Sometimes, hunting magical beasts can be murder... In the great city of Abraniotok live the Stalkers: men and women dedicated to hunting miscreations – magically created beasts who lurk in the city and countryside. So when a pair of fast-breeding, tree-eating miscreations attack a valley of orchards two days away, Assistant Stalker Abyowith and Lieutenant Kalitith are ordered to grab their swords and pistols and hunt them down. It seems like an easy job until Abyowith finds the son of the local noble, lying dead near a mountain stream. Now, Abyowith and Kalitith must split their focus between finding the young man’s killer and stopping the tree eaters from destroying the valley. But as what looks like a simple murder grows ever-more complicated, the Stalkers realize that discovering the truth may be far more dangerous than anything they expected.
The Knighthood Trials are supposed to be hard. They aren’t supposed to be murder... Abyowith is ready to join the Knights of the Exculpatory Order and fight miscreations—the magical creatures plaguing the countryside. She can ride, shoot and swordfight, and if she has some trouble using magic, well, she’s certain she can overcome that. So, when she rides to the Trials, she fully expects to become a Knight Initiate. She did not expect to lose everything and need rescue by the very knights she wanted to join. Or that Marfolio, Captain of the mysterious Royal Stalkers, would take an interest in her. Or that she would fail the Knights’ magical ability test. And she certainly wasn’t expecting one of her fellow Initiates to be brutally murdered. Now, with suspicion falling on her, and her future in the Knights at stake, Abyowith must pass her magic test, learn what the Captain of the Stalkers wants, and discover who is killing her fellow initiates before the killer comes after her...
A New York Times bestseller! In 2006, twenty-seven-year-old Jessica Buchanan stepped off a plane in Nairobi, Kenya, with a teaching degree and long-held dreams of helping to educate African children. By 2009, she had met and married a native Swede named Erik Landemalm, who worked to coordinate humanitarian aid with authorities in Africa. Together the two moved from Nairobi to Somalia, and with hopes of starting a family, their future couldn’t have been brighter. . . . But on October 25, 2011, Jessica and a colleague were kidnapped at gunpoint and held for ransom by a band of Somali pirates. For the next three months, Jessica was terrorized by more than two dozen gangsters, held outdoors in filthy conditions, and kept on a starvation diet while her health steadily deteriorated. Negotiations for ransom dragged on, and as the ordeal stretched into its third month, the captors grew increasingly impatient. Every terrifying moment Jessica Buchanan spent suffering in captivity was matched by that of her adoring husband working behind the scenes to deal with her captors. After ninety-three days of fruitless negotiations, and with Jessica’s medical state becoming a life-or-death issue, President Barack Obama ordered Navy SEAL Team Six to attempt a rescue operation. On January 25, 2012, just before the president delivered his State of the Union speech, the team of twenty-four SEALs, under the cover of darkness, attacked the heavily armed hostiles. They killed all nine with no harm to the hostages, who were quickly airlifted out on a military rescue helicopter. In riveting detail, this book chronicles Jessica and Erik’s mutual journey during those torturous months. Together they relate the events prior to the kidnapping, the drama of Jessica’s fight to stay alive, and Erik’s efforts to bolster and support the hunt for her while he acted as liaison between their two families, the FBI, professional hostage negotiators, and the United States government. Both a testament to two people’s courage and a nail-biting look at a life-or-death struggle, this is a harrowing and deeply personal story about their triumph over impossible odds.
In a world where no one really believes in magic, one man is stealing all that's left... Erik Buchanan's first novel introduces Thomas Flarety, whose first visit home from school in four years brings him face to face with a juggler who can create a ball of light from air, a Bishop who can control men with his voice, and a plot to steal what magic is left in the world. Before long, Thomas is thrust into a nightmare of betrayal and murder, where all that he has is threatened by a power he does not understand, and where learning to master a power he did not know he had may be the only way he can survive.
When a magical creature kills, is it murder? On the day Abyowith is promoted to Assistant Stalker, a City Councillor is found is garroted in a locked room. All signs point to a miscreation—a magically created beast—but why would a miscreation break into a man’s house, kill him, and lock the door after? And why, that night, does a voice in the darkness tell Abyowith, “Leave him alone!" With no motive to be found and more victims coming to light, Abyowith begins a search for answers that takes her from the halls of power to the city’s underbelly. And as she closes in on the killer, Abyowith discovers that learning why the Councillor died may be even more dangerous than tracking the creature who killed him.
