A serial killer is roaming the streets of Los Angeles. The police can't catch him; the FBI can't understand him; and nobody—including the 'voices'—can stop him. In another part of the panicked city, a young mother struggles to keep her small family together. The problem is that forces, which humans can barely comprehend, are playing out dangerous actions that have been ordered from another plane of existence . . . There, the life and death of a young child is just another violent step in the cascade of events, of evolution of the Soul. Caught in the middle is a Guardian Angel, one of many, condemned to carry out the service of God in the darkest city . . . Purgatory. It is the place where all Souls wait, determining their final choice. They may choose the Grace of God, or they may cross the Torn Valley and enter the city of Hades—a bright place of sin and pleasure . . . and of Lucifer. Whatever they choose, the path is forever. In Purgatory the Angels protect the evolved Souls as choices are being made. In Hades, Demons and Dark Angels are preparing for the final battle between Heaven and Hell, good against evil. And the outcome of this battle has not been foretold. In a series of twists and turns; unlikely heroes and unexpected alliances are formed that could spell the end for all humanity, and the beginning of Lucifer's reign. Welcome to Purg: Where everything is nothingness . . . and nothing is what it seems . . .
Chronicling the underappreciated black tradition of bearing arms for self-defense, law professor Nicholas Johnson presents an array of examples reaching back to the pre-Civil War era that demonstrate a willingness of African American men and women to use firearms when necessary to defend their families and communities. From Frederick Douglass's advice to keep "a good revolver" handy as defense against slave catchers to the armed self-protection of Monroe, North Carolina, blacks against the KKK chronicled in Robert Williams's Negroes with Guns, it is clear that owning firearms was commonplace in the black community.Johnson points out that this story has been submerged because it is hard to reconcile with the dominant narrative of nonviolence during the civil rights era. His book, however, resolves that tension by showing how the black tradition of arms maintained and demanded a critical distinction between private self-defense and political violence. In the last two chapters, Johnson addresses the unavoidable issue of young black men with guns and the toll that gun violence takes on many in the inner city. He shows how complicated this issue is by highlighting the surprising diversity of views on gun ownership in the black community. In fact, recent Supreme Court affirmations of the right to bear arms resulted from cases led by black plaintiffs.Surprising and informative, this well-researched book strips away many stock assumptions of conventional wisdom on the issue of guns and the black freedom struggle.
The Notorious Black Royals, led by the infamous King brothers, and the violent El Salvadorian Matas, led by the dangerous Juan-Carlos, are two rival drug gangs fighting a war to control the streets of New York City. Watching this all happen are the Russians, carefully waiting for their moment to strike! In the midst of the violence and chaos is a mysterious man known only as Voodoo-a contract killer who will determine the final outcome of this turf war. Contract Killer is a fast-paced novel, filled with sex, murder, conspiracies and enough mayhem for 10 Hollywood films! It's a story that will keep you turning the pages to the very end.
A New York Times bestseller, the groundbreaking authoritative history of the migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North. A definitive book on American history, The Promised Land is also essential reading for educators and policymakers at both national and local levels.
A New York Times bestseller, the groundbreaking authoritative history of the migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North. A definitive book on American history, The Promised Land is also essential reading for educators and policymakers at both national and local levels.
Wanted al Qaeda agents. U.S. counter-terrorism operatives. American officials— dead-set on stopping terrorist activity and preventing the deaths of innocent civilians the world over.Except they didn't. And instead, I became a pawn for the U.S. government and the Madrid train bombings of March 11, 2004 still occurred. Even after I handed evidence over to high-level American officials that could stop a devastating al Qaeda attack, the powers that be did nothing. And countless people still died.I am Nicholas Black, a former Security Contractor, U.S. Navy serviceman and member of the French Foreign Legion. I am also a former prisoner, having served time in Valdemoro prison in Spain. Also known as “Terrorist University,” it was here, while awaiting extradition that the U.S. government decided to use me to gather information on al Qaeda. I became friends with my fellow prisoners—some of them the most wanted men on the planet—and I earned their trust. All in the hopes of serving my country and possibly having the chance to save some lives.My efforts were for naught. A day that began as any other, but ended bloody—March 11, 2004—still came and went. And the U.S. government simply watched, even when they had the knowledge, and the means, to prevent it.Terrorist University is my story.
As the conversation around homosexuality becomes increasingly hostile on all sides, it can be difficult to know where to stand as a Christian. You don't want to compromise God's Word, either by blindly following the culture or by treating others with hatred and contempt. How do you hold onto your convictions without projecting an image of ...
