The fascination with celebrities may be a guilty pleasure, but it is also an increasingly important dimension of the way we organise social and political relationships. 'Celebrity Society' outlines the sociology of celebrity as a central characteristic of modernity, linking us together in unique and ever-changing ways.
Professor van den Bosch of the University of California was one of the developers of Integrated Pest Management—the use of biological controls, improved pest knowledge and observation, and judicious application of chemicals only when absolutely necessary. His research often suggested that less or no pesticides should be applied, which made him the target of both open and clandestine attack from industry and government figures. In protest, he wrote this passionate account of what Ecology called "the ultimate social disaster of: evolving pesticide-resistant insects, the destruction of their natural predators and parasites, emergent populations of new insect pests, downstream water pollution, atmospheric pollution, the 'accidental' killing of wildlife and people, and the bankruptcies of indigenous and small farmers." As a new Introduction to this edition recounts, some lessening of dangerous overreliance on massive pesticide applications has been achieved since van den Bosch published this book in 1978—partly as a result of its influence. But the structural problems he described remain. The book has thus become a classic, along with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.
Judge Dee and his entourage, seeking refuge from a mountain storm, become trapped in a Taoist monastery, where the Abbott Jade mysteriously dies after delivering an ecstatic sermon. The monks call it a supernatural experience, but the judge calls it murder. Recalling the allegedly accidental deaths of three young women in the same monastery, Judge Dee seeks clues in the eyes of a cat to solve cases of impersonation and murder. A painting by one of the victims reveals the truth about the killings, propelling the judge on a quest for justice and revenge. "Entertaining, instructive, and impressive."—Times Literary Supplement
The book contains the memoirs of Robert van Voren covering the period 1977-2008 and provides unique insights into the dissident movement in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, both inside the country and abroad. As a result of his close friendship with many of the leading dissidents and his dozens of trips to the USSR as a courier, he had intimate knowledge of the ins and outs of the dissident movement and participated in many of the campaigns to obtain the release of Soviet political prisoners. In the late 1980s he became involved in building a humane and ethical practice of psychiatry in Eastern Europe and the (ex-) USSR, based on respect for the human rights of persons with mental illness. The book describes the dissident movement and many of the people who formed it, mental health reformers in Eastern Europe and the response of the Western psychiatric community, the battle with the World Psychiatric Association over Soviet, and later, Chinese political abuse of psychiatry, his contacts with former KGB officers and problems with the KGB's successor organization, the FSB. It also vividly describes the emotional effects of serving as a courier for the dissident movement, the fear of arrest, the pain of seeing friends disappear for many years into camps and prisons, sometimes never to return.
A chance encounter with Autumn Moon, the most powerful courtesan on Paradise Island, leads Judge Dee to investigate three deaths. Although he finally teases the true story from a tangled history of passion and betrayal, Dee is saddened by the perversion, corruption, and waste of the world "of flowers and willows" that thrives on prostitution.
Based on the conviction that biblical prophecy will be literally fulfilled, The Sign powerfully presents the Bible's teachings concerning the Antichrist's identification and how he will control the world, the sign of the end of the age, the signal of Christ's return, and the church and the Great Tribulation. This revised edition of the concise, sequential overview of the End Times has an urgent message for every Christian.
Judge Dee, the master detective of seventh-century China, sets out to solve a puzzling double murder and discovers complex passions lurking beneath the placid surface of academic life. A mild-mannered student is rumored to have been slain by a fox-demon, while a young dancer meets her death as she dresses to perform for the magistrate's illustrious dinner guests—an obese Zen monk revered for his calligraphy, a beautiful poetess accused of murder, and the past president of the imperial academy. To connect the present crimes with betrayals and adulteries from decades past, the clever judge must visit a high-class brothel and the haunted shrine of the Black Fox. From the moment the young scholar is found dead on the eve of the Autumn Festival, the pace never lets up. "The China of old, in Mr. van Gulik's skilled hands, comes vividly alive again."—Allen J. Hubin, New York Times Book Review "If you have not yet discovered Judge Dee, I envy you that initial pleasure. . . . For the magistrate of Poo-yang belongs in that select group headed by Sherlock Holmes."—Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times
The Monkey and The Tiger includes two detective stories, "The Morning of the Monkey" and "The Night of the Tiger." In the first, a gibbon drops an emerald in the open gallery of Dee's official residence, leading the judge to discover a strangely mutilated body in the woods—and how it got there. In the second, Dee is traveling to the imperial capital to assume a new position when he is separated from his escort by a flood. Marooned in a large country house surrounded by fierce bandits, Dee confronts an apparition that helps him solve a mystery.
