Leaving the blinding sand for the cool shade of the trees, I walked carefully through the undergrowth to where Dave, using two twigs as chopsticks, was picking up a freshly severed human finger'... John's trip to India starts badly when his girlfriend returns home. Left to his own devices, he soon finds himself looking at the sharp end of a knife in a train station cubicle. But his life is saved - and turned upside down - by an enigmatic fellow traveller called Rick, who persuades John to question his mundane plans for the future, risking it all for much, much more. Fast forward to the Thai island of Koh Pha-Ngan; John, Rick and their new friend Dave pose as millionaire aristocrats in a hedonistic Eden of beautiful girls, free drugs and wild beach parties. However, when they find themselves hotly pursued by the Thai Mafia. Tragedy sends them on increasingly adrenalin-fuelled journeys to Indonesia, Australia and Hong Kong, facing danger at every turn. This is not travel writing for the faint-hearted: this is an unbelievable true story of the hunt for excess, at any cost. AUTHOR: At the age of 18, after a variety of dismal package holidays, John Harris bought a ticket to Egypt; things would never be the same again. Following a few years of on-off travel, mostly in Africa, he decided to go a stage further and work in the developing world, joining VSO to work as a building instructor in Nigeria. Back in London, life proved uninspiring and the draw of distant shores called again. John set off on his trip round South-East Asia which later formed the background for The Backpacker.
In 2007, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett filmed a landmark discussion about modern atheism. The video went viral. Now in print for the first time, the transcript of their conversation is illuminated by new essays from three of the original participants and an introduction by Stephen Fry. At the dawn of the new atheist movement, the thinkers who became known as “the four horsemen,” the heralds of religion's unraveling—Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett—sat down together over cocktails. What followed was a rigorous, pathbreaking, and enthralling exchange, which has been viewed millions of times since it was first posted on YouTube. This is intellectual inquiry at its best: exhilarating, funny, and unpredictable, sincere and probing, reminding us just how varied and colorful the threads of modern atheism are. Here is the transcript of that conversation, in print for the first time, augmented by material from the living participants: Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett. These new essays, introduced by Stephen Fry, mark the evolution of their thinking and highlight particularly resonant aspects of this epic exchange. Each man contends with the most fundamental questions of human existence while challenging the others to articulate their own stance on God and religion, cultural criticism, spirituality, debate with people of faith, and the components of a truly ethical life. Praise for The Four Horsemen “This bracing exchange of ideas crackles with energy. It’s fascinating to watch four first-class minds explore a rugged intellectual terrain. . . . The text affords a different, more reflective way of processing the truly vital exchange of ideas. . . . I commend the book to those seeking an honest reckoning with their religion—and those curious about how the world looks from a rigorously naturalistic and atheistic point of view.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “The full, electrifying transcript of the one and only conversation between the quartet of luminaries dubbed the ‘four horsemen’ of the New Atheism, which took place in Washington, D.C., in 2007. Among the vast range of ideas and questions they discuss: Is it ever possible to win a war of ideas? Is spirituality the preserve of the religious? And, are there any truths you would rather not know?”—The Bookseller (UK) (starred review)
A “gripping, sensitive” biography of the trailblazing singer who carved a path for African American artists including Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson (The Atlanta Voice). Performing in a country rife with racism and segregation, the tenor Roland Hayes was the first African American man to reach international fame as a concert performer. He became one of the few artists in the world who could sell out Town Hall, Carnegie Hall, Symphony Hall, and Covent Garden. Performing the African American spirituals he was raised on, his voice was marked with a unique sonority which easily navigated French, German, and Italian art songs. A multiculturalist both on and off the stage, he counted among his friends George Washington Carver, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ezra Pound, Pearl Buck, Dwight Eisenhower, and Langston Hughes. This “substantial and well-documented” biography spans the history of Hayes’s life and career and the legacy he left behind as a musician and a champion of African American rights (BBC Music Magazine). It is an authentic, panoramic portrait of a man who was as complex as the music he performed. “Like many generations of celebrated African American concert artists, I am an inheritor of the legacy left by the great Roland Hayes. Yet, we hardly know his name today. With this long overdue book, the oversight is now remedied.” —Lawrence Brownlee, Metropolitan Opera “A wonderful journey through Hayes’ performances, racial plight and acceptance.” —Examiner.com
Reaching back to the beginnings of television, The Greatest Cult Television Shows offers readers a fun and accessible look at the 100 most significant cult television series of all time, compiled in a single resource that includes valuable information on the shows and their creators. While they generally lack mainstream appeal, cult television shows develop devout followings over time and exert some sort of impact on a given community, society, culture, or even media industry. Cult television shows have been around since at least the 1960s, with Star Trek perhaps the most famous of that era. However, the rise of cable contributed to the rise of cult television throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and now, with the plethora of streaming options available, more shows can be added to this categorization Reaching back to the beginnings of television, the book includes such groundbreaking series as The Twilight Zone and The Prisoner alongside more contemporary examples like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Hannibal. The authors provide production history for each series and discuss their relevance to global pop culture. To provide a more global approach to the topic, the authors also consider several non-American cult TV series, including British, Canadian, and Japanese shows. Thus, Monty Python’s Flying Circus appears alongside Sailor Moon and Degrassi Junior High. Additionally, to move beyond the conception of “cult” as a primarily white, heteronormative, fanboy obsession, the book contains shows that speak to a variety of cult audiences and experiences, such as Queer as Folk and Charmed. With detailed arguments for why these shows deserve to be considered the greatest of all time, Olson and Reinhard provide ideas for discussion and debate on cult television. Each entry in this book demonstrates the importance of the 100 shows chosen for inclusion and highlights how they offer insight into the period and the cults that formed around them.