In the author's point of view, a black swan is an improbable event with three principal characteristics - It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don't know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the 'impossible'.
Between 1935 and 1942, photographers for the New Deal's Resettlement Administration-Farm Security Administration (FSA) captured in powerfully moving images the travail of the Great Depression and the ways of a people confronting radical social change. Those who speak of the special achievement of FSA photography usually have in mind such white icons as Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother or Walker Evans's Alabama sharecroppers. But some six thousand printed images, a tenth of FSA's total, included black figures or their dwellings. At last, Nicholas Natanson reveals both the innovative treatment of African Americans in FSA photographs and the agency's highly problematic use of these images once they had been created. While mono-dimensional treatments of blacks were common in public and private photography of the period, such FSA photographers as Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, and Jack Delano were well informed concerning racial problems and approached blacks in a manner that avoided stereotypes, right-wing as well as left-wing. In addition, rather than focusing exclusively on FSA-approved agency projects involving blacks - politically the safest course - they boldly addressed wider social and cultural themes. This study employs a variety of methodological tools to explore the political and administrative forces that worked against documentary coverage of particularly sensitive racial issues. Moreover, Natanson shows that those who drew on the FSA photo files for newspapers, magazines, books, and exhibitions often entirely omitted images of black people and their environment or used devices such as cropping and captioning to diminish the true range of the FSA photographers' vision.
The most influential book of the past seventy-five years: a groundbreaking exploration of everything we know about what we don’t know, now with a new section called “On Robustness and Fragility.” A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives. Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.” For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. In this revelatory book, Taleb will change the way you look at the world, and this second edition features a new philosophical and empirical essay, “On Robustness and Fragility,” which offers tools to navigate and exploit a Black Swan world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications, The Black Swan is a landmark book—itself a black swan.
In the author's point of view, a black swan is an improbable event with three principal characteristics - It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don't know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the 'impossible'.
The Unpredictable Constitution brings together a distinguished group of U.S. Supreme Court Justices and U.S. Court of Appeals Judges, who are some of our most prominent legal scholars, to discuss an array of topics on civil liberties. In thoughtful and incisive essays, the authors draw on decades of experience to examine such wide-ranging issues as how legal error should be handled, the death penalty, reasonable doubt, racism in American and South African courts, women and the constitution, and government benefits. Contributors: Richard S. Arnold, Martha Craig Daughtry, Harry T. Edwards, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Betty B. Fletcher, A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Lord Irvine of Lairg, Jon O. Newman, Sandra Day O'Connor, Richard A. Posner, Stephen Reinhardt, and Patricia M. Wald.
Black men need hope to survive and, ultimately, flourish. As mental health is a critical but often neglected issue, especially among Black men, Care for the Mental and Spiritual Health of Black Men examines that sensitive topic in conjunction with reflections on race, gender, sexuality, and class to offer a hopeful and constructive framework for care and counseling, particularly for Black men. These are not separate from spiritual health and growth, as well, but both are integral to holistic, dynamic wellbeing. In this, the author provides a careful and critical analysis of spiritual hope and healing as ingredient to individual and communal flourishing. As such, this volume will be a vital resource for health practitioners, spiritual caregivers, and providers in community care who serve to bolster the mental wellbeing of Black men.
Black men need hope to survive and, ultimately, flourish. As mental health is a critical but often neglected issue, especially among Black men, Care for the Mental and Spiritual Health of Black Men examines that sensitive topic in conjunction with reflections on race, gender, sexuality, and class to offer a hopeful and constructive framework for care and counseling, particularly for Black men. These are not separate from spiritual health and growth, as well, but both are integral to holistic, dynamic wellbeing. In this, the author provides a careful and critical analysis of spiritual hope and healing as ingredient to individual and communal flourishing. As such, this volume will be a vital resource for health practitioners, spiritual caregivers, and providers in community care who serve to bolster the mental wellbeing of Black men.
