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Finalist, ABA Silver Gavel Award for Books

The New York Times bestseller that has cemented Elie Mystal’s reputation as one of our sharpest and most acerbic legal minds

“After reading Allow Me to Retort, I want Elie Mystal to explain everything I don’t understand—quantum astrophysics, the infield fly rule, why people think Bob Dylan is a good singer . . .” —Michael Harriot, The Root

Allow Me to Retort is an easily digestible argument about what rights we have, what rights Republicans are trying to take away, and how to stop them. Mystal explains how to protect the rights of women and people of color instead of cowering to the absolutism of gun owners and bigots. He explains the legal way to stop everything from police brutality to political gerrymandering, just by changing a few judges and justices. He strips out all of the fancy jargon conservatives like to hide behind and lays bare the truth of their project to keep America forever tethered to its slaveholding past.

Mystal brings his trademark humor, expertise, and rhetorical flair to explain concepts like substantive due process and the right for the LGBTQ community to buy a cake, and to arm readers with the knowledge to defend themselves against conservatives who want everybody to live under the yoke of eighteenth-century white men. The same tactics Mystal uses to defend the idea of a fair and equal society on MSNBC and CNN are in this book, for anybody who wants to deploy them on social media.

You don’t need to be a legal scholar to understand your own rights. You don’t need to accept the “whites only” theory of equality pushed by conservative judges. You can read this book to understand that the Constitution is trash, but doesn’t have to be.

Finalist, ABA Silver Gavel Award for Books

The New York Times bestseller that has cemented Elie Mystal’s reputation as one of our sharpest and most acerbic legal minds

“After reading Allow Me to Retort, I want Elie Mystal to explain everything I don’t understand—quantum astrophysics, the infield fly rule, why people think Bob Dylan is a good singer . . .” —Michael Harriot, The Root

Allow Me to Retort is an easily digestible argument about what rights we have, what rights Republicans are trying to take away, and how to stop them. Mystal explains how to protect the rights of women and people of color instead of cowering to the absolutism of gun owners and bigots. He explains the legal way to stop everything from police brutality to political gerrymandering, just by changing a few judges and justices. He strips out all of the fancy jargon conservatives like to hide behind and lays bare the truth of their project to keep America forever tethered to its slaveholding past.

Mystal brings his trademark humor, expertise, and rhetorical flair to explain concepts like substantive due process and the right for the LGBTQ community to buy a cake, and to arm readers with the knowledge to defend themselves against conservatives who want everybody to live under the yoke of eighteenth-century white men. The same tactics Mystal uses to defend the idea of a fair and equal society on MSNBC and CNN are in this book, for anybody who wants to deploy them on social media.

You don’t need to be a legal scholar to understand your own rights. You don’t need to accept the “whites only” theory of equality pushed by conservative judges. You can read this book to understand that the Constitution is trash, but doesn’t have to be.

Lange Zeit galt Genrekunst als Abbild der Wirklichkeit und der Prozess zunehmender Säkularisierung schien die Ursache ihrer Entstehung. Heute herrschen Erklärungen vor, welche die Genrekunst im Sinne gemalter Ethik und Lasterdarstellungen als Beitrag eines christlich-didaktischen Programms werten. Der vorliegende Band erweitert diese Perspektiven. Denn die Genremalerei stellt sich politischen, theologischen wie kunsttheoretischen Fragen und erweist sich als Medium einer im Aufbruch begriffenen Welt. So ist es kein Zufall, dass sich die Anfänge der Genrekunst im 15. Jahrhundert in druckgraphischen Werken – im fortschrittlichsten Reproduktionsmedium jener Zeit – finden. Dabei adressiert sie ein städtisches Publikum, das im Alltag immer wieder dem Problem christlicher Lebensführung gegenübersteht.

Die Publikation versammelt Beiträge mit Interpretationen exemplarischer Genrebilder von Albrecht Dürer, Hieronymus Bosch, Petrus Christus oder Jan Sanders van Hemessen und regt zu einer Neubewertung der Gattung an, um sie als selbstreflexive, konfliktoffene Kunstform sichtbar zu machen.

