Radiants. Humans born with the potential to produce and manipulate the mysterious energy known as "Luvis". Enabling them to perform amazing physical feats and use fantastical abilities. One of these few Radiants is Daedalus Notos. A below-average Radiant, yet a determined one whose life has taken him to the front steps of Regulus University. One of the worlds greatest and most respected training establishments for Radiants. There, he will learn that the path toward success is often lined with failure and he must quickly accept that just tenacity and a positive attitude isn't enough when face to face with titans.
This intimate, revisionist portrait of Fidel Castro, showing how an unlikely young Cuban led his country in revolution and transfixed the world, is “sure to become the standard on Castro’s early life” (Publishers Weekly). Until now, biographers have treated Castro’s life like prosecutors, scouring his past for evidence to convict a person they don’t like or don’t understand. Young Castro challenges us to put aside the caricature of a bearded, cigar-munching, anti-American hothead to discover how Castro became the dictator who acted as a thorn in the side of US presidents for nearly half a century. In this “gripping and edifying narrative…Hansen brings imposing research and notable erudition” (Booklist) to Castro’s early life, showing Castro getting his toughness from a father who survived Spain’s class system and colonial wars to become one of the most successful independent plantation owners in Cuba. We see a boy running around that plantation more comfortable playing with the children of his father’s laborers than his own classmates at elite boarding schools in Santiago de Cuba and Havana. We discover a young man who writes flowery love letters from prison and contemplates the meaning of life, a gregarious soul attentive to the needs of strangers but often indifferent to the needs of his own family. These pages show a liberal democrat who admires FDR’s New Deal policies and is skeptical of communism, but is also hostile to American imperialism. They show an audacious militant who stages a reckless attack on a military barracks but is canny about building an army of resisters. In short, Young Castro reveals a complex man. The first American historian in a generation to gain access to the Castro archives in Havana, Jonathan Hansen was able to secure cooperation from Castro’s family and closest confidants. He gained access to hundreds of never-before-seen letters and interviewed people he was the first to ask for their impressions of the man. The result is a nuanced and penetrating portrait of a man at once brilliant, arrogant, bold, vulnerable, and all too human: a man who, having grown up on an island that felt like a colonial cage, was compelled to lead his country to independence.
Bringing rare interviews and meticulous research to the cloaked world of Mexican politics in the mid-twentieth century, Palace Politics provides a captivating look at the authoritarian Mexican state—one of the longest-lived regimes of its kind in recent history—as well as the origins of political instability itself, with revelations that can be applied to a variety of contemporary political situations around the globe. Culling a trove of remarkable firsthand accounts from former Mexican presidents, finance ministers, interior ministers, and other high officials from the 1950s through the 1980s, Jonathan Schlefer describes a world in which elite politics planted the seeds of a mammoth socioeconomic crisis. Palace Politics outlines the process by which political infighting among small rival factions of high officials drove Mexico to precarious situations at all levels of government. Schlefer also demonstrates how, earlier on, elite cooperation among these factions had helped sustain one of the most stable growth economies in Latin America, until all-or-nothing struggles began to tear the Mexican ruling party apart in the 1970s. A vivid, seamlessly narrated history, Palace Politics is essential reading for anyone seeking to better understand not only the nation next door but also the workings of elite politics in general.
Jonathan Sarna's meticulously documented centennial history presents the personalities and the controversies, the struggles and the achievements behind a century of publishing by America's foremost publisher of Jewish books in English. Sarna's engaging blend of anecdote and analysis contextualizes the Jewish Publication Society within American Jewry's evolving social, political, and cultural history. He demonstrates that the society has been a major factor. Sarna recounts the inspired struggle of the Jewish Publication Society's founders, a group of genteel Philadelphia philanthropists including Cyrus Adler and Mayer Sulzberger, who believed fervently in the need to educate their immigrant coreligionists with Jewish books in the new vernacular. He also tells the story of Henrietta Szold, best known for her later achievements as the founder of Hadassah and Youth Aliyah. Szold worked doggedly for twenty-three years as the society's first editor until a shattered love for a JPS author became the catalyst that led her to Palestine and Zionist leadership. Here too are fascinating accounts of the long deliberations and intense work that produced the authoritative JPS Bible translations of 1917 and 1985, translations acceptable to all major branches of Judaism. Sarna also recounts the controversy surrounding the 1973 publication of The Jewish Catalog, a project developed by the bold JPS editor Chaim Potok. The Catalog, embodying the spirit of the Jewish counterculture, not only became the best-selling JPS book after the Bible, but it also showed that JPS could meet the challenge of a new generation as it moved toward its second century.
Catholicism has long been the dominant religion among ethnic Mexicans in the U.S. Recent shifts, however, have challenged the traditional association between Mexican ethnicity and Catholicism. Evangelical Protestantism has emerged as a notable alternative of ethnic identity expression for ethnic Mexicans. This book takes readers into the thriving Mexican-majority neighborhoods of Santa Ana, California, a city once dubbed the hardest place to live in the U.S. There, Jonathan E. Calvillo explores how religious practices permeate the fabric of everyday social interactions for Mexican immigrants. How does faith shape these immigrants' sense of ethnic identity? To answer this question, The Saints of Santa Ana compares the experiences of Catholic and Evangelical Mexican immigrants-the two largest religious groupings in the city. Drawing on five years of participant observation and in-depth interviews, this book argues that religious affiliations set Catholics and Evangelicals along diverging trajectories with regard to ethnic identity. In particular, Calvillo argues, Catholics and Evangelicals have differing perspectives on collective memory and ethnic community. The Saints of Santa Ana offers a rich portrait of a fascinating American community.
Boggy Slough Conservation Area is a 19,000-acre unbroken tract of pine and bottomland hardwood forest situated in East Texas’ Trinity and Houston counties. More than twenty miles of the Neches River, one of the last free-flowing rivers in the state, serves as the eastern boundary, and for more than a century the land has been one of the state’s leading game and industrial forest management areas. A unique blend of natural, cultural, and business history, Boggy Slough presents a highly illustrated narrative of the land, people, and evolving purpose, from time of European contact to the present. Gerland traces the many phases of land use in this forest as it transitioned from hunting, gathering, fishing, and subsistence farming to an experimental mix of stock raising and large-scale commercial forestry, eventually becoming important conservation land along the Neches River Corridor. Gerland explores the natural features and adaptive land use practices of the region as well as the environmental history of railroads and logging camps, barbed wire fences and company cattle ranches, and exclusive hunting clubs. The underlying story is the evolution and environmental impact of Southern Pine Lumber Company, founded in 1893 by T. L. L. Temple. Now owned and maintained by the fifth generation of the Temple family, the Boggy Slough lands are the last remnants of what was once a 1.2 million–acre forest empire. Gerland examines the family’s and the lumber company’s struggles to grow and manage a second-, third-, and fourth-generation forest, ultimately achieving sustainability while managing changing environmental concerns and attitudes.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.