THE SERPENT'S GUILE is a psychological thriller with three main characters - a famous writer, his personal chauffeur and the unwitting biracial sex worker embroiled into the dark world of the writer. All three of them hiding secrets, all puppets of greed, all three magnificent liars. Set in an opulent background of the privileged few, it shows humanity at its lowest and at its most human element. Unlike books of same genre, readers know who the serpent is from the beginning. The crux is how each one of the three protagonists try to manipulate each other - like a game of chess, a charade, a cat and mouse game. A cliff hanger to the very last page, it keeps the readers guessing what happens next: who wins, who lives, and who dies.
Pearls mother, Aurora, immigrated to the United States to meet her American suitor. As a Filipina, she struggled to be accepted into her new culture. Although, she was quick to learn the foreign ways of her new country; she continued to honor her culture, a knowledge she passes on to her daughter, Pearl. Once Pearl grows up, she decides it is time to see her mothers birthplace. As soon as Pearl lands in the Philippines, she feels at home. She feels as though she learned about her home country through her mothers stories. She is at ease in the warm breeze, surrounded by the sound of the native tongue. She immerses herself in the culture and catches the eye of a wealthy local matriarch. The older woman thinks Pearl would make a perfect wife for her grandson. Pearl is soon spoiled and courted by the whole family, but a tragedy steals her dreams. She is cast out and must now find a way to still love the country of her mothers birththe country that hurt her. Aurora was a strong woman in a foreign place; her daughter can be too.
THE SERPENT'S GUILE is a psychological thriller with three main characters - a famous writer, his personal chauffeur and the unwitting biracial sex worker embroiled into the dark world of the writer. All three of them hiding secrets, all puppets of greed, all three magnificent liars. Set in an opulent background of the privileged few, it shows humanity at its lowest and at its most human element. Unlike books of same genre, readers know who the serpent is from the beginning. The crux is how each one of the three protagonists try to manipulate each other - like a game of chess, a charade, a cat and mouse game. A cliff hanger to the very last page, it keeps the readers guessing what happens next: who wins, who lives, and who dies.
Pearls mother, Aurora, immigrated to the United States to meet her American suitor. As a Filipina, she struggled to be accepted into her new culture. Although, she was quick to learn the foreign ways of her new country; she continued to honor her culture, a knowledge she passes on to her daughter, Pearl. Once Pearl grows up, she decides it is time to see her mothers birthplace. As soon as Pearl lands in the Philippines, she feels at home. She feels as though she learned about her home country through her mothers stories. She is at ease in the warm breeze, surrounded by the sound of the native tongue. She immerses herself in the culture and catches the eye of a wealthy local matriarch. The older woman thinks Pearl would make a perfect wife for her grandson. Pearl is soon spoiled and courted by the whole family, but a tragedy steals her dreams. She is cast out and must now find a way to still love the country of her mothers birththe country that hurt her. Aurora was a strong woman in a foreign place; her daughter can be too.
Merriam Press World War 2 History Series. Well-known military historian Col. Roy M. Stanley II presents the second volume of his series on World War II in the Pacific. Like the first volume, it is essentially a photo book with accompanying text, drawing heavily from DOD Intelligence and Army files, National Archives and numerous other sources. What is offered, to both the casual reader and the military history buff, is his 27 years of military experience and skill as a photo interpreter to draw information from the imagery. Stanley considers photos, particularly aerial photos, an "original source" equal to first-hand testimony. Many photos were found at random during reviews of DOD imagery holdings he was responsible for, but actively searched for pictures of Guadalcanal. There were no indexes for the boxes he was screening, but one of his goals was to assemble everything on "The Canal." Coverage includes Coral Sea and Midway battles. Well illustrated with hundreds of photos, illustrations, and maps.