2016 Neue Herausgeberschaft

Elisabeth Blum, Jesko Fezer, Günther Fischer, Angelika Schnell

Die nicht zu Unrecht legendär genannte Schriftenreihe zu Geschichte und Theorie von Architektur und Städtebau wurde 1963 von Ulrich Conrads gegründet und seit den frühen 1980er Jahren zusammen mit Peter Neitzke herausgegeben. Sie ist mit inzwischen über 150 Bänden die umfangreichste deutschsprachige Buchreihe zu diesen Themen. Mit dem Tod der beiden langjährigen Herausgeber Ulrich Conrads (2013) und Peter Neitzke (2015) hat ein neues HerausgeberInnengremium seine Arbeit aufgenommen: Elisabeth Blum, Jesko Fezer, Günther Fischer, Angelika Schnell. Als künftige HerausgeberInnen versuchen wir auf Kurs zu bleiben.

Die ursprüngliche Zielsetzung der Reihe, eine Bestandsaufnahme der baulichen und städtebaulichen Ideen und Realisierungen des 20. Jahrhunderts zu leisten, wurde bereits in herausragender Weise erfüllt. Die Bauwelt Fundamente repräsentieren geradezu die Ideengeschichte des Planens und Bauens jener Zeit bis in die Gegenwart hinein. Diese gilt es in die Zukunft hinein fortzuschreiben.

In gleicher Weise besteht der zweite, direkt im Namen verankerte Anspruch der Reihe unvermindert fort: nicht Tagesmeinungen, sondern Fundamente – Verbindliches und Grundlegendes – aber auch Thesen- und Streitschriften zu den brennenden architektonischen und städtebaulichen Themen der Zeit zu veröffentlichen. Komplexe Zusammenhänge zu durchdringen und probeweise einzuordnen bildet die Voraussetzung fruchtbarer Diskurse und zukunftsfähiger Auseinandersetzungen.

Die Bauwelt Fundamente-Reihe legt als Forum solcher Diskurse und Beiträge ihren Fokus unvermindert auf die Bereiche Architektur und Urbanismus, ergänzt durch die immer notwendige historische Aufarbeitung wichtiger Fragen und Texte und den Blick darüber hinaus in andere kulturelle und gesellschaftliche Gefilde. Eine stärker internationale Ausrichtung und der Wunsch nach mehr Autorinnen sind hierbei selbstverständlich.

Die grafische Gestaltung der Reihe von Helmut Lortz wird in Bezug auf seine ursprünglichen Anliegen beibehalten: Wie sich das für eine Arbeitsbücherei gehört, bleiben die Bauwelt Fundamente einfach ausgestattet: Schwarz/weiß das Signet sowie die Bildmotive von Vorder- und Rückseite und der 11-Zeiler mit konzentrierter Information zum Inhalt. Damit wenden sich die Bauwelt Fundamente auch weiterhin an alle, die Anteil nehmen an der kulturellen und gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung, in deren Kontext Städte, Häuser und Dinge entstehen und die wiederum Kontexte schaffen für die Welt. „Architekten hätten sich, heißt es – oder hofft man – immer schon, über die Grenzen ihres Berufs hinaus, für die Welt interessiert." (1)

(1) Peter Neitzke, Manuskript seiner Rede „Nicht mit dem Rücken zur Gesellschaft" anlässlich der 50-Jahrfeier der Bauwelt Fundamente in Berlin, 2013

Die Alltägliche Hausmusik, für die Rist erneut mit Johann Schop und Michael Jacobi – nur ersterer wird indes auf dem Titelblatt genannt – zusammenarbeitete, ist (stärker als dies mit Blick auf die übrigen Rist’schen geistlichen Liedsammlungen der Fall ist) fast ausschließlich auf die Pflege der häuslichen praxis pietatis ausgerichtet. Die 70 Lieder berücksichtigen (ähnlich wie die zeitüblichen Sammlungen von Standesgebeten) die Lebenskontexte unterschiedlicher Berufsgruppen und bieten Gesänge zu heterogenen alltäglichen Situationen (Tageszeiten, Mahlzeiten, Schwangerschaften etc.), zu typischen Krisensituationen (Krankheiten, Todesfälle), zu witterungsbedingten Widrigkeiten (z. B. Hitze) sowie zur häuslichen Vorbereitung auf den öffentlichen Gottesdienst, insbesondere auf die Teilnahme am Abendmahl. Schops Lieder auf Rist’sche Texte werden mit diesem Band dann vollständig vorliegen.