Thomas Flarety has magic. He used it to destroy a corrupt bishop who tried to steal all the world's magic for himself. And so far, Thomas has managed to keep it a secret. Then raiders attack the northern Duchy of Frostmire with fire and magic. Henry, son of the duke and Thomas's friend, convinces Thomas to leave his studies and go help. But the church is also investigating the rumours of "witchcraft" in the north, and the Archbishop's Envoy is as interested in Thomas as he is in the raiders. Now Thomas must use all his wits, his skills and his magic to figure out who the raiders are and how to stop them. He must protect Eileen, the girl he loves, from the intrigues of the duke's court. He must find a way to keep the duke from turning him over to the Archbishop's Envoy. And he must do it before the raiders destroy them all.
A harrowing and heart-wrenching memoir of humanitarian aid worker Buchanan's kidnapping by Somali land pirates, her three months in captivity, her rescue by the Navy SEALs, and her husband's extraordinary efforts to help bring her home.
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile brings to life the pivotal five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln and the start of the Civil War—a simmering crisis that finally tore a deeply divided nation in two. A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, Time, Los Angeles Times, Men’s Health, New York Post, Lit Hub, Book Riot On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston Harbor: Fort Sumter. Master storyteller Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter—a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.” At the heart of this suspense-filled narrative are Major Robert Anderson, Sumter’s commander and a former slave owner sympathetic to the South but loyal to the Union; Edmund Ruffin, a vain and bloodthirsty radical who stirs secessionist ardor at every opportunity; and Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of a prominent planter, conflicted over both marriage and slavery and seeing parallels between them. In the middle of it all is the overwhelmed Lincoln, battling with his duplicitous secretary of state, William Seward, as he tries desperately to avert a war that he fears is inevitable—one that will eventually kill 750,000 Americans. Drawing on diaries, secret communiques, slave ledgers, and plantation records, Larson gives us a political horror story that captures the forces that led America to the brink—a dark reminder that we often don’t see a cataclysm coming until it’s too late.
The Third Edition of this successful textbook introduces students to the major concepts, models, and approaches surrounding the public sector. Now fully updated to include coverage of the New Public Management (NPM), The Public Sector is the most comprehensive textbook on theories of public policy and public administration. The Public Sector is introduced within a three-part framework: public resource allocation, redistribution and regulation. Jan-Erik Lane explains the basic concepts of each of these broad areas, and goes on to examine their consequences for various approaches to the making and implementation of public policy. The book explores models of management, effectiveness and efficiency, and evaluates the contribution, among many, of public choice and neo-institutionalist approaches, organizational theory, models of normative policy-making and, expanded in this edition, the theory of fiscal federalism. The New Edition retains chapters on public sector reform and continues to contrast the logic of the new management state with that of the old administrative state before introducing the basic ideas of New Public Management. The Public Sector will be essential reading to all students seeking a deeper understanding of the modern state and government across political science and public policy, administration and management.
On Nov. 28, 1858, a ship called the Wanderer slipped silently into a coastal channel and unloaded a cargo of over 400 African slaves onto Jekyll Island, Georgia, fifty years after the African slave trade had been made illegal. It was the last ship ever to bring a cargo of African slaves to American soil. The Wanderer began life as a luxury racing yacht, but within a year was secretly converted into a slave ship, and--using the pennant of the New York Yacht Club as a diversion--sailed off to Africa. More than a slaving venture, her journey defied the federal government and hurried the nation's descent into civil war. The New York Times first reported the story as a hoax; as groups of Africans began to appear in the small towns surrounding Savannah, however, the story of the Wanderer began to leak out, igniting a fire of protest and debate that made headlines throughout the nation and across the Atlantic. As the story shifts from New York City to Charleston, to the Congo River, Jekyll Island and finally Savannah, the Wanderer's tale is played out in the slave markets of Africa, the offices of the New York Times, heated Southern courtrooms, The White House, and some of the most charming homes Southern royalty had to offer. In a gripping account of the high seas and the high life in New York and Savannah, Erik Calonius brings to light one of the most important and little remembered stories of the Civil War period.
This book explores the puzzling phenomenon of new veiling practices among lower middle class women in Cairo, Egypt. Although these women are part of a modernizing middle class, they also voluntarily adopt a traditional symbol of female subordination. How can this paradox be explained? An explanation emerges which reconceptualizes what appears to be reactionary behavior as a new style of political struggle--as accommodating protest. These women, most of them clerical workers in the large government bureaucracy, are ambivalent about working outside the home, considering it a change which brings new burdens as well as some important benefits. At the same time they realize that leaving home and family is creating an intolerable situation of the erosion of their social status and the loss of their traditional identity. The new veiling expresses women's protest against this. MacLeod argues that the symbolism of the new veiling emerges from this tense subcultural dilemma, involving elements of both resistance and acquiescence.
