Imagine a drug cartel and Isis joining forces to create a shared caliphate in a southwestern corner of New Mexico. Two soldiers from both sides meet, fight, compete for the affections of the same woman and against all odds, fall in love. Set against the backdrop of a war-torn town rife with corporate franchises, these two men learn to survive in a forlorn and ruthless world.
In the mid 1970's Manhattan night life was fueled by amyl nitrate, cocaine and celebrity sightings, there a conflicted and bipolar bicycle messenger forges his way in the world. He is living in the city of coincidences where somebodies and nobodies are forever mixing it up. When he happens to witness a Kennedy relative burying a call girl on the North Shore of Long Island and tells a detective about it. She, in turn, sets him up to receive a monthly stipend to keep his mouth shut. It is only when he saves the same Kennedy he is extorting from an overdose, does he realize the full ramifications of what he has done.
A twelve-year-old boy sees a UFO in a neighbour's suburban backyard during the early Sixties. He then decides to devote his life to his vision. By the mid-Seventies, he is a published and somewhat stoned-out science fiction writer. Slowly, but, surely his fiction, his reality and his sexuality merge into one ongoing hallucination of self as he descends into the gritty mind-set of a crack addict.
Ralph Snyder is a 21st century dentist living in Great Neck Long Island. He is besieged with a plethora of insurmountable problems: a severely autistic son, a horse-obsessed daughter, a demanding cliental, a looming property tax bill, an exhausted wife, and a recently deceased uncle. While going through his uncle’s rent-controlled apartment, he chances upon a strait jacket that is supposedly the property of the greatest escape artist of all time-Henry Houdini. On a whim he dons the jacket and is instantly thrust in the spiritual and vaudevillian worlds of Houdini. There he lives the life of Henry Houdini and in doing so learns the tricks of his trade as well as falling in love with Houdini’s wife, Bess, who ultimately teaches him how to successfully cope with his life.
There was never a more twisted triangle: A Beverly Hills Billionaire who tapes his kinky trysts; his Beverly Hills wife who is best friends with the First Lady; his Beverly Hills mistress who is an unbridled narcissist. When a cocaine addicted private eye is hired by the Beverly Hills wife to break up the extra martial relationship-the consequences that ensue are more than anyone bargained for.
On the militaristic Homestead, Velcro lines the bottom of objects and the soles of shoes to hold things down. The ten-thousand-mannedspace ship has meandered on the far reaches of the empty universe for thirty-five years. Nonetheless, the ship's shops, schools and services attempts to recapture the amenities of suburban life in the now long-gone earth.A psychiatrist suddenly has a revolution on his hands. Entiredemographics of men, women and children are acting out in a sexually-compulsive manner.People are flocking to the space ship's boiler rooms where they shed their clothes, float, and fluck anonymously. This spins the shrink into a quandary, he tries to rein in his client'simpulses but he too is swept up in the ship's zeitgeist.
Prometheus Rebound is a three-pronged narrative. Henri Vanderveer, a struggling gossip columnist, forges his way through the mid-Seventies celebrity culture in search of the scoop that will make his career-only to find that the story he was looking for will expose his own family. Paul Manship, the renown Art Deco sculptor, searches for a vision that will be the focus of Rockefeller Center. In the hunt for his inspiration he discovers the intricacies of his psychosexual underbelly. And then there is Prometheus, the punished and chained Titan who daily has his liver eaten out by vultures because he stole the fire from the heavens and brought it to earth. This is the price he pays so that we mortals can live in a civilized manner.
Merry Existential Christmas assuages those of us who bemoan holiday season. This short and smart novella is the perfect Christmas story for those who are sophisticated, savvy and grouchy on your list. This ten chapter tome chronicles Christmas from post World War Two France through the Swinging Sixties to present day at an exclusive rehab in the Malibu mountains. Every chapter is a story about seeking meaning and hope in one's life during the Christmas season. It, at times, illuminates as well as entertains. What is out there for all the over educated cynics to read (besides The Christmas Carol) during the Yuletide season? The answer, we hope, is right here.