The pontianak, a terrifying female vampire ghost, is a powerful figure in Malay cultures, as loved and feared in Southeast Asia as Dracula is in the West. In animist tradition, she is a woman who has died in childbirth, and her vengeful return upsets gender norms and social hierarchies. The pontianak first appeared on screen in late colonial Singapore in a series of popular films that combine indigenous animism and transnational production with the cultural and political force of the horror genre.

In Alluring Monsters, Rosalind Galt explores how and why the pontianak found new life in postcolonial Southeast Asian film and society. She argues that the figure speaks to a series of intersecting anxieties: about femininity and modernity, globalization and indigeneity, racial and national identities, the relationship of Islam to animism, and heritage and environmental destruction. The pontianak offers abundant feminist potential, but her disruptive gender politics also unsettle queer and feminist film theories by putting them in dialogue with Malay epistemologies. Reading the pontianak as a precolonial figure of disturbance within postcolonial cultures, Galt reveals the importance of cinema to histories and theories of decolonization. From the horror films made by Cathay Keris and Shaw Studios in the 1950s and 1960s to contemporary film, television, art, and fiction in Malaysia and Singapore, the pontianak in all her media forms sheds light on how postcolonial identities are both developed and contested. In tracing the entanglements of Malay feminist animisms with postcolonial visual cultures, Alluring Monsters reveals how a “pontianak theory” can reshape understandings of anticolonial aesthetics and world cinema.

The pontianak, a terrifying female vampire ghost, is a powerful figure in Malay cultures, as loved and feared in Southeast Asia as Dracula is in the West. In animist tradition, she is a woman who has died in childbirth, and her vengeful return upsets gender norms and social hierarchies. The pontianak first appeared on screen in late colonial Singapore in a series of popular films that combine indigenous animism and transnational production with the cultural and political force of the horror genre.

In Alluring Monsters, Rosalind Galt explores how and why the pontianak found new life in postcolonial Southeast Asian film and society. She argues that the figure speaks to a series of intersecting anxieties: about femininity and modernity, globalization and indigeneity, racial and national identities, the relationship of Islam to animism, and heritage and environmental destruction. The pontianak offers abundant feminist potential, but her disruptive gender politics also unsettle queer and feminist film theories by putting them in dialogue with Malay epistemologies. Reading the pontianak as a precolonial figure of disturbance within postcolonial cultures, Galt reveals the importance of cinema to histories and theories of decolonization. From the horror films made by Cathay Keris and Shaw Studios in the 1950s and 1960s to contemporary film, television, art, and fiction in Malaysia and Singapore, the pontianak in all her media forms sheds light on how postcolonial identities are both developed and contested. In tracing the entanglements of Malay feminist animisms with postcolonial visual cultures, Alluring Monsters reveals how a “pontianak theory” can reshape understandings of anticolonial aesthetics and world cinema.

The Ciris has received a certain amount of scholarly attention during the twentieth century, but on the whole has failed to meet with an adequate appreciation. This book aims to vindicate the Ciris, mainly by exploring its use of pre-Virgilian poetic texts largely ignored in previous scholarship.

The core of the book consists of a discursive literary commentary, divided into chapters that examine consecutively the poem's main narrative units. Viewing allusion and allegory as intrinsic features of poetic composition rather than mere artistic devices, the book explores, among more prominent intertexts, Apollonius' Argonautica and Callimachus' Hecale, Lucretius and Catullus 64. Allusions are also suggested to Homer and Empedocles, Theocritus, Moschus, and Bion, Nicander and Euphorion, Choerilus of Samos and Asius of Samos, Ennius and Cicero. Through its intricate web of references to poetic intertexts, the Ciris, it is argued, creates an implicit allegorical pattern with an original poetological message.

Allusion and Allegory is thus the first book-length study to offer a coherent literary interpretation of this controversial poem.

Many interpreters read John 6 as a contrast between Jesus and Judaism: Jesus repudiates Moses and manna and offers himself as an alternative. In contrast, this monograph argues that John 6 places elements of the Exodus story in a positive and constructive relationship to Jesus. This reading leads to an understanding of John as an interpreter of Exodus who, like other contemporary Jewish interpreters, sees current experiences in light of the Exodus story. This approach to John offers new possibilities for assessing the gospel’s relationship to Jewish scripture, its dualism, and its metaphorical language.