It all begins on the night of the Poo-yang dragonboat races in 699 A.D.: a drummer in the leading boat collapses, and the body of a beautiful young woman turns up in a deserted country mansion. There, Judge Dee—tribunal magistrate, inquisitor, and public avenger—steps in to investigate the murders and return order to the Tang Dynasty. In The Emperor’s Pearl, the judge discovers that these two deaths are connected by an ancient tragedy involving a near-legendary treasure stolen from the Imperial Harem one hundred years earlier. The terrifying figure of the White Lady, a river goddess enshrined on a bloodstained altar, looms in the background of the investigation. Clues are few and elusive, but under the expert hand of Robert van Gulik, this mythic jigsaw puzzle assembles itself into a taut mystery. “If you have not yet discovered Judge Dee and his faithful Sgt. Hoong, I envy you that initial pleasure which comes from the discovery of a great detective story. For the magistrate of Poo-yang belongs in that select group of fictional detectives headed by the renowned Sherlock Holmes.”—Robert Kirsch, Los AngelesTimes “The title of this book and the book itself have much in common. Each is a jewel, a rare and precious find.”—AtlantaTimes
Brought back into print in the 1990s to wide acclaim, re-designed new editions of Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee Mysteries are now available. Written by a Dutch diplomat and scholar during the 1950s and 1960s, these lively and historically accurate mysteries have entertained a devoted following for decades. Set during the T'ang dynasty, they feature Judge Dee, a brilliant and cultured Confucian magistrate disdainful of personal luxury and corruption, who cleverly selects allies to help him navigate the royal courts, politics, and ethnic tensions in imperial China. Robert van Gulik modeled Judge Dee on a magistrate of that name who lived in the seventh century, and he drew on stories and literary conventions of Chinese mystery writing dating back to the Sung dynasty to construct his ingenious plots. Murder in Canton takes place in the year 680, as Judge Dee, recently promoted to lord chief justice, is sent incognito to Canton to investigate the disappearance of a court censor. With the help of his trusted lieutenants Chiao Tai and Tao Gan, and that of a clever blind girl who collects crickets, Dee solves a complex puzzle of political intrigue and murder through the three separate subplots "the vanished censor," "the Smaragdine dancer," and "the Golden Bell." An expert on the art and erotica as well as the literature, religion, and politics of China, van Gulik also provides charming illustrations to accompany his engaging and entertaining mysteries.
On television and in films, in magazines and books, on the Internet and in the realm of politics, celebrities of all sorts seem to dominate our attention. Celebrity Society: The Struggle for Attention brings new perspectives to our understanding of how the figure of ‘the celebrity’ is bound up with the structure and dynamics of society, economics, and politics. It outlines how the ‘celebrification of society’ is not just the twentieth-century product of Hollywood and television, but a long-term historical process, beginning with Christian saints, the printing press, theatre, and art. Drawing on the ideas of Norbert Elias, the book explains how contemporary celebrity society is the heir (or heiress) of ‘court society’, taking on but also transforming many of the functions of the aristocracy. As well as examining celebrity in all the familiar arenas – film, television, music, fashion, and sport – Celebrity Society also includes the analysis of celebrity in business and management, politics, humanitarianism, and philanthropy. A key feature of the book is its development of the idea that celebrity is driven by the ‘economy of attention’, since attention has become a form of capital – attention capital – in the Information and Internet age. In this second edition the author has updated and significantly revised this path-breaking book to include a more detailed discussion of attention capital, the question of gender and celebrity, populism, fans, fandom, and self-formation, micro-celebrity, and personal or self-branding, the ‘worker celebrity’, and the impact of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Celebrity is an exciting and rapidly expanding field of social science, making this engaging book a valuable resource for students and scholars in sociology, politics, history, celebrity studies, cultural studies, the sociology of media, and cultural theory.