This is the story of the young Adolf Hitler, an insignificant young man from provincial Austria who suddenly emerged as a momentous historical figure and ultimately the very personification of evil. How did that happen? To answer this question, the narrative takes the reader into the mind of the man before the monster. 150 pages of intriguing appendices substantiate the work's provenance. It tells the story of the seventeen-year-old school drop-out and starving artist; the vagrant who spends years on the streets and in the shelters of Vienna; the Lance Corporal who is fatefully changed by the First World War. In the aftermath of that Great War, amongst the ashes of a demoralised and bankrupt Germany, the narrative follows the bizarre series of events that culminate in this lonely and eccentric young man becoming 'The Fuhrer' of the Third Reich.
To most biologists, sociobiology represents the concept of strict Darwinian individual selection married to an analytical application of ecological principles and brought to bear on social behavior in an unusually exciting and productive way. Joining the biologists are a small number of social scientists. But there are radically divergent views as to how the field should be delimited, and sociobiology is one of the most widely discussed fields in biology and anthropology today. The symposium on which this book is based was arranged by a biologist and an anthropologist. The participants, leaders in their fields, ably present contrasting and responsible views on current issues. This is the first collection of essays on sociobiology in which opposing views are aired. It is an exciting, timely book and an important historical document.
When the father of gene-centred evolutionary biology, George C. Williams, asked the world’s largest university press to publish a popular-level exposé of Darwin’s wager, he was told the idea was far too radical to put in front of the reading public. Because Darwin wagered in 1871 that humankind is born just another cannibalistic great ape, and that it falls on culture, not biology, to civilise us. Darwin’s wager explains mathematically the enormous power of culture, yet that only by acknowledging this can societies become moral and just. Though many, including the United States, may well never get there. Darwin’s wager has been buried, suppressed, for a century and a half. Darwin couldn’t get the idea out, and the giants of modern evolutionary biology couldn’t get the idea out. So on this 150th anniversary we will fight Darwin’s final battle for him.
This book presents a third way to envision the Creatorship of the Triune God who is both compassionate and eschatologically redemptive in providential presence, rather than biasedly gravitating toward the openness of a self-limiting God or God’s all-determining sovereignty. Not only is God in, with, and under creation, God’s kenotic presence invites creatures to participate in the self-giving love of God through both general and special divine action in a top-down-through-bottom-up mode. Creatio continua is God’s own journey of fulfilling the eschatological promise for creation. This redemptive presence of God in creation is a Trinitarian co-protesting against the power of death, sin, and evil, considering the cosmic dimensions of the eschatological hope promised in the resurrection of Jesus. The new creation is the ultimate fulfillment of creaturely freedom and contingency divinely granted in creatio ex nihilo. In arguing this, Shin engages in a comparative and critical study of natural and cosmic theodicy advanced by Catherine Keller, Arthur Peacocke, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Robert Russell.
. . tiny differences in the nature of individuals require that each of usdiscovers, arranges, and sustains his or her unique partnerships andterritories. Because of this uniqueness you must actively steer your life rather that just letting it happen. None of us is mere clay for environment's thumbs and even the youngest of ten children is a one-off architect who renovates his parents. Using clarity, humor, and personal examples, Dr. James Brody shows why you simplify or complicate your life, form partnerships and social networks, and sometimes conform or not. He also explains why certain aspects of physics are your best friends, why your commonsense handles them so well, why women displace men, and why you shouldn't believe bell curves! To illustrate, Brody includes stories from his clients as well as from biologists Charles and Erasmus Darwin, authors William and Henry James, anthropologists Mary Leakey and Loren Eiseley, and Nobel-winners Richard Feynman and Rita Levi-Montalcini. ". a rich tapestry of human behavior, but done in a way that gives significance to individualism using models that physics and mathematics offer. Phase transitions, emergent networks, condensates, swarming, and other models are in the arsenal that he develops in the first half of the book and applies in its second half to evolution and behavior genetics, conflict and suicide, and resilience and personal will. This is serious work, yet it is not difficult to read. I highly recommend it." -Bryen Lorenz, Ph.D., Professor of Electrical Engineering, Widener University
Girls and boys are different. So why do our schools insist on treating them as identical? Bringing together many women's voices, from Bridget Jones to Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan to Germaine Greer, Mr. Tooley challenges education's sacred cows, demanding a radical rethinking of sexual politics and a fairer way forward for women. "This book is...carefully wrought to engage readers who might be coming from very different directions."-Times Educational Supplement.