Questions about how ancient Greek texts establish their authority, reflect on each other, and project their own truths have become central for a wide range of recent critical discourses. In this volume, an influential group of international scholars examines these themes in a variety of poetic and rhetorical genres. The result is a series of striking and original readings from different critical perspectives that display the centrality of these questions for understanding the poetic and rhetorical aims of ancient Greek texts. Characterized by a combination of close attention to philological detail and theoretical sophistication, the essays in this volume make a compelling case for this kind of focused, critically informed dialogue about the nature of ancient textual praxis. Students of classical literature will find a wealth of critical insights and challenging new readings of many familiar texts.

This corpus-based study of allusions in the British press shows the range of targets journalists allude to - from Shakespeare to TV soaps, from Jane Austen to Hillary Clinton, from hymns to nursery rhymes, proverbs and riddles. It analyzes the linguistic forms allusions take and demonstrates how allusions function meaningfully in discourse. It explores the nature of the background cultural and intertextual knowledge allusions demand of readers and sets out the processing stages involved in understanding an allusion. Allusion is integrated into existing theories of indirect language and linked to idioms, word-play and metaphor.

»Die Urteilskraft herrscht über die Leidenschaften.« So lautet die Leitthese des 4. Makkabäerbuches, welche in den 18 Kapiteln dieser Schrift in verschiedensten Variationen über hundertmal wiederholt wird. Diese spürbare thematische Fokussierung auf den Aspekt der menschlichen Handlungsverantwortung ruft in einer ausdrücklich als Gotteslob angelegten Schrift die Frage nach der Rolle Gottes auf den Plan. Wie wird von ihm gesprochen? Wo und wie ist er in den Text eingebunden? Wie werden göttliches und menschliches Handeln einander zugeordnet? Die vorliegende Untersuchung geht diesen Fragen nach und erweist die grundlegende Verwurzelung der Anthropologie des 4Makk-Verfassers in seiner Gottesvorstellung. Dazu wird die textinterne Entfaltung des Gottesbildes nachgezeichnet, in dessen Zentrum Gott als allweiser Schöpfer und durchsetzungsstarker Gesetzgeber erscheint.

A playful re-imagining of the traditional Scottish rhyme filled with bright illustrations and lots of lift-the-flaps fun!

"Ally bally, ally bally bee,
Sittin on yer mammy's knee
Greetin for a wee bawbee
Tae buy some Coulter's Candy."

Little Ally is having fun -- singing with Mummy, playing in the sun and getting messy with Daddy!

Sing along and lift the flaps to discover teddy getting splashed in a paddling pool, covered in paint and lost under a pile of sweeties.

This is a playful re-imagining of the traditional Scottish rhyme -- perfect for sharing with very young children. The bright, colorful illustrations are full of fun details to spot and each page is enhanced with durable, toddler-friendly flaps.

As top DEI Consultant Di Ciruolo asks readers, “Why should people care about being allies?”. The current system, she reveals, is full of blame for inequalities. It is full of shame, too, as insiders at top tech companies share eye-opening stories about what DEI is really like in Silicon Valley and beyond. But allyship isn’t about blame or shame; it’s about action. Now, Ciruolo shows why allyship is crucial for every business within Ally Up. Leaders are expected to understand systems of inequality in the workplace and beyond to promote more inclusive and higher performing teams. Ally Up is a how-to guide written with exactly those goals in mind.

ALM Modeling and Balance Sheet Optimization is a comprehensive book that combines theoretical exploration with practical guidance and code examples on implementing a balance sheet optimization model. The book emphasizes the use of stochastic dynamic programming to develop a deep and holistic understanding of the banking problem. Encompassing the entire implementation stack – spanning from data layers to the specification of decision variables, business and regulatory constraints, objective functions, modeling strategies, solving techniques, debugging, and reporting – this book serves as a comprehensive guide for constructing highly effective balance optimization models from scratch, enabling the maximization of banking outcomes.

Readers will learn how to build a mathematical model capable of generating projections for portfolios; balance sheet, income and cash flow statements; capital, and risk measures in real-world scenarios. This practical approach is particularly valuable for professionals involved in integrated stress testing, capital adequacy assessment, financial planning, and optimization tasks. In essence, the book offers valuable insights into the challenges of balance sheet optimization, providing readers with the necessary tools to build their own dynamic and comprehensive ALM models.