Focusing on solutions, this second edition provides guidance for readers who face a variety of real-world problems. The text presents a complete introduction to key concepts and a clear mapping of the methods. New chapters address spatial patterning in single variables and spatial relations. The author distinguishes between local and global methods and provides detailed coverage of geographical weighting, image texture measures, local spatial autocorrelation, and geographically weighted regression.
Conceived in Crisis argues that the American Revolution was not just the product of the Imperial Crisis, brought on by Parliament’s attempt to impose a new idea of empire on the American colonies. To an equal or greater degree, it was a response to the inability of individual colonial governments to deliver basic services, which undermined their legitimacy. Factional bickering over policy, violent extralegal regulations, and the dreadful experiences of conducting an imperial war while governing a demographically growing and geographically expanding population all led colonists and imperial officials to consider reforming the colonial governments into more powerful and coercive entities. Using Pennsylvania as a case study, Christopher Pearl demonstrates how this history of ineffective colonial governance precipitated a process of state formation that was accelerated by the demands of the Revolutionary War. The powerful state governments that resulted dominated the lives of ordinary people well into the nineteenth century. Conceived in Crisis makes sense of the trajectory from weak colonial to strong revolutionary states, and in so doing explains the limited success of efforts to consolidate state power at the national level during the early Republican period.
Mainstream discussions of ethics often search for a problem-solving theory or explore ontological status. This book argues instead that the proper starting point should be the words and deeds of ordinary people in ordinary disagreements - the ethical concepts in play can only derive full meaning within the context of ordinary human lives.
In Unfriendly to Liberty, Christopher F. Minty explores the origins of loyalism in New York City between 1768 and 1776, and revises our understanding of the coming of the American Revolution. Through detailed analyses of those who became loyalists, Minty argues that would-be loyalists came together long before Lexington and Concord to form an organized, politically motivated, and inclusive political group that was centered around the DeLancey faction. Following the DeLanceys' election to the New York Assembly in 1768, these men, elite and nonelite, championed an inclusive political economy that advanced the public good, and they strongly protested Parliament's reorientation of the British Empire. For New York loyalists, it was local politics, factions, institutions, and behaviors that governed their political activities in the build up to the American Revolution. By focusing on political culture, organization, and patterns of allegiance, Unfriendly to Liberty shows how the contending allegiances of loyalists and patriots were all but locked in place by 1775 when British troops marched out of Boston to seize caches of weapons in neighboring villages. Indeed, local political alignments that were formed in the imperial crises of the 1760s and 1770s provided a critical platform for the divide between loyalists and patriots in New York City. Political and social disputes coming out of the Seven Years' War, more than republican radicalization in the 1770s, forged the united force that would make New York City a center of loyalism throughout the American Revolution.
Towns without nationally advertised fast-food restaurants often eagerly await the day when the golden arches sprout next door to the local car dealership. But what really happens to a community with the arrival of the uni-burger? Christopher Gunn and Hazel Dayton Gunn demonstrate that perhaps three-quarters of the money a community spends at its burger emporium will leave the area. Poor communities remain poor, they assert, because local capital tends to be drained off to financial centers, corporate accounts, and stockholders' portfolios. In keeping with ecologists' injunction to "think globally and act locally," this imaginative book documents ways in which communities have counteracted constraints of the capitalist economic system and succeeded in promoting democratic control of their resources. Taking as one example the local impact of a new McDonald's restaurant, Gunn and Gunn first illustrate how capital potentially available for community development may be identified. They then explore a variety of alternative institutions—credit unions, nonprofit corporations, and consumers' and workers' cooperatives, among others—that serve to attract and retain resources, foster growth, and extend public control over the development process. The authors also consider how grassroots activism for social change may be integrated with more conventional political practice. Reclaiming Capital will be a vital resource for activists, elected officials, and others concerned with urban and regional planning.