The name Black Hawk permeates the built environment in the upper Midwestern United States. It has been appropriated for everything from fitness clubs to used car dealerships. Makataimeshekiakiak, the Sauk Indian war leader whose name loosely translates to "Black Hawk," surrendered in 1832 after hundreds of his fellow tribal members were slaughtered at the Bad Axe Massacre. Re-Collecting Black Hawk examines the phenomena of this appropriation in the physical landscape, and the deeply rooted sentiments it evokes among Native Americans and descendants of European settlers. Nearly 170 original photographs are presented and juxtaposed with texts that reveal and complicate the significance of the imagery. Contributors include tribal officials, scholars, activists, and others, such as George Thurman, the principal chief of the Sac and Fox Nation and a direct descendant of Black Hawk. These image-text encounters offer visions of both the past and present and the shaping of memory through landscapes that reach beyond their material presence into spaces of cultural and political power. As we witness, the evocation of Black Hawk serves as a painful reminder, a forced deference, and a veiled attempt to wipe away the guilt of past atrocities. Re-Collecting Black Hawk also points toward the future. By simultaneously unsettling and reconstructing the Midwestern landscape, Re-Collecting Black Hawk envisions new modes of pea
Between 1935 and 1942, photographers for the New Deal's Resettlement Administration-Farm Security Administration (FSA) captured in powerfully moving images the travail of the Great Depression and the ways of a people confronting radical social change. Those who speak of the special achievement of FSA photography usually have in mind such white icons as Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother or Walker Evans's Alabama sharecroppers. But some six thousand printed images, a tenth of FSA's total, included black figures or their dwellings. At last, Nicholas Natanson reveals both the innovative treatment of African Americans in FSA photographs and the agency's highly problematic use of these images once they had been created. While mono-dimensional treatments of blacks were common in public and private photography of the period, such FSA photographers as Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, and Jack Delano were well informed concerning racial problems and approached blacks in a manner that avoided stereotypes, right-wing as well as left-wing. In addition, rather than focusing exclusively on FSA-approved agency projects involving blacks - politically the safest course - they boldly addressed wider social and cultural themes. This study employs a variety of methodological tools to explore the political and administrative forces that worked against documentary coverage of particularly sensitive racial issues. Moreover, Natanson shows that those who drew on the FSA photo files for newspapers, magazines, books, and exhibitions often entirely omitted images of black people and their environment or used devices such as cropping and captioning to diminish the true range of the FSA photographers' vision.
Includes exciting recent advances in studying gravity and its cosmic manifestations.' Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, former President of the Royal Society A fascinating historical account of how we have reached our current understanding of gravity. There have been sensational developments in gravitational physics in recent years. The detection of gravitational waves - ripples in the fabric of space - has opened a new window on the universe. These waves are produced by the most cataclysmic events in the universe - the collisions and mergers of black holes and neutron stars. There have also been great strides in our understanding of supermassive black holes. We now know that a black hole with a gargantuan mass lies at the heart of every galaxy, and we even have an image of one such beast. Gravity: From Falling Apples to Supermassive Black Holes provides an engaging and accessible account of how we have reached our current understanding of gravity and places these amazing discoveries in their true context. Gravity: From Falling Apples to Supermassive Black Holes is written in a captivating historical style with stories about the researchers of the past and present that illuminate many key ideas in astronomy and physics. The historical material leads from discussions of the early cosmologies to the great breakthroughs of Tycho and Kepler. We then consider Galileo's contributions to astronomy and mechanics, and the significance of Jeremiah Horrocks's ideas to the Newtonian revolution that would follow. Newton's theories brought about a new scientific age and his description of gravity was unrivalled for over two centuries until it was superseded by Einstein's description in terms of curved spacetime. The outlandish predictions of Einstein's theory have been confirmed again and again, including black holes and gravitational waves. Finally, we move on to more speculative ideas including Hawking radiation and primordial black holes and attempts to find a quantum theory of gravity.
The protagonist in this book is President Barack Obama. The antagonist is White America. Unlike many contemporary works of literature on race relations and politics, this book shuns the myopic views embedded in the ideological leanings of the right and left political spectrum. It underlines the disquietude of a wary White America that viewed a black presidency as a risky experiment. It explains how Republicans fiercely and relentlessly opposed Barack Obama and contemptuously plotted the downfall of his administration unsuccessfully. The book discusses the unique relationship of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, compares both personalities and underscores the social anxiety that propelled the election of Donald Trump to succeed Barack Obama. It also answers the question that many Americans have asked: Is President Donald Trump a racist? Here are some other intriguing excerpts from the book: "It is no secret that the United States has never been an "honest broker" when it comes to the actions of the Israeli government in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." "In rather negative terms, the "red line" syndrome in Syria had indelibly marked President Obama's foreign policy in the eyes of the world ..." "The fact is that more whites have enrolled in Obamacare than blacks and Latinos put together." "The irrational invasion of Iraq and subsequent dismantling of its once-formidable military by the United States shifted the military dynamic in the area." "In 2016, gun lobbyists gave $5,900,000 to Republicans and $106,000 to Democrats during the election cycle.