GANADOR DEL PREMIO JAMES BEARD 2024

LA PLANTA DE AGAVE NUNCA ESTUVO DESTINADA A CONVERTIRSE EN UNA BEBIDA DESTILADA INSÍPIDA Y BARATA...

Todos los tequilas son mezcales. Todos los mezcales se elaboran a partir de agaves. Y cada botella de mezcal es el resultado extraordinario de colaboraciones entre emprendedores del agave, botánicos, destiladores, distribuidores de bebidas, bartenders y entusiastas. Este fascinante libro del reconocido etnobotánico Gary Paul Nabhan y el pionero restaurantero David Suro Piñera explora la conexión entre todos ellos.

La destilación del agave es parte ciencia y parte arte. Alma de agave muestra cómo los métodos tradicionales de producción de mezcal están inspirando a una nueva generación de entusiastas de los destilados del agave. Remontándose a una tradición ancestral, los autores comparten su experiencia para entender la historia detrás de una botella del emblemático destilado de México, e invitan al lector a un viaje apasionante por la arqueología, la botánica y hasta las consecuencias del cambio climático.

«Este libro es una auténtica celebración de cómo el respeto de una comunidad por su biodiversidad puede crear magia líquida».
—José Andrés

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

WINNER OF THE JAMES BEARD AWARD 2024

THE AGAVE PLANT WAS NEVER MEANT TO BECOME A BLAND, CHEAP DISTILLED BEVERAGE...

All tequilas are mezcals. All mezcals are made from agaves. And every bottle of mezcal is the extraordinary result of collaborations between agave entrepreneurs, botanists, distillers, beverage distributors, bartenders, and enthusiasts. This fascinating book by renowned ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan and pioneering restaurateur David Suro Piñera explores the connection among them all.

Agave distillation is part science and part art. Alma de agave shows how traditional mezcal production methods are inspiring a new generation of agave spirit enthusiasts. Reaching back to an ancestral tradition, the authors share their expertise to uncover the story behind a bottle of Mexico’s iconic distilled spirit, and invite readers on a thrilling journey through archaeology, botany, and even the consequences of climate change.

“This book is a true celebration of how a community’s respect for its biodiversity can create liquid magic.”
—José Andrés

The Almaguin Highlands, an extensive territory covering a 90 km corridor from Huntsville, north to Callander, west to Dunchurch and east to the Algonquin Park border, is a land rich with lakes, rivers and a lively history. Once considered as a possibility for a government Indian Reserve in the early 1800s, Almaguin became a centre for lumbering and ultimately a year-round mecca for outdoor enthusiasts.

Almaguin: A Highland History offers a wide range of stories from the opening of the area by colonization roads to the first vessels on the Magnetawan River and the courage of the early pioneers. Included are community histories of the many towns, villages and ghost towns of today, profiles of colourful personalities, as well as interesting and amusing tales of these rugged early times.

The Almaguin Highlands is a region that was once coveted for its game, silver birch and majestic white pine. For centuries this area stretched up to the shores of Lake Nipissing and embraced an unbroken forest that remained largely intact save where lakes, streams and beaver meadows punctuated the forest floor. In 1900, the northernmost areas of the District of Parry Sound were still not accessible by even a conventional roadway. Homesteaders, their claims precariously strung along the Pickerel River, relied on the waterway as their transportation route. What must it have been like at the outset for the lumbermen who cut down the white pine? And how did the settlers-those intrepid folk who trekked across the district with only the lumberjack's blazed trails for a guide-cope in the wilderness?

Almaguin Chronicles explores the relationship between lumbering and settlement throughout the Parry Sound District-the last frontier of this part of Ontario. Throughout, rare archival photographs and excerpts from unpublished memoirs augment the text.

Fence poetry editor and rising star Michael Chang’s Almanac of Useless Talents is a must-read for poetry lovers and newbies alike. 

This is a useless Almanac. There’s no seasonal data, only poems good for leaving the club in haute couture with mid-level poets, for ambiguous sex, mouthy seductions, shoulder-turns of cold cock disrespect.