The president is arguably the most recognized and powerful individual in the United States. This reference work explores the American presidency in relation to issues of race concerning the African American community. This work provides a contemporary and refreshing examination of the American presidency through the prism of race and race relations in America, revealing a long and complicated relationship between the U.S. presidency and the African American community. The book evaluates each of the forty-five American presidents' policies, cabinet appointments, and handling of race matters in the United States. Following an extensive timeline, chronological chapters take an incisive look at each American president's life and career as well as the policies enacted during his presidency that affected the African American community. The presidents' personal writings, memoirs, autobiographies, and biographies frame their views on the issue of race and how they dealt with it before, during, and after their presidency.
Jan-Erik Lane is a very experienced and well-known author Unique - no other book has such a systematic and global approach to their analysis of democracy (uses methodological positivism) Plenty of use of empirical evidence, so will be useful as a reference tool
From heroic George Washington to the dastardly Richard Nixon, the oval office has been occupied by larger-than-life personalities since 1789. The position comes with enormous power and responsibility, and every American president thus far has managed to achieve great things. However, the President of the United States is only human—and oftentimes far from perfect. While some men suffered through only minor mishaps during their time in office, others are famously remembered for leaving behind much bigger messes. In the third installment of the Epic Fails series, authors Erik Slader and Ben Thompson, and artist Tim Foley, take readers on another hilarious ride, exploring the lives, legacies, and failures of some of America’s commanders in chief.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The author of The Splendid and the Vile brings to life the pivotal five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln and the start of the Civil War in this “riveting reexamination of a nation in tumult” (Los Angeles Times). “A feast of historical insight and narrative verve . . . This is Erik Larson at his best, enlivening even a thrice-told tale into an irresistible thriller.”—The Wall Street Journal On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston Harbor: Fort Sumter. Master storyteller Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter—a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.” At the heart of this suspense-filled narrative are Major Robert Anderson, Sumter’s commander and a former slave owner sympathetic to the South but loyal to the Union; Edmund Ruffin, a vain and bloodthirsty radical who stirs secessionist ardor at every opportunity; and Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of a prominent planter, conflicted over both marriage and slavery and seeing parallels between them. In the middle of it all is the overwhelmed Lincoln, battling with his duplicitous secretary of state, William Seward, as he tries desperately to avert a war that he fears is inevitable—one that will eventually kill 750,000 Americans. Drawing on diaries, secret communiques, slave ledgers, and plantation records, Larson gives us a political horror story that captures the forces that led America to the brink—a dark reminder that we often don’t see a cataclysm coming until it’s too late.
This book presents a unique overview of urban policy conducted by national authorities in the fifteen 'old' member states of the EU. Focussing on recent changes in the development of the larger cities and changes in policymaking by national authorities with respect to urban development, the book is structured around 15 'country chapters', written by national experts in the field of urban development. The book provides an up-to-date source of information, and will be of importance to anyone involved in the role and development of European cities as well as the formulation and delivery of associated national policies.
Analyzing the period after 1945 when uprisings against colonial rule broke out across the world, Age of Emergency (Oxford University Press), focuses on how violence was experienced in the lives of ordinary people in imperial Britain. Using various historical records including letters, television, newspapers, novels, and more, Linstrum uncovers the violent torture, executions, and gruesome punishments the community faced. Throughout his writing, Linstrum demonstrates the significance of war beyond the fight between soldiers, and the ways in which war encroaches on all aspects of life.
In 1840s Rhode Island, the state’s seventeenth-century colonial charter remained in force and restricted suffrage to property owners, effectively disenfranchising 60 percent of potential voters. Thomas Wilson Dorr’s failed attempt to rectify that situation through constitutional reform ultimately led to an armed insurrection that was quickly quashed—and to a stiff sentence for Dorr himself. Nevertheless, as Erik Chaput shows, the Dorr Rebellion stands as a critical moment of American history during the two decades of fractious sectional politics leading up to the Civil War. This uprising was the only revolutionary republican movement in the antebellum period that claimed the people’s sovereignty as the basis for the right to alter or abolish a form of government. Equally important, it influenced the outcomes of important elections throughout northern states in the early 1840s and foreshadowed the breakup of the national Democratic Party in 1860. Through his spellbinding and engaging narrative, Chaput sets the rebellion in the context of national affairs—especially the abolitionist movement. While Dorr supported the rights of African Americans, a majority of delegates to the “People’s Convention” favored a whites-only clause to ensure the proposed constitution’s passage, which brought abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, Parker Pillsbury, and Abby Kelley to Rhode Island to protest. Meanwhile, Dorr’s ideology of the people’s sovereignty sparked profound fears among Southern politicians regarding its potential to trigger slave insurrections. Drawing upon years of extensive archival research, Chaput’s book provides the first scholarly biography of Dorr, as well as the most detailed account of the rebellion yet published. In it, Chaput tackles issues of race and gender and carries the story forward into the 1850s to examine the transformation of Dorr’s ideology into the more familiar refrain of popular sovereignty. Chaput demonstrates how the rebellion’s real aims and significance were far broader than have been supposed, encompassing seemingly conflicting issues including popular sovereignty, antislavery, land reform, and states’ rights. The People’s Martyr is a definitive look at a key event in our history that further defined the nature of American democracy and the form of constitutionalism we now hold as inviolable.
A perspective on the public sector that presents a concise and comprehensive analysis of exactly what it is and how it operates. Governments in any society deliver a large number of services and goods to their populations. To get the job done, they need public management in order to steer resources – employees, money and laws – into policy outputs and outcomes. In well-ordered societies the teams who work for the state work under a rule-of-law framework, known as public administration. This book covers the key issues of: the principal-agent framework and the public sector public principals and their agents the economic reasons of government public organization, incentives and rationality in government the essence of public administration: legality and the rule of law public policy criteria: the Cambridge and Chicago positions public teams and private teams public firms public insurance public management policy Public Administration & Public Management is essential reading for those with professional and research interests in public administration and public management.
Global politics in the twenty-first century is complicated by dense economic interdependence, rapid technological innovation, and fierce security competition. How should governments formulate grand strategy in this complex environment? Many strategists look to deterrence as the answer, but how much can we expect of deterrence? Classical deterrence theory developed in response to the nuclear threats of the Cold War, but strategists since have applied it to a variety of threats in the land, sea, air, space, and cyber domains. If war is the continuation of politics by other means, then the diversity of technologies in modern war suggests a diversity of political effects. Some military forces or postures are most useful for "winning" various kinds of wars. Others are effective for "warning" adversaries of consequences or demonstrating resolve. Still others may accomplish these goals at lower political cost, or with greater strategic stability. Deterrence is not a simple strategy, therefore, but a complex relationship between many ends and many means. This book presents findings from a decade-long research program on "cross-domain deterrence." Through a series of theoretical and empirical studies, we explore fundamental trade-offs that have always been implicit in practice but have yet to be synthesized into a general theory of deterrence. Gartzke and Lindsay integrate newly revised and updated versions of published work alongside new work into a holistic framework for understanding how deterrence works--or fails to work--in multiple domains. Their findings show that in deterrence, all good things do not go together.
What is the impact of lobbying on the policymaking process? And who benefits? This book argues that most research overlooks the lobbying of regulatory agencies even though it accounts for almost half of all lobbying - even though bureaucratic agencies have considerable leeway in how they choose to implement law.
The first shot of the American Civil War was not fired on April 12, 1861, in Charleston, South Carolina, but instead came on October 16, 1859, in Harpers Ferry, Virginia—or so claimed former slave turned abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The shot came like a meteor in the dark. John Brown, the infamous fighter on the Kansas plains and detester of slavery, led a band of nineteen men on a desperate nighttime raid that targeted the Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. There, they planned to begin a war to end slavery in the United States. But after 36 tumultuous hours, John Brown’s Raid failed, and Brown himself became a prisoner of the state of Virginia. Brown’s subsequent trial further divided north and south on the issue of slavery as Brown justified his violent actions to a national audience forced to choose sides. Ultimately, Southerners cheered Brown’s death at the gallows while Northerners observed it with reverence. The nation’s dividing line had been drawn. Herman Melville and Walt Whitman extolled Brown as a “meteor” of the war. Roughly one year after Brown and his men attacked slavery in Virginia, the nation split apart, fueled by Brown’s fiery actions. John Brown’s Raid tells the story of the first shots that led to disunion. Richly filled with maps and images, it includes a driving and walking tour of sites related to Brown’s Raid so visitors today can follow the path of America’s meteor.