This work explores the British country house between 1700-1830 and looks at the lives of the noblemen and the servants who inhabited them. Reference is made to the whole of the British Isles and there is a discussion of their political significance.
Darwinian evolution is taught unreservedly to students of science around the world as incontrovertible truth even though many aspects of the theory have been thoroughly discredited while others are woefully lacking in corroboration from a standpoint of proper scientific precept and practice. Practical and honest scientists increasingly are acknowledging that evolutionism is biologically and mathematically impossible. The outlandish premise is at odds with the laws of physics and manifestly incompatible with genuine geological and paleontological criteria for aging and classifying rocks, strata and fossils. Evolutionary theory's ostracism of God as a supreme designer and creator of the universe and of life has emboldened many of history's most ruthless dictators who have embraced its disturbing message to commit crimes of unspeakable evil. Many millions of people have lost their lives as demagogues, fueled by evolutionist inclinations, have sought to legitimize sinister proclivities such as racism, bigotry, eugenics and ethnic cleansing, among other perpetrations of antipathy and wickedness. It is not unreasonable to assume that many of today's social and behavioral thinkers, as well as misguided scientists who support evolutionary theory, also nurture predilections that are far removed from wholesome deportment and espouse leanings that show scant respect for the sanctity of human life. Evolutionary thought falls outside the precincts of essential moral contemplation.and is beyond the realm of real science!
Population growth and the drop in the returns from the major cash crop (coffee) for small farmers are the main drivers that have influenced the farming systems and mobility of farmers in the Western Highlands of Cameroon. The main objective of the research that led to this book was to determine the interactions between farming systems and human mobility in this region of Cameroon. A comparative study was conducted through household and field surveys in three villages and conceptualized based on the systems approach. The different types of mobility were influenced by household social factors, the quest for 'high valued' farm plots and hired labour. Urban-rural migration contributed to occupation diversification and social mobility. The sustainability factor was a function of land use intensity, intensity of off-farm inputs, the household adjustment factor and mobility of the household. The sacred groves were rich in plant diversity of varied ecological and economic importance. Nitrogen mining was common at all levels of the farming system. These determinants and types of mobility claims are pertinent to the research area; the sustainability results of the farming systems reflect the reality on the ground; the nutrient flux evaluated at the crop and farm levels constitute a valuable database for future research.
Who were the People of the Moor? Sixty generations have lived here since the Roman Second Legion descended from the skyline. What is the significance of the spirit-road....or a beautiful pavement in a villa buried by the soil of centuries? Who were the mysterious hill-fort people who established a high-status society on an ancient site? We encounter Norman lords and the lives of the miserable, a Mayor of Bristol who lost his wife when Black Death swept the people away, a senior Judge but also the common people, determined to build a magnificent structure as a sign of faith and hope for the future. What would it have been like to go to church in 1460? We read of the irrepressible way that the late medieval life of Merry England spills over into the church; of payments to minstrels and skilled craftsmen. The People of the Moor have to face up to religion-shock as a reform movement rocks their foundations. They contend with a tsunami, pirates and soldiers. As the generations roll by, we experience life in an 18th century village and witness a remarkable experiment by Hannah and her sisters. An in-depth look at the mid-Victorians holds up a mirror to social transformation on wheels and the challenge of educating and providing for the poor. Some intriguing characters pass each other in the street in 1840. Who is the village tailor, a yeoman farmer with relatives sentenced to death or transportation to Australia, a Quaker girl and the old gypsy who will die next year in the workhouse? In time new forms of power take hold and rural communities between the wars experience rapid social change. This story of small communities on their journey through time is a microcosm of English history. The march of 60 generations is our story too.
Studies the thought and actions of the Reformation's central figures - reformers, counter-reformers, and their supporters - in the light of ordinary people.
This book provides a thorough introduction to the War of American Independence. Told with great authority and clarity the book describes and details the effects of each notable event from 1770 to 1781. The book examines each of the major battles and skirmishes but does not get bogged down in deep analysis of battle formations and strategies. Instead the book concentrates on the war as a whole and its political and ecomonic impacts on Britain and America and consequently how each commander's startegy was affected. The book is littered with anecdotes to give the reader a clearer understanding of how the war affected the lives of those involved.
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