Part confessional, part experimental, and completely original, Chang is a poet read in classrooms and on phone screens with equal fervor. Each poem deftly deforms self into outrageous performance. This poetry snaps and twists so fast you’ll miss things: the intricate formal craft, the bitchy wordplay. A dopamine rush delving into desire’s throbbing networks of flesh and circuit, identity, relationships, Aznness, queerdom, and more that would arouse Ashbery envy, Chang’s playful style is edgy, surprising, and delightful. In Chang’s world, sentiment is décor: come face the amusing ever-ache of our desires or go ahead and try to outrun them.

Being a Phillies fan has never been easy. The team has amassed the most losses of any professional sports franchise in history, as well as the longest losing streak and the most last-place finishes in the major leagues.

The year 1980 was redemption for a miserable, century-old legacy of losing. It was also the beginning of the end for a team that could have been among the very best in baseball throughout the decade. Between 1980 and 1983 the Philadelphia Phillies captured two pennants and a world championship. Legends like Tug McGraw, Steve Carlton, Mike Schmidt, and Pete Rose led the collection of homegrown products, veteran castoffs, and fair-haired rookies. If they had won another World Series, the team not only would have distanced themselves from a history of losing but would have established a championship dynasty. It never happened.

The 1981 season was a watershed for both the Phillies and baseball. A players' strike led to a sixty-day work stoppage. The Phils, who had been in first place before the strike, were unable to regain their winning ways after play resumed. Labor relations between an increasingly powerful Players Association and inflexible owners became more acrimonious than ever before. Player salaries skyrocketed. Old loyalties were forgotten, and the notion of a homegrown team, like the 1980 Phillies, was a thing of the past.

Almost a Dynasty details the rise and fall of the 1980 World Champion Phillies. Based on personal interviews, newspaper accounts, and the keen insight of a veteran baseball writer, the book convincingly explains why a team that had regularly made the post-season in the mid- to late 1970s, only to lose in the playoffs, was finally able to win its first world championship.

CHANGE YOUR MATH
CHANGE YOUR BUSINESS
CHANGE YOUR LIFE
Almost Alchemy challenges your existing beliefs and self-imposed limitations—forcing you to re-imagine, reinvent, and reorganize your business to achieve and exceed goals in a systematic and sustainable way.
In this radical new book, Dan Kennedy destroys the myth that “Knowledge is Power” by exposing 20 different proven strategies to ensure business sustainability and maximize wealth extraction. It is thought-provoking, cage-rattling and mind blowing all in one.
Alchemy isn’t writing slightly better copy or tweaking your marketing to take advantage of some new media or some other hot trend. Instead, it’s about reinventing the way you think about your business, recognizing the “brutal realities” that few dare to embrace or refuse to even recognize… and turning information into ACTION and PROFIT.
In its mythical context, Alchemy was about one thing and one thing only: transforming ordinary metals into gold. And like thousands of others, you may start this book thinking you’re in an ordinary business and finish realizing you instead have a different, bigger, better, more valuable one.

Almost Home tells the stories of six remarkable young people from across the United States and Canada as they confront life alone on the streets. Each eventually finds his or her way to Covenant House, the largest charity serving homeless and runaway youth in North America. From the son of a crack addict who fights his own descent into drug addiction to a teen mother reaching for a new life, their stories veer between devastating and inspiring as they each struggle to find a place called home.

• Includes a foreword by Newark Mayor Cory Booker
• Shares the personal stories of six homeless youths grappling with issues such as drug addiction, family violence, prostitution, rejection based on sexual orientation, teen parenthood, and aging out of foster care into a future with limited skills and no support system
• Gives voice to the estimated 1.6 million young people in the United States and Canada who run away or are kicked out of their homes each year
• Includes striking photographs, stories of firsthand experiences mentoring and working with homeless and troubled youth, and practical suggestions on how to get involved
• Discusses the root causes of homelessness among young people, and policy recommendations to address them
• Provides action steps readers can take to fight youth homelessness and assist individual homeless young people
• Written by Kevin Ryan, president of Covenant House, and Pulitzer Prize nominee and former New York Times writer Tina Kelley

Inviting us to get to know homeless teens as more than an accumulation of statistics and societal issues, this book gives a human face to a huge but largely invisible problem and offers practical insights into how to prevent homelessness and help homeless youth move to a hopeful future. For instance, one kid in the book goes on to become a college football player and counselor to at-risk adolescents and another becomes a state kickboxing champion. All the stories inspire us with victories of the human spirit, large and small. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of each book will help support kids who benefit from Covenant House's shelter and outreach services.