Social behavior occurs in some of the smallest animals as well as some the largest, and the transition from solitary life to sociality is an unsolved evolutionary mystery. In The Evolution of Social Wasps, James H. Hunt examines social behavior in a single lineage of insects, wasps of the family Vespidae. He presents empirical knowledge of social wasps from two approaches, one that focuses on phylogeny and life history and one that focuses on individual ontogeny, colony development, and population dynamics. He also provides an extensive summary of the existing literature while demonstrating how it can be clouded by theory. Hunt's fresh approach to the conflicting literature on sociality highlights how oft repeated models can become fixed in the thinking of the scientific community. Instead, Hunt presents a mechanistic scenario for the evolution of sociality in wasps that changes our perspective on kin selection, the paradigm that has dominated thinking about social evolution since the 1970s. This innovative new model integrates life history, nutrition, fitness and ecology in which social insect biologists will find a rich storehouse of ideas and information, and behavioral ecologists will find a bracing challenge to long accepted models. Engagingly written, bold, and provocative, The Evolution of Social Wasps marks a milestone in our understanding of one of lifes major evolutionary transitions - the origin of social behavior.
Social behavior has long puzzled evolutionary biologists, since the classical theory of natural selection maintains that individuals should not sacrifice their own fitness to affect that of others. Social Evolution and Inclusive Fitness Theory argues that a theory first presented in 1963 by William D. Hamilton—inclusive fitness theory—provides the most fundamental and general explanation for the evolution and maintenance of social behavior in the natural world. James Marshall guides readers through the vast and confusing literature on the evolution of social behavior, introducing and explaining the competing theories that claim to provide answers to questions such as why animals evolve to behave altruistically. Using simple statistical language and techniques that practicing biologists will be familiar with, he provides a comprehensive yet easily understandable treatment of key concepts and their repeated misinterpretations. Particular attention is paid to how more realistic features of behavior, such as nonadditivity and conditionality, can complicate analysis. Marshall highlights the general problem of identifying the underlying causes of evolutionary change, and proposes fruitful approaches to doing so in the study of social evolution. Social Evolution and Inclusive Fitness Theory describes how inclusive fitness theory addresses both simple and complex social scenarios, the controversies surrounding the theory, and how experimental work supports the theory as the most powerful explanation for social behavior and its evolution.
The #1 New York Times bestseller and subject of the acclaimed major motion picture Bridge of Spies directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Tom Hanks as James B. Donovan. Originally published in 1964, this is the “enthralling…truly remarkable” (The New York Times Book Review) insider account of the Cold War spy exchange—with a new foreword by Jason Matthews, New York Times bestselling author of Red Sparrow and Palace of Treason. In the early morning of February 10, 1962, James B. Donovan began his walk toward the center of the Glienicke Bridge, the famous “Bridge of Spies” which then linked West Berlin to East. With him, walked Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, master spy and for years the chief of Soviet espionage in the United States. Approaching them from the other side, under equally heavy guard, was Francis Gary Powers, the American U-2 spy plane pilot famously shot down by the Soviets, whose exchange for Abel Donovan had negotiated. These were the strangers on a bridge, men of East and West, representatives of two opposed worlds meeting in a moment of high drama. Abel was the most gifted, the most mysterious, the most effective spy in his time. His trial, which began in a Brooklyn United States District Court and ended in the Supreme Court of the United States, chillingly revealed the methods and successes of Soviet espionage. No one was better equipped to tell the whole absorbing history than James B. Donovan, who was appointed to defend one of his country’s enemies and did so with scrupulous skill. In Strangers on a Bridge, the lead prosecutor in the Nuremburg Trials offers a clear-eyed and fast-paced memoir that is part procedural drama, part dark character study and reads like a noirish espionage thriller. From the first interview with Abel to the exchange on the bridge in Berlin—and featuring unseen photographs of Donovan and Abel as well as trial notes and sketches drawn from Abel’s prison cell—here is an important historical narrative that is “as fascinating as it is exciting” (The Houston Chronicle).