[Includes 2 tables, 3 charts, 21 maps and 88 illustrations] On 3 October 1944 American forces in the Pacific Ocean Areas received a directive to seize positions in the Ryukyu Islands (Nansei Shoto). Okinawa is the most important island of the Ryukyu Group, the threshold of the four main islands of Japan. The decision to invade the Ryukyus signalized the readiness of the United States to penetrate the inner ring of Japanese defenses. For the enemy, failure on Okinawa meant that he must prepare to resist an early invasion of the homeland or surrender. The present volume [Of the United States Army in WWII series] concerns one of the most bitterly fought battles of the Pacific war, in which the Army, the Marine Corps, and the Navy all played a vital part. In order to make the Army’s role and the campaign as a whole as intelligible as possible the historians have treated in detail the operations of the Marine Corps units attached to Tenth Army, and have also sketched the contribution of the Navy both in preliminary operations against Okinawa and in the campaign itself. Another characteristic of this as of other volumes on Pacific campaigns is that tactical action is treated on levels lower than those usually presented in the history of operations in the European theaters. The physical limitations of the terrain fought over in the Pacific restricted the number and size of the units which could be employed and brought into sharp focus the operations of regiments, battalions, and smaller units. A wealth of verified material on such operations is available for all theaters, but it is only that of the Pacific which can be used extensively, since in other theaters the actions of smaller units are lost in the broad sweep of great distances and large forces. The description of small-unit action has the merit of giving the nonprofessional reader a fuller record of the nature of the battlefield in modern war, and the professional reader a better insight into troop leading.
This work attempts to cast new light on the Generacion del Treinta, a group of Creole intellectuals who situated themselves as the voice of a new cultural nationalism in Puerto Rico. Through a feminist lens, it focuses on the interlocking themes of nationalism, gender, class and race.
The son of Hispanic immigrants, Rogelio "Roy" Dominguez grew up in gang-plagued Gary, Indiana. With strong family support, he managed to beat the odds, graduating with distinction from Indiana University, finishing law school after a rough start, and maturing into a successful attorney and officeholder. Yet there was more in store for Roy. Ready to start a family and embark on a career as a deputy prosecutor, he was stricken with Guillain-Barré syndrome. How he coped with and eventually overcame this debilitating affliction is a compelling part of his story. The experience steeled him to meet future crises with wisdom, perspective, and grit. An inspiring true story, Valor is also a significant and original contribution to the social, ethnic, and political history of Indiana.
Just as the Romans built roads to create and maintain their empire, so the British ruled the ocean waves with ships, and created the biggest empire the world has seen. The Last of a Salty Breed tells tales about British ships, seamen, and the many millions of folk who were voluntarily or forcibly shipped to the four corners of the world to create new countries. This book takes a conventional, chronological narrative interspersed by interludes between the chapters. They are light-hearted or poignant in nature, in many cases highlighting the high and low points of seafaring, and the harrowing voyages of times past. The author, a former maritime journalist for the New Zealand Herald and a ship deck officer, adds to the narrative his personal experiences and those of his maritime ancestors, who stretch back to the 1700s. The main “characters” are ships and prominent seafarers who made history one way or another, from Elizabethan mariners to present time, and include the author’s long family history of seafaring. “The dual dialogue and the subject a very worthy one, as to my knowledge there is no history of the New Zealand Merchant Navy, only books about ships and individual shipping companies.” – Captain Hamish Ross, editor of “Sea Breezes,” the worldwide magazine of ships and the sea
Born in Liverpool in 1945, Roy Starkey grew up fascinated with the natural world. As a schoolboy he joined the local botanical society and made a number of trips to isolated bird observatories around the British coast. At the age of twenty-five he became disillusioned by the politics of university research and decided to leave and do his own thing. With very little money, no boatbuilding skills and no experience of the sea he built Sea Loone, a thirty-three foot sloop, and sailed away. The boat and crew were soon tested on the ocean, first losing the mast over the side and then sailing into one of the worst gales ever - the 1979 'Fastnet Gale' - which claimed eighteen lives on the 306 yachts participating in that year's biannual 'Fastnet Race'. Over the next nearly forty years Sea Loone sailed throughout the tropics finally completing three very convoluted circumnavigations of the world. Having experienced hardships, tragedies and many happy adventures, Roy at last decided to put pen to paper and record his remarkable story.
Home gardens, in addition to providing sustenance and satisfaction, embody a sense of self identity. In this groundbreaking work on Vietnamese foodways, Farm-to-Freedom: Vietnamese Americans and Their Food Gardens brings to light how the Vietnamese diasporic population in Texas uses gardens literally and figuratively to set down roots in a new country. These gardens, often hidden in plain sight, establish the seat of Vietnamese immigrant culture, according to author Roy Vũ. They can also offer Vietnamese Americans an empowering pathway to forging a new homeland duality by retaining ties to the foods and environs they drew comfort from in Vietnam. Farm-to-Freedom uses the concept of emancipatory foodways as a lens into gardens that serve a semi-palliative purpose by succoring the experienced tragedies of war and exile for Vietnamese immigrants and Vietnamese Americans, which arguably adds another dimension to the importance of the home garden. Vũ covers topics including but not limited to culinary citizenship, food democracy, culinary justice, and food sovereignty. Farm-to-Freedom reveals how these gardens not only provide those who tend them a greater sense of security and agency in an unfamiliar land but also give them the means to preserve and expand Vietnamese cuisine for themselves while simultaneously enriching food culture in the United States. With a wealth of original oral histories, community-based recipes and poetry, and photographs of home gardens in suburban and urban settings, Farm-to-Freedom provides a deeper understanding of the Vietnamese diaspora in Texas for scholars, professionals, and general readers alike.
The Mereleigh Record Club Cruise of the South Pacific captures the thrilling journey taken by a group of friends in their chartered sailing ship. They encounter much more than they bargained for when they become entangled with Japanese fascists on the high seas. Hunting for lost gold, rescuing survivors on a sinking ship, and being captured by pirates, mark just some of their unexpected adventures. Fact and fiction are interwoven in this exciting novel based on two historic events. The first involves gold stolen during World War II. Then there’s the curious tale of the Joyita, an island trader found adrift and abandoned in 1955. The merchant vessel’s twenty-five passengers and crew were never found.
Roy Bedichek spent most of his life working in the educational field in Texas, but his main interest was always the great outdoors. His first book, Adventures with a Texas Naturalist, was published when he was almost seventy, and his second, Karánkaway Country, appeared three years later. Both were the result of a lifetime of exploring a beloved land, of searching observation, of discussion, debate, wide reading, and reflection. Long out of print, Karánkaway Country is now available in a handsome second edition with a new Foreword by W. W. Newcomb, Jr. Karánkaway Country focuses on the natural history of a strip of coastal prairie lying roughly between Corpus Christi and Galveston and once inhabited by the poorly known and much maligned Karankawa Indians. It serves as home base for an exposition of Bedichek's philosophy, providing a convenient local setting for richly tailored essays on wildlife, soil, human skin, and a variety of other topics suggested by a wide-ranging intellect. Bedichek's philosophy, if it can be reduced to a few words, is essentially that humans must learn to live on peaceful and conciliatory terms with our natural environment.
This book is designed for a one-semester course in sedimentology taken by advanced undergraduate or graduate students. It gives detailed descriptions of sedimentary features and the analytical methods used to evaluate them and is intended to support and reinforce principles presented in lectures. Discussion of principles and processes is found in complimentary texts, such as Leeder's (1982) Sedimentology: process and product and selected readings in professional journals. This book is not an exhaustive treatise of laboratory techniques and theory. The subject matter includes topics generally covered in courses entitled "Sedimentology" or "Sedimentation". Sandstone and carbonate petrography is commonly given in a separate course. Furthermore, this topic is covered in several current texts. For these reasons I have omitted petrographic methods, with the exception of those applying to heavy minerals. I have included a rather extensive discussion of heavies because this topic is generally lacking in most modern texts. Every course in sedimentology is highly individualistic and material covered varies with the interests, background, and point of view of the instructor. For these reasons some topics presented in this book are not necessarily covered in all courses. Similarly some instructors may find that their favorite topic is missing. I can only hope that this problem is minimal. Several chapters contain precise exercises to be completed by the student. Some must be done in the classroom, where specimens are available for study. Others may be done outside of the classroom.