A young boy and girl, born worlds apart, chased the promise of the good life—the American Dream—only for the lives they carefully built to fall apart in the wake of divorce. Almost Home shares the truth of God’s promises, his power to rebuild lives and transform hearts. 

Almost Home shares how two broken families joined together in holy matrimony and God’s healing. David Steen takes readers through one family’s journey of remarriage, building a home, growing a family, selling a house and pursuing life on a farm, all while pursuing the believers’ true home—with Christ. 

The family in Almost Home sought to build their lives anew on a firm foundation. Their desire for God and faith in Him, along with their raw determination and love for one another carried them through decades of joyous victories as well as trials and tribulations. The life of their dreams, along with an amazing place to call home, was built in amazement before their very eyes, and their growing family drew near to God continually, desiring to hear His voice and to obediently follow the Lord with reckless abandon.

Yet even then, something was missing. In all of their pursuits, the destination of home they sought after in this life eventually became somewhat of a mystery, something to cling to less and less as time passed on. What they longed for was fleeting as they came to recognize that they were not citizens of this world after all, but sojourners on a journey to another world, a heavenly realm where the struggles of this life are no more.

Join this family on their miraculous journey to find hope for the future as they pursue their heavenly home, encouraging readers to loosen their grip on the things of this world.

“In essays that bespeak a thoroughly cosmopolitan sensibility, Githa Hariharan not only takes us on illuminating tours through cities rich in history, but gives a voice to urban people from all over the world—Kashmir, Palestine, Delhi—trying to live with basic human dignity under circumstances of dire repression or crushing poverty.” —JM Coetzee

What does a medieval city in South India have in common with Washington, D.C.? How do people in Kashmir envision the freedom they long for? To whom does Delhi, city of grand monuments and hidden slums, actually belong? And what makes a city, or any place, home? In ten intricately wrought essays, renowned author Githa Hariharan takes readers on an eye-opening journey across time and place, exploring the history, landscape, and people that have shaped the world’s most fascinating and fraught cities.

Inspired by Italo Calvino’s playful and powerful writing about journeys and cities, Harihan combines memory, cultural criticism, and history to sculpt fascinating, layered stories about the places around the world—from Delhi, Mumbai, and Kashmir to Palestine, Algeria, and eleventh-century Córdoba, from Tokyo to New York and Washington. In narrating the lives of these places’ vanquished and marginalized, she plumbs the depths of colonization and nation-building, poverty and war, the struggle for human rights, and the day-to-day business of survival. Almost Home: Finding a Place in the World from Kashmir to New York presents a new kind of travel writing that is intellectually adventurous but never detached, couched in personal experience but deeply engaged in the world, inviting the reader to make surprising connections with her own sense of home.

“In essays that bespeak a thoroughly cosmopolitan sensibility, Githa Hariharan not only takes us on illuminating tours through cities rich in history, but gives a voice to urban people from all over the world—Kashmir, Palestine, Delhi—trying to live with basic human dignity under circumstances of dire repression or crushing poverty.” —JM Coetzee

What does a medieval city in South India have in common with Washington, D.C.? How do people in Kashmir envision the freedom they long for? To whom does Delhi, city of grand monuments and hidden slums, actually belong? And what makes a city, or any place, home? In ten intricately wrought essays, renowned author Githa Hariharan takes readers on an eye-opening journey across time and place, exploring the history, landscape, and people that have shaped the world’s most fascinating and fraught cities.

Inspired by Italo Calvino’s playful and powerful writing about journeys and cities, Harihan combines memory, cultural criticism, and history to sculpt fascinating, layered stories about the places around the world—from Delhi, Mumbai, and Kashmir to Palestine, Algeria, and eleventh-century Córdoba, from Tokyo to New York and Washington. In narrating the lives of these places’ vanquished and marginalized, she plumbs the depths of colonization and nation-building, poverty and war, the struggle for human rights, and the day-to-day business of survival. Almost Home: Finding a Place in the World from Kashmir to New York presents a new kind of travel writing that is intellectually adventurous but never detached, couched in personal experience but deeply engaged in the world, inviting the reader to make surprising connections with her own sense of home.

“Alternately joyous and heartbreaking...” —Jane Goodall

A moving and revealing biography of Norway’s most famous chimpanzee.