This book provides a general introduction to the rapidly developing astrophysical frontier of stellar tidal disruption, but also details original thesis research on the subject. This work has shown that recoiling black holes can disrupt stars far outside a galactic nucleus, errors in the traditional literature have strongly overestimated the maximum luminosity of “deeply plunging” tidal disruptions, the precession of transient accretion disks can encode the spins of supermassive black holes, and much more. This work is based on but differs from the original thesis that was formally defended at Harvard, which received both the Roger Doxsey Award and the Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Award from the American Astronomical Society.
See Jack run. Jack Pagan is 6 1⁄2 months old. After an accident, his past is lost, forever. But his injury left him with a special gift: He can walk among the dead. Not only that, but he can also see the shadow creatures that take the souls from earth to the Land of Sorrows. Known by its inhabitants as . . . Deadside. He released 23 evil spirits onto the earth from this place of darkness beyond death. If left to their own devices, the 23 Evils will bring about a horrible change to the future of humanity. And their every breath challenges the forces of both good and evil. Run, Jack, run. In Ecuador, children are disappearing. And when bodies start turning up drained of their blood, Jack knows that it could be the work of the 23 Evils. Jack, Ricky, and Ms. Josephine start their new company, The After Life Group (ALG) to hunt down the escaped souls. But they are far from alone on this dangerous quest. But finding the Evils is only the first part. He must bring them all back to their nightmares. He must become the monster he can't remember. The murderer in his forgotten past. And to do it, he must cross between life and death, teaming up with the monsters that live in the shadows. Follow Jack on an haunting adventure that will change the way you think about life and death, and challenge the world you thought you knew.
IN THIS COMING of age story a tragic accident leaves Trevor looking for a place to call home. And now that his parents are gone the only one he can turn to is his uncle Gary — the legendary fetish-porn producer. Surrounded by new friends, a new school, and an environment that he could never have imagined, Trevor finds that the past he thought he knew was a well constructed lie.LITTLE BY LITTLE, the disturbing truth is brought to the surface and he finds that guidance and understanding can come from the most unlikely of people. Just when he thinks he is getting his life back together, tragedy strikes again.AND THEN HE is given the Diary.BE WARNED — this story is not for the faint of heart. It is an incredible mix of mystery and comedy, turmoil and suspense. Sodomy Cat has a way of getting under your skin. It'll knock on your door at 3 in the morning, sneak into your bedroom, and pull your panties down.
As America lurched into the twentieth century, its national pastime was afflicted with the same moral malaise that was enveloping the rest of the nation. Players regularly bet on games, games were routinely fixed, and league politics were as dirty as the base paths. Against this backdrop, Hal Chase emerged as one of the game's greatest players and also as one of its most scandalous characters. With charisma and bravado that earned him the nickname The Prince, Chase charmed his way across America, spinning lies in the afternoon, dealing high-stakes poker at night, and gambling with beautiful women until dawn. Most notoriously of all, he undermined his stature as the era's greatest first baseman by conniving with gamblers to fix games and draw teammates into his diamond conspiracies. But as Donald Dewey and Nicholas Acocella reveal in their groundbreaking biography, The Black Prince of Baseball, Chase was also a scapegoat for baseball notables with hands even dirtier than his. These included league officials who ignored facts in an attempt to pin the 1919 Black Sox scandal on him and--a previously unknown twist--the fabled John McGraw, who perjured himself on a witness stand against the first baseman. Although Chase, contrary to popular belief, was never banned from the major leagues, meticulous research by the authors implicates him in other shady enterprises as well, not least an attempt to blackmail revivalist Aimee Semple McPherson. As The Black Prince of Baseball makes clear, in his protean talents and larcenies, Hal Chase personified all the excesses of Ragtime.
In The Powers of Dignity Nick Bromell unpacks Frederick Douglass's 1867 claim that he had “elaborated a political philosophy” from his own “slave experience.” Bromell shows that Douglass devised his philosophy because he found that antebellum Americans' liberal-republican understanding of democracy did not provide a sufficient principled basis on which to fight anti-Black racism. To remedy this deficiency, Douglass deployed insights from his distinctively Black experience and developed a Black philosophy of democracy. He began by contesting the founders' racist assumptions about humanity and advancing instead a more robust theory of “the human” as a collection of human “powers.” He asserted further that the conscious exercise of those powers is what confirms human dignity and that human rights and democracy come into being as ways to affirm and protect that dignity. Thus, by emphasizing the powers and the dignity of all citizens, deriving democratic rights from these, and promoting a remarkably activist, power-oriented model of citizenship, Douglass's Black political philosophy aimed to rectify two major failings of US democracy in his time and ours: its complacence and its racism.
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