“Artificial intelligence has always inspired outlandish visions—that AI is going to destroy us, save us, or at the very least radically transform us. Erik Larson exposes the vast gap between the actual science underlying AI and the dramatic claims being made for it. This is a timely, important, and even essential book.” —John Horgan, author of The End of Science Many futurists insist that AI will soon achieve human levels of intelligence. From there, it will quickly eclipse the most gifted human mind. The Myth of Artificial Intelligence argues that such claims are just that: myths. We are not on the path to developing truly intelligent machines. We don’t even know where that path might be. Erik Larson charts a journey through the landscape of AI, from Alan Turing’s early work to today’s dominant models of machine learning. Since the beginning, AI researchers and enthusiasts have equated the reasoning approaches of AI with those of human intelligence. But this is a profound mistake. Even cutting-edge AI looks nothing like human intelligence. Modern AI is based on inductive reasoning: computers make statistical correlations to determine which answer is likely to be right, allowing software to, say, detect a particular face in an image. But human reasoning is entirely different. Humans do not correlate data sets; we make conjectures sensitive to context—the best guess, given our observations and what we already know about the world. We haven’t a clue how to program this kind of reasoning, known as abduction. Yet it is the heart of common sense. Larson argues that all this AI hype is bad science and bad for science. A culture of invention thrives on exploring unknowns, not overselling existing methods. Inductive AI will continue to improve at narrow tasks, but if we are to make real progress, we must abandon futuristic talk and learn to better appreciate the only true intelligence we know—our own.
The widening and deepening of the European Union have brought to the fore the question of democracy at the European level. The system of domination already in place at the European level requires and aspires to direct legitimation - from the citizens themselves and not merely indirect, derived from the Member Nation States. Such can only be achieved by making the EU into a democratic polity. But can democracy be disassociated from its putative nation-state foundation? A revised concept of democratic legitimacy based on discourse theory is developed. It is argued that post-national democracy requires a constitution but not necessarily a state. The Union amounts to less than a state but more than an international organisation and a system of transnational governance. In the political theory of the multilevel constellation that makes up the EU, it is conceived of as a regional subset of an emerging cosmopolitan order. The EU is a state-less government. As it is not premised on group identity, it is able to accommodate a high measure of variance with regard to territory and function. The book analyzes the reforms undertaken to bring the EU 'closer to the citizens'. It documents elements of democratization and reduction of arbitrary power. However, democracy requires that the citizens can approve or reject the laws they are subjected to. Since the institutional as well as the civic conditions under which a public justification process would be deemed legitimate are not in place, European post-national democracy remains an unaccomplished mission.
When a magical creature kills, is it murder? On the day Abyowith is promoted to Assistant Stalker, a City Councillor is found is garroted in a locked room. All signs point to a miscreation—a magically created beast—but why would a miscreation break into a man’s house, kill him, and lock the door after? And why, that night, does a voice in the darkness tell Abyowith, “Leave him alone!" With no motive to be found and more victims coming to light, Abyowith begins a search for answers that takes her from the halls of power to the city’s underbelly. And as she closes in on the killer, Abyowith discovers that learning why the Councillor died may be even more dangerous than tracking the creature who killed him.
In a world where no one really believes in magic, one man is stealing all that's left... Erik Buchanan's first novel introduces Thomas Flarety, whose first visit home from school in four years brings him face to face with a juggler who can create a ball of light from air, a Bishop who can control men with his voice, and a plot to steal what magic is left in the world. Before long, Thomas is thrust into a nightmare of betrayal and murder, where all that he has is threatened by a power he does not understand, and where learning to master a power he did not know he had may be the only way he can survive.
Globalization is a common theme in the discourse of post-industrial society, yet it is a process that is ill understood. Is it basically a technological phenomenon or does its immense impulse derive from economic factors? Should it be regulated by government, and at what level? Questions such as these are debated continuously in the mass media, yet there are no simple answers available, as globalization is not only an amporphous but also a contested phenomenon.Government and the Economy is a completely reworked edition of Jan-Erik Lane and Svante Ersson's popular text Comparative Political Economy, which the authors have updated for the twenty-first century. They present a profound analysis of how globalization changes the boundaries between state and market, public and private, and government and society. When the state retreats and markets expand, what are the major outcomes? And what is driving this process of redefining the roles of government and the tasks of society?The book offers a penetrating survey of the differences between the countries of the world in terms of their economy and polity, and a forceful critique of the prevailing models in political economy. Lane and Ersson look closely at Public Choice theories which emphasize the role of markets in accomplishing efficient solutions to human interaction while modeling governments as enhancing state failure. They argue that such accounts are misguided. The need for govenment in the global market economy is as strong as it is in relation to the domestic economy. They go on to suggest that the most efficient and equitable means of strengthening government in the global market place, without creating one-world government, is the reform and empowerment of IGOs.
The Visionary Realism of German Economics forms a collection of Erik S. Reinert’s essays bringing the more realistic German economic tradition into focus as an alternative to Anglo-Saxon neoclassical mainstream economics. Together the essays form a holistic theory explaining why economic development—by its very nature—is a very uneven process. Herein lie the important policy implications of the volume.
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