Paul and Julie LeBlanc move from New Orleans to Colorado, leaving a world of troubles behind them. Settled in Denver, they achieve their dream of adopting a baby, a fondling who was left in a mall. They name their adopted daughter Lara, and as time goes by she seems to be an almost perfect child; healthy, affectionate and smart. They gradually become aware that Lara is different from other children in a number of ways, but they do not realize just how different she is. Lara and her parents split their time between Denver and Quarrytown, a small town in the Rockies where Paul and Julie own a business. Their almost idyllic existence is threatened when Billy Reed, and ex-con who owns an adjacent ranch, establishes a commune of fanatic white power advocates. He becomes enraged when a young woman from his compound starts dating a Hispanic who works for the LeBlancs. The conflict becomes personal when Charles and Billy have a confrontation. It goes badly for Billy, but the LeBlancs realize that they are in danger from Reed, who is bent on revenge.
Paul and Julie LeBlanc move from New Orleans to Colorado, leaving a world of troubles behind them. Settled in Denver, they achieve their dream of adopting a baby, a fondling who was left in a mall. They name their adopted daughter Lara, and as time goes by she seems to be an almost perfect child; healthy, affectionate and smart. They gradually become aware that Lara is different from other children in a number of ways, but they do not realize just how different she is. Lara and her parents split their time between Denver and Quarrytown, a small town in the Rockies where Paul and Julie own a business. Their almost idyllic existence is threatened when Billy Reed, and ex-con who owns an adjacent ranch, establishes a commune of fanatic white power advocates. He becomes enraged when a young woman from his compound starts dating a Hispanic who works for the LeBlancs. The conflict becomes personal when Charles and Billy have a confrontation. It goes badly for Billy, but the LeBlancs realize that they are in danger from Reed, who is bent on revenge.
This is the first full-length English-language study of one of the world's most exciting and innovative cinemas. Covering a period from 1909 to 'the end of Hong Kong cinema' in the present day, this book features information about the films, the studios, the personalities and the contexts that have shaped a cinema famous for its energy and style. It includes studies of the films of King Hu, Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, as well as those of John Woo and the directors of the various 'New Waves'. Stephen Teo explores this cinema from both Western and Chinese perspectives and encompasses genres ranging from melodrama to martial arts, 'kung fu', fantasy and horror movies, as well as the international art-house successes.
From the sinking decks of a navy cruiser to the cockpit of a doomed B-25 bomber, Ronald J. Drez takes us to the front lines of World War II. Through Drez's gripping narrative style, we meet twelve men, all ordinary soldiers, and learn what the war was like through their eyes, experiencing their own 'twenty-five yards of war.' The men in these pages represent all branches of the military who were sent on impossible missions, where they witnessed triumphs and tragedies. As a result of Drez's ten years of research and over 1,400 interviews, Twenty-Five Yards of War is a tribute to all of the soldiers who fought in World War II -- those who walked away with amazing stories to tell, and those who did not make it home.
Why do some groups retain their ethnicity as they become assimilated into mainstream American life while others do not? This study employs both historical sources and contemporary survey data to explain the seeming paradox of why Japanese Americans have maintained high levels of ethnic community involvement while becoming structurally assimilated. Most traditional approaches to the study of ethnicity in the United States are based on the European immigrant experience and conclude that a zero-sum relationship exists between assimilation and retention of ethnicity: community solidarity weakens as structural assimilation grows stronger. Japanese Americans, however, like American Jews, do not fit this pattern. The basic thesis of this book is that the maintenance of ethnic community solidarity, the process of assimilation, and the reactions of an ethnic group to outside forces must be understood in light of the internal social organization of the ethnic group, which can be traced to core cultural orientations that predate immigration. Though frequently excluded from mainstream economic opportunities, Japanese Americans were able to form quasi-kin relationships of trust, upon which enduring group economic relations could be based. The resultant ethnic economy and petit bourgeois family experience fostered the values of hard work, deferred gratification, and other perspectives conductive to success in mainstream society. This book will be of interest to sociologist and psychologist studying ethnicity, community organization, and intergenerational change; and to anyone interested in the Japanese American experience from an economic or political perspective, Asian American studies, or social history of the United States.
The Franklin Northwest Passage Expedition of 1845 is perhaps the greatest disaster in the history of exploration--all 129 men vanished, as did the expedition's two ships, HMS Erebus and Terror. Over the next 150 years, searchers found bones, clothing and a variety of relics. Inuit narratives provided some of the details of what happened to the frozen, starving sailors after they deserted their ice-locked ships in 1848. Then, in 2014 and 2016, Canadian researchers found the sunken wrecks, not far from the bleak, windswept King William Island in the Arctic. At last, the mystery of the Franklin Expedition would be solved. Or would it? This book pulls together the various searchers' discoveries; the many recent scientific studies that shed light on when, how and why the men died (and whether, in extremis, they ate each other); and illuminates what we know, and what we don't and may never know, about the fate of the expedition.
This study is the first of its kind: a street-level inside account of what Stalinism meant to the masses of ordinary people who lived it. Stephen Kotkin was the first American in 45 years to be allowed into Magnitogorsk, a city built in response to Stalin's decision to transform the predominantly agricultural nation into a "country of metal." With unique access to previously untapped archives and interviews, Kotkin forges a vivid and compelling account of the impact of industrialization on a single urban community. Kotkin argues that Stalinism offered itself as an opportunity for enlightenment. The utopia it proffered, socialism, would be a new civilization based on the repudiation of capitalism. The extent to which the citizenry participated in this scheme and the relationship of the state's ambitions to the dreams of ordinary people form the substance of this fascinating story. Kotkin tells it deftly, with a remarkable understanding of the social and political system, as well as a keen instinct for the details of everyday life. Kotkin depicts a whole range of life: from the blast furnace workers who labored in the enormous iron and steel plant, to the families who struggled with the shortage of housing and services. Thematically organized and closely focused, Magnetic Mountain signals the beginning of a new stage in the writing of Soviet social history.
Besides absolutists of the right (the tsar and his adherents) and left (Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks), the Russian political landscape in 1917 featured moderates seeking liberal reform and a rapid evolution towards a constitutional monarchy. Vasily Maklakov, a lawyer, legislator and public intellectual, was among the most prominent of these, and the most articulate and sophisticated advocate of the rule of law, the linchpin of liberalism. This book tells the story of his efforts and his analysis of the reasons for their ultimate failure. It is thus, in part, an example for movements seeking to liberalize authoritarian countries today—both as a warning and a guide. Although never a cabinet member or the head of his political party—the Constitutional Democrats or “Kadets”—Maklakov was deeply involved in most of the political events of the period. He was defense counsel for individuals resisting the regime (or charged simply for being of the wrong ethnicity, such as Menahem Beilis, sometimes considered the Russian Dreyfus). He was continuously a member of the Kadets’ central committee and their most compelling orator. As a somewhat maverick (and moderate) Kadet, he stood not only between the country’s absolute extremes (the reactionary monarchists and the revolutionaries), but also between the two more or less liberal centrist parties, the Kadets on the center left, and the Octobrists on the center right. As a member of the Second, Third and Fourth Dumas (1907-1917), he advocated a wide range of reforms, especially in the realms of religious freedom, national minorities, judicial independence, citizens’ judicial remedies, and peasant rights.
Stephen C. Ferguson II provides a philosophical examination of Black popular culture for the first time. From extensive discussion of the philosophy and political economy of Hip-Hop music through to a developed exploration of the influence of the postmodernism-poststructuralist ideology on African American studies, he argues how postmodernism ideology plays a seminal role in justifying the relationship between corporate capitalism and Black popular culture. Chapters cover topics such as cultural populism, capitalism and Black liberation, the philosophy of Hip-Hop music, and Harold Cruse's influence on the cultural turn in African American studies. Ferguson combines case studies of past and contemporary Black cultural and intellectual productions with a Marxist ideological critique to provide a cutting edge reflection on the economic structure in which Black popular culture emerged. He highlights the contradictions that are central to the juxtaposition of Black cultural artists as political participants in socioeconomic struggle and the political participants who perform the rigorous task of social criticism. Adopting capitalism as an explanatory framework, Ferguson investigates the relationship between postmodernism as social theory, current manifestations of Black popular culture, and the theoretical work of Black thinkers and scholars to demonstrate how African American studies have been shaped.
