the 18th century version of "Little Red Riding Hood" did the wolf eat the child at the end? What did the anonymous townsman of Montpelier have in mind when he kept an exhaustive dossier on all the activities of his native city? These are some of the provocative questions Robert Darnton attempts to answer in this dazzling series of essays that probe the ways of thought in what we like to call "The Age of Enlightenment."

Metaphors We Live By


George Lakoff - 1980
    Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by", metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.

Reading in the Dark: Using Film as a Tool in the English Classroom


John Golden - 2001
    Harness the students interest in film to help them engage critically with a range of media including visual and printed texts.

The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently... and Why


Richard E. Nisbett - 2003
    As a result, East Asian thought is “holistic”—drawn to the perceptual field as a whole and to relations among objects and events within that field. By contrast, Westerners focus on salient objects or people, use attributes to assign them to categories, and apply rules of formal logic to understand their behavior. From feng shui to metaphysics, from comparative linguistics to economic history, a gulf separates the children of Aristotle from the descendants of Confucius. At a moment in history when the need for cross-cultural understanding and collaboration have never been more important, The Geography of Thought offers both a map to that gulf and a blueprint for a bridge that will span it.

A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis: The Eightfold Path to More Effective Problem Solving


Eugene Bardach - 2000
    A clear and effective guide to policy analysis addressing the psychology, as well as the logic, of the analytical process Full of helpful hints, such as warnings about language traps, strategies for economizing on data collection, and checklists for generating solutions, this book is widely used by students, practicing policy officials in government, and professionals in executive-level training programmes.

Essentials of Sociology


Anthony Giddens - 2001
    New features in the Fourth Edition pull together the big questions in each chapter and organize them around a concept map to help students synthesize concepts and see the personal and global applications of a sociological imagination.

The Social Movements Reader: Cases and Concepts


Jeff Goodwin - 2002
    The Social Movements Reader, Second Edition, provides the most important and readable articles and book selections on recent social movements from around the world.With selected readings and editorial material this book combines the strengths of a reader and a textbookReflects new developments in the study of social movements, both empirical and theoreticalProvides original texts, many of them classics in the field of social movements, which have been edited for the non-technical readerSidebars offer concise definitions of key terms as well as biographies of famous activists and chronologies of several key movementsRequires no prior knowledge about social movements or theories of social movements

Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School


C.J. Pascoe - 2007
    Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in a racially diverse working-class high school, Dude, You're a Fag sheds new light on masculinity both as a field of meaning and as a set of social practices. C. J. Pascoe's unorthodox approach analyzes masculinity as not only a gendered process but also a sexual one. She demonstrates how the "specter of the fag" becomes a disciplinary mechanism for regulating heterosexual as well as homosexual boys and how the "fag discourse" is as much tied to gender as it is to sexuality.

Student Success in College: Creating Conditions That Matter


George D. Kuh - 2005
    This book clearly shows the benefits of student learning and educational effectiveness that can be realized when these conditions are present. Based on the Documenting Effective Educational Practice (DEEP) project from the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University, this book provides concrete examples from twenty institutions that other colleges and universities can learn from and adapt to help create a success-oriented campus culture and learning environment.