The Nation's Hangar: Aircraft Treasures of the Smithsonian offers a fascinating textual and visual history of civilian, military, and commercial aviation from the earliest balloon flights to today's most advanced aircraft. The Nation's Hangar charts the awe-inspiring history of flight around the world. F. Robert Van Der Linden, a Smithsonian curator and leading expert on aviation history, explains the fascinating stories behind aviation's great technological advances and provides historic and social context that highlights the many ways in which these innovations have changed the course of human history. The Nation's Hangar is also a visual delight. The Smithsonian aircraft collection has never looked so compelling and sleek. The Nation's Hangar is a must-have for that fly boy or fly girl in your flight pattern.
In this, the second book in Robert van Gulik's classic mystery series of ancient China, Judge Dee must look into the murder of his predecessor. His job is complicated by the simultaneous disappearance of his chief clerk and the new bride of a wealthy local shipowner. Meanwhile, a tiger is terrorizing the district, the ghost of the murdered magistrate stalks the tribunal, a prostitute has a secret message for Dee, and the body of a murdered monk is discovered to be in the wrong grave. In the end, the judge, with his deft powers of deduction, uncovers the one cause for all of these seemingly unrelated events.
About the Book Volume I discusses the literature of the Roaring Twenties and the cultural and historical context for this literature, and it also features essays on Hemingway, Steinbeck, and George Orwell as well as an essay about literature of the American West and its mythic dimensions. Reflections on Literature is a forthcoming series of essays about literature intended for the general reader. With Volume I now published, the author is working on Volume II. The series will include discussions of novels, poetry, drama, and their authors. Some of the authors featured are: William Shakespeare, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, Mary Oliver, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Pat Conroy, Louise Penny, and many others. Also included are essays on what literature teaches us about growing up and growing old, about love, and about friendships. Watch for notices about these additional volumes in this series, Reflections on Literature: Exploring Meanings and Messages. About the Author Robert Van Dellen began his professional career as a professor of literature and ended it as the president of a college in Michigan. He has taught both undergraduate and graduate courses, written scripts for several feature-length videos, which included working with the legendary Curt Gowdy and Roy rogers. He has conducted numerous workshops, seminars, trainings, and talks, including a series of Talks on Literature for the Elliott Museum in Stuart, Florida, and Zoom Talks on Literature. Visit his website for more information about these Talks: www.BobTalks.Me. He also served as the founding executive director of a community foundation and ran a business consulting firm for several years. He and his wife enjoy travel. He loves playing pickle ball and golf, and he was an avid backpacker and wilderness canoeist.
The eight short stories in Judge Dee at Work cover a decade during which the judge served in four different provinces of the T’ang Empire. From the suspected treason of a general in the Chinese army to the murder of a lonely poet in his garden pavilion, the cases here are among the most memorable in the Judge Dee series.
It is beyond doubt that the climate is changing, presenting us with one of the biggest challenges in the twenty-first-century. During the past 150 years, archaeologists have studied the impact of climate change on humanity; however, this information has not yet been used when considering the impact climate change will have on future human communities. This pioneering study addresses this major paradox in modern climate change research, and provides the theoretical basis for archaeological data to be included in climate change debates - an approach which uses archaeological research as a repository of ideas and concepts which can help build the resilience of modern communities against the background of rapid climate change. Applying this approach to four case study areas, which will be among the first to be significantly affected by climate change - the coastal wetlands of the North Sea, the Sundarbans, Florida's Gulf Coast, and the Iraqi Marshland, this comparative study illustrates the diversity of adaptive pathways implemented in times of climate change in the past and how these can help prepare modern communities.
Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Acknowledgements -- Lithuanian Historical Background -- Origins of Anti-Semitism -- Jewish Life in Lithuania between World Wars -- The Holocaust in Lithuania -- Issues of Compliance and Collaboration -- The Human Dimension -- Why Did it Happen? -- From Black and White to Shades of Grey -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index of Names -- About the Author.
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