Julius is a national celebrity, the inspiration behind pop hits and bestselling books.

He’s also a chimpanzee, born in captivity, but raised in a zookeeper’s home after his own mother rejects him. Julius’s new parents change his diapers and comfort him when he has nightmares, and their daughters play with him. But soon they must reintroduce Julius to the zoo, a challenging task that brings new learnings on primate behavior and the dangers of animal celebrity.

Alternately humorous and heartbreaking, Almost Human shows that primates are more like us than we once thought possible. It also charts the transformation of one zoo over time: from a small operation of animals behind bars to a fast-growing attraction coming to terms with twenty-first-century views on animal rights and welfare.

“Alternately joyous and heartbreaking...” —Jane Goodall

A moving and revealing biography of Norway’s most famous chimpanzee.

Julius is a national celebrity, the inspiration behind pop hits and bestselling books.

He’s also a chimpanzee, born in captivity, but raised in a zookeeper’s home after his own mother rejects him. Julius’s new parents change his diapers and comfort him when he has nightmares, and their daughters play with him. But soon they must reintroduce Julius to the zoo, a challenging task that brings new learnings on primate behavior and the dangers of animal celebrity.

Alternately humorous and heartbreaking, Almost Human shows that primates are more like us than we once thought possible. It also charts the transformation of one zoo over time: from a small operation of animals behind bars to a fast-growing attraction coming to terms with twenty-first-century views on animal rights and welfare.

Jewel is on the run from an abusive home situation and furtively living at school. After Maya discovers her classmate’s secret, should she tell? Or can she help Jewel on her own?

Thirteen-year-old Jewel has been holding her life together ever since her older sister, Charmaine, suddenly left home with no forwarding address. She tried to find Charmaine once, but that only brought her family to the attention of the police. Now Jewel keeps her head down at school, looks after her special-needs brother as well as she can, and tries to steer clear of her parents and their shady friends.

When her father’s friend comes into her bedroom one night, Jewel finally understands why Charmaine had to leave home. Soon she is on the run herself. When her food runs out, Jewel chances upon a new place to live — the cupboard of the art room at school. It turns out to be surprisingly easy to live under the radar when you have perfected the art of being almost invisible.

That is, until Jewel’s classmates, Maya and Lily, discover her washing her hair in the girls’ washroom at school and making breakfast in the lunchroom. They take her on as their project, finding her places to sleep, fixing her hair and wardrobe — even as they can’t quite understand her terror, or why she is so afraid of seeking adult help. But the girls help keep Jewel and her secret safe — until they no longer can.

Told in the alternating voices of Maya and Jewel, this is a thought-provoking and moving story about loyalty, privilege, keeping secrets, and what it means to be a good friend.

Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.5.6
Describe how a narrator's or speaker's point of view influences how events are described.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.3
Describe how a particular story's or drama's plot unfolds in a series of episodes as well as how the characters respond or change as the plot moves toward a resolution.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.6
Explain how an author develops the point of view of the narrator or speaker in a text.

What does an assemblage made out of crumpled newspaper have in common with an empty room in which the lights go on and off every five seconds? This book argues that they are both examples of a 'precarious' art that flourished from the late 1950s to the first decade of the twenty-first century, in light of a growing awareness of the individual's fragile existence in capitalist society.

Focusing on comparative case studies drawn from European, North and South American practices, this study maps out a network of similar concerns and practices, while outlining its evolution from the 1960s to the beginning of the twenty-first century.

This book will provide students and amateurs of contemporary art and culture with new insights into contemporary art practices and the critical issues that they raise concerning the material status of the art object, the role of the artist in society, and the relation between art and everyday life.

The gritty detail of a life in the spotlight is exposed — rebuilding herself after a fall that left one of her limbs compromised and challenged all she had aspired to be, avoiding child abusers in the show business world, and keeping her cool when the unpredictable happens 30 metres in the air. More than this, Erika explains the methodology behind her success stories. With precise parameters, tips, and tricks, Almost Perfect is the guide she shares to a pain-free life, which explains how she maintains her physical conditions to Olympic-athlete level, and demonstrates how everyone can achieve the extraordinary — not by magical thinking but by designing a precise set of habits that can open doors to what most think is only accessible to the few.

Almost Perfect is ideal for anyone that aspires to exceptional health, an extraordinary life, a head-turