Vikkan Lantry, a pianist with more talent than ambition, is content with his job at an upscale cocktail lounge until a request from reclusive soprano draws him grudgingly back into the world of classical music. Her mysterious past ushers him into an intrigue that begins with a song cycle composed by Schumann and ends in a grisly double murder.
Vikkan Lantry, a pianist with more talent than ambition, is content with his job at an upscale cocktail lounge until a request from reclusive soprano, Ulrike Vogel, draws him grudgingly back into the world of classical music. Ulrike’s mysterious past, and her friendship with elderly Viennese piano teacher, Dieter Mann, usher Vikkan into an intrigue that begins in the nineteenth century with an unknown song cycle composed by Robert Schumann, and ends in the present-day with a grisly double murder. As Vikkan probes the layers of deceit obscuring a killer’s identity, The Schumann Proof reveals itself to be a study in ambition gone awry. The theme is hardly new, but The Schumann Proof gives it a fresh slant, examining not only the devastating results of too much seeking after personal glory, but the painful consequences of too little.
It is part of current missiological orthodoxy that newly created churches should obtain independence from cross-cultural missionaries as soon as possible. It is not often realised that much Victorian missionary thinking shared that objective. This important new work examines the ideal of the self-governing church in the Victorian period through a study of the official mind of the Church Missionary Society. The study begins with an examination of Henry Venn's, the famous CMS Secretary, commitment to self-supporting, self-propagating and self-governing churches. Was he a lonely figure battling against the accepted wisdom of the mid-Victorian period? The author argues that he was not, and was, if anything a slightly conservative spokesman for much current wisdom. Far from his views being abandoned at his death, they were the accepted orthodoxy within CMS until the end of the century. Although they came under increasing attack in the nineties, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly under the influence of Eugune Stock, that they were finally abandoned. The importance of this study lies not only in its ability to explain Victorian missionary development, but also because it takes on board the age-old issue of how quickly should a church become self-governing.
Challenging the popular conception of Southern youth on the eve of the Civil War as intellectually lazy, violent, and dissipated, Peter S. Carmichael looks closely at the lives of more than one hundred young white men from Virginia's last generation to grow up with the institution of slavery. He finds them deeply engaged in the political, economic, and cultural forces of their time. Age, he concludes, created special concerns for young men who spent their formative years in the 1850s. Before the Civil War, these young men thought long and hard about Virginia's place as a progressive slave society. They vigorously lobbied for disunion despite opposition from their elders, then served as officers in the Army of Northern Virginia as frontline negotiators with the nonslaveholding rank and file. After the war, however, they quickly shed their Confederate radicalism to pursue the political goals of home rule and New South economic development and reconciliation. Not until the turn of the century, when these men were nearing the ends of their lives, did the mythmaking and storytelling begin, and members of the last generation recast themselves once more as unreconstructed Rebels. By examining the lives of members of this generation on personal as well as generational and cultural levels, Carmichael sheds new light on the formation and reformation of Southern identity during the turbulent last half of the nineteenth century.
By the end of the 1970s, contaminated sites had emerged as one of the most complex and urgent environmental issues affecting industrialized countries. The authors show that small and prosperous Switzerland is no exception to the pervasive problem of sites contamination, the legacy of past practices in waste management having left some 38,000 contaminated sites throughout the country. This book outlines the problem, offering evidence that open and polycentric environmental decision-making that includes civil society actors is valuable. They propose an understanding of environmental management of contaminated sites as a political process in which institutions frame interactions between strategic actors pursuing sometimes conflicting interests. In the opening chapter, the authors describe the influences of politics and the power relationships between actors involved in decision-making in contaminated sites management, which they term a “wicked problem.” Chapter Two offers a theoretical framework for understanding institutions and the environmental management of contaminated sites. The next five chapters present a detailed case study on environmental management and contaminated sites in Switzerland, focused on the Bonfol Chemical Landfill. The study and analysis covers the establishment of the landfill under the first generation of environmental regulations, its closure and early remediation efforts, and the gambling on the remediation objectives, methods and funding in the first decade of the 21st Century. The concluding chapter discusses the question of whether the strength of environmental regulations, and the type of interactions between public, private, and civil society actors can explain the environmental choices in contaminated sites management. Drawing lessons from research, the authors debate the value of institutional flexibility for dealing with environmental issues such as contaminated sites.
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