Whites and Reds illuminates the ideas, controversies, political alliances, technologies, business practices, international networks, growers, vintners, connoisseurs, and consumers who shaped the history of wine in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union over more than two centuries.
In this edited collection of narrative-based, critically situated essays, each contributor explores how class has affected his/her personal and academic lives. The collection is divided into three sections: i) narratives that critique the meritocracy; ii) narratives that trace the effects of middle class cultural capital on relatively new academics from the working class, and; iii) narratives that explore the effects of class on longtime academics from the working class. The effect of the collection will be cumulative. By choosing contributors from multiple disciplines, including both established and emerging voices, the text articulates the pervasiveness of class bias in this country and fleshes out the mechanisms that mask how class and power work. Such a text is critically important, both inside and outside academia, because it demystifies the academic world for those who have been restricted by it, but also engages critically trained academics and academics-in-waiting to understand and respond to the experiences of working class students. Finally, the authors hope this text will encourage other working class students to consider an academic career as an option.
Originally published in 1985, this book examines the rising of the menalamba, the Red Shawls, against French colonial rule in Madagascar in the 1890s. Using the words of the Malagasy themselves and the archives of the Malagasy kings and queens, as well as European records, it tells from the inside the story of an Afro-Asian society at a moment of crisis. In the century before the French conquest, rising tensions between modernising kings, self-seeking Christian oligarchs and reactionary guardians of the ancient talismans had weakened the capacity of the kingdom to resist. But just two months after the French occupation of the capital the menalamba revivalist movement sought to restore the customs of the ancestors and expel the French from the island. The civil war of 1895-9, which was fully described here for the first time, has cast a shadow on Malagasy politics ever since.
This innovative text provides a compelling narrative world history through the lens of food and farmers. Tracing the history of agriculture from earliest times to the present, Christopher Isett and Stephen Millerargue that people, rather than markets, have been the primary agents of agricultural change. Exploring the actions taken by individuals and groups over time and analyzing their activities in the wider contexts of markets, states, wars, the environment, population increase, and similar factors, the authors emphasize how larger social and political forces inform decisions and lead to different technological outcomes. Both farmers and elites responded in ways that impeded economic development. Farmers, when able to trade with towns, used the revenue to gain more land and security. Elites used commercial opportunities to accumulate military power and slaves. The book explores these tendencies through rich case studies of ancient China; precolonial South America; early-modern France, England, and Japan; New World slavery; colonial Taiwan; socialist Cuba; and many other periods and places. Readers will understand how the promises and problems of contemporary agriculture are not simply technologically derived but are the outcomes of decisions and choices people have made and continue to make.
Debating how Canada compares, both regionally and in relation to other countries, is a national pastime. This book examines how political scientists apply diverse comparative strategies to better understand Canadian political life. Using a variety of methods, the contributors use comparison to examine topics as diverse as Indigenous rights, Canadian voting behaviour, activist movements, climate policy, and immigrant retention. While the theoretical perspectives and kinds of questions asked vary greatly, as a whole they demonstrate how the “art of comparing” is an important strategy for understanding Canadian identity politics, political mobilization, political institutions, and public policy. Ultimately, this book establishes how adopting a more systematic comparative outlook is essential – not only to revitalize the study of Canadian politics but also to achieve a more nuanced understanding of Canada as a whole.
Marketing is a very diverse discipline, dealing with everything from the costs of globalization to the benefits of money-back guarantees. However, there is one thing that all marketing academics share. They are writers. They publish or perish. Their careers are advanced, and their reputations are enhanced, by the written word. Despite its importance, writing is rarely discussed, much less written about, by marketing scholars. It is one of the least understood, yet most significant, academic competencies. It is a competency in need of careful study. Writing Marketing is the first such study. It offers a detailed reading of five renowned marketing writers, ranging from Ted Levitt to Morris Holbrook, and draws lessons that can be adopted, with profit, by everyone else. Although it is not a `how to' book – there are no lengthy lists of dos and don’ts – Writing Marketing reveals that the `rules' of good writing are good for nothing. Written by Stephen Brown, whose own writing skills are much commented upon, Writing Marketing is insightful, illuminating and iconoclastic. It is a must read for every marketing academic, irrespective of their methodological inclinations or philosophical preferences.
Glamour is one of the most tantalizing and bewitching aspects of contemporary culture - but also one of the most elusive. The aura of celebrity, the style of the fashion world, the vanity of the rich and beautiful, and the publicity-driven rites of café society are all imbued with its irresistible magnetism. But what exactly is glamour? Where does it come from? How old is it? And can anyone quite capture its magic? Stephen Gundle answers all these questions and more in this first ever history of the phenomenon, from Paris in the tumultuous final decades of the eighteenth century through to Hollywood, New York, and Monte Carlo in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from Napoleon to Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe, from Beau Brummell to Gianni Versace. Throughout, the book captures the excitement and sex appeal of glamour while exposing its mechanisms and exploring its sleazy and sometimes tragic underside. As Gundle shows, while glamour is exciting and magnetic, its promise is ultimately an illusion that can only ever be partially fulfilled.
Since the 1960s, Hong Kong cinema has helped to shape one of the world's most popular cultural genres: action cinema. Hong Kong action films have proved popular over the decades with audiences worldwide, and they have seized the imaginations of filmmakers working in many different cultural traditions and styles. How do we account for this appeal, which changes as it crosses national borders? Hong Kong Connections brings leading film scholars together to explore the uptake of Hong Kong cinema in Japan, Korea, India, Australia, France and the US as well as its links with Taiwan, Singapore and the Chinese mainland. In the process, this collective study examines diverse cultural contexts for action cinema's popularity, and the problems involved in the transnational study of globally popular forms suggesting that in order to grasp the history of Hong Kong action cinema's influence we need to bring out the differences as well as the links that constitute popularity.
William Blake and the Age of Aquarius / by Stephen F. Eisenman -- Prophets, madmen, and millenarians: Blake and the (counter)culture of the 1790s / by Mark Crosby -- William Blake on the West Coast / Elizabeth Ferrell -- William Blake and art against surveillance / Jacob Henry Leveton -- Building Golgonooza in the Age of Aquarius / John Murphy -- "My teacher in all things": Sendak, Blake, and the visual language of childhood / Mark Crosby -- Blake then and now / W.J.T. Mitchell
In the first musicological study of Kurt Weill’s complete stage works, Stephen Hinton charts the full range of theatrical achievements by one of twentieth-century musical theater’s key figures. Hinton shows how Weill’s experiments with a range of genres—from one-act operas and plays with music to Broadway musicals and film-opera—became an indispensable part of the reforms he promoted during his brief but intense career. Confronting the divisive notion of "two Weills"—one European, the other American—Hinton adopts a broad and inclusive perspective, establishing criteria that allow aspects of continuity to emerge, particularly in matters of dramaturgy. Tracing his extraordinary journey as a composer, the book shows how Weill’s artistic ambitions led to his working with a remarkably heterogeneous collection of authors, such as Georg Kaiser, Bertolt Brecht, Moss Hart, Alan Jay Lerner, and Maxwell Anderson.
The best New York has to offer, Pocket Rough Guide New York City is your essential guide to the cultural capital of the USA, with all the key sights, restaurants, shops and bars. Whether you have an afternoon or a few days at your disposal, our itineraries help you plan your trip, and the Best of New York section picks out the highlights you won't want to miss, from MoMA's incredible modern art collection to towering skyscrapers like the Empire State. Divided by area for easy navigation, the Places section is written in Rough Guide's trademark honest and informative style, with listings of the must-see sights and our pick of the places to eat, drink and dance, from the best Jewish delis to the city's most historic jazz clubs. Make the most of your time with The Pocket Rough Guide to New York City. Now available in ePub format.
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