Are human beings naturally endowed with a conscience? Or is morality artificially acquired through social pressure and instruction? Most people assume that modern science proves the latter. Further, most of our current social policies are based upon this “scientific” view of the sources of morality. In this book, however, James Q. Wilson seeks to reconcile traditional ideas with a range of important empirical research into the sources of human behavior over the last fifty years. Marshalling evidence drawn from diverse scientific disciplines, including animal behavior, anthropology, evolutionary theory, biology, endocrinology, brain science, genetics, primatology, education and psychology, Wilson shows that the facts about the origin and development of moral reasoning are not at odds with traditional views predating Freud, Darwin and Marx. Our basic sense of right and wrong actually does have a biological and behavioral origin. This “moral sense” arises from the infant’s innate sociability, though it must also be nurtured by parental influence. Thus, this book revives ancient traditions of moral and ethical argument that go back to Aristotle, and reunifies the separate streams of philosophical and scientific knowledge that for so long were regarded as unbridgeable.
Professor Robert Plomin, the world’s leading geneticist, said in 2014 of his search for genes that explain differences in our psychology: ‘I have been looking for these genes for fifteen years. I don’t have any’. Using a mixture of famous and ordinary people, Oliver James drills deep down into the childhood causes of our individuality, revealing why our upbringing, not our genes, plays such an important role in our wellbeing and success. The implications are huge: as adults we can change, we can clutch our fates from predetermined destiny, as parents we can radically alter the trajectory of our childrens’ lives, and as a society we could largely eradicate criminality and poverty. Not in Your Genes will not only change the way you think about yourself and the people around you, but give you the fuel to change your personality and your life for the better.
(Book). The Modern Amazons: Warrior Women on Screen documents the public's seemingly insatiable fascination with the warrior woman archetype in film and on television. The book examines the cautious beginnings of new roles for women in the late fifties, the rapid development of female action leads during the burgeoning second-wave feminist movement in the late sixties and seventies, and the present-day onslaught of female action characters now leaping from page to screen. The book itself is organized into chapters that group women warriors into sub-genres, e.g., classic Amazons like Xena Warrior Princess and the women of the Conan films; superheroes and their archenemies such as Wonder Woman, Batgirl, and Catwoman; revenge films such as the Kill Bill movies; Sexploitation and Blaxploitation films such as Coffy and the Ilsa trilogy; Hong Kong cinema and warriors like Angela Mao, Cynthia Rothrock, and Zhang Ziyi; sci-fi warriors from Star Trek , Blade Runner , and Star Wars ; supersleuths and spies like the Avengers and Charlie's Angels; and gothic warriors such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Kate Beckinsale in Underworld and Van Helsing . In addition, the book is lavishly illustrated with over 400 photos of these popular-culture icons in action, interesting articles and sidebars about themes, trends, weapons, style, and trivia, as well as a complete filmography of more than 150 titles.
Offering the first general introductory text to this subject, the timely Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics reflects the most up-to-date research and current issues being debated in both psychology and philosophy. The book presents students to the areas of cognitive psychology, normative ethics, and metaethics. The first general introduction to evolutionary ethics Provides a comprehensive survey of work in three distinct areas of research: cognitive psychology, normative ethics, and metaethics Presents the most up-to-date research available in both psychology and philosophy Written in an engaging and accessible style for undergraduates and the interested general reader Discusses the evolution of morality, broadening its relevance to those studying psychology
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