Ethics in the West too often equates morality with universal moral principles, thus imposing lifestyles and moral criteria that do not respect differences and local histories. Even Christianity proposes ethics that is based on eternal, absolute and universal truths or principles, independent of sociocultural and historical contexts. The problem is that these universal moral laws become a means of social control to exclude those who are different: non-Christian religions, nonwhite races, non-Western cultures, and poor and marginalized social classes everywhere. To these can be added minorities marginalized because of sexual orientation, physical handicaps, and women of all sectors and cultures. Another kind of ethics is urgent. For these reasons, Christians in Latin America and other parts are seeking innovative ways of envisioning ethics from their marginalized and discriminated social locations in order to find another possible ethics, an ethics that is not universal and not based on eternal truths or principles, but rather is contextual and historical and that takes into account real-life realities. Only an ethics that does this will be liberative. Important steps toward this other possible ethics have been taken by the theology of liberation by developing a contextual and intercultural morality.
Most Americans are aware that Texas gained its independence from Santa Annas Mexico in the 1840s. Mention of the Alamo evokes the familiar names of heroes like Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie and William Travis. All too often another group of heroes, heroines and patriots who fought and died for the independence of Texas is overlooked. The sacrifices, bravery and valor of that group--the Tejanos, Texans of Hispanic ancestry--are the focus of The Texas Revolution: Tejano Heroes. It was not just at famous battles such as Agua Dulce, Bexar, Goliad, the Alamo and San Jacinto that Tejanos made their mark on Texas history, often giving their lives and fortunes. Long before the arrival of Stephen F. Austin and settlers from the east, Tejanos were fighting for the independence of Tejas or Texas. The first declaration of Texas independence from Spain was issued in April 1813 by Bernardo Guiterrez de Lara. The first, and bloodiest, battle for Texas independence was fought at the battle of the Medina in August 1813. The first formal list of grievances against the Mexican government was issued by several Tejanos, including Juan Seguin and Gaspar Abrego de Flores, in October 1834. Recognition of the courage, abilities and endurance of Tejanos as major emancipators in the Texas Revolution is long overdue, hence this book.
This is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of the land war during the Second World War in South-East Asia and the South and South-West Pacific. The extensive existing literature focuses on particular armies – Japanese, British, American, Australian or Indian – and/or on particular theatres – the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Malaya or Burma. This book, on the contrary, argues that warfare in all the theatres was very similar, especially the difficulties of the undeveloped terrain, and that there was considerable interchange of ideas between the allied armies which enabled the spread of best practice among them. The book considers tactics, training, technology and logistics, assesses the changing state of the combat effectiveness of the different armies, and traces the course of the war from the Japanese Blitzkrieg of 1941, through the later stalemate, and the hard fought Allied fightback. Although the book concentrates on ground forces, due attention is also given to air forces and amphibious operations. One important argument put forward by the author is that the defeat of the Japanese was not inevitable and that it was brought about by chance and considerable tactical ingenuity on the part of US and British imperial forces.
Remember Goliad! was as famous a rallying cry during the Texas Revolution as Remember the Alamo! Despite the disparity in casualties (Goliads were over twice those of the Alamo), relatively little is remembered about the grisly massacre of an estimated 490 Texan and American prisoners of war by order of Santa Anna on Palm Sunday, March 27, 1865. Killing Fannin is not only about the execution of the Texas commander at Goliad. It is a recounting of the decisions leading to his defeat by a superior Mexican army. Overriding Fannins death is the tragic, cruel massacre of his men, most of them volunteers from the US who cared enough for Texan independence that they fought and lost their lives for it. Remember Goliad!
New mysteries, as well as variations on recurring ones, continue to surface on a weekly basis around the globe, from showers of frogs over Hungary to birds falling to earth in Arkansas. This compendious round-up of unexplained phenomena examines everything from the experiments being done with the Large Hadron Collider to classic maritime mysteries involving inexplicably missing crews, via UFOs, mediums, cryptozoology, panics, paranoia and a universe proving stranger in fact than we'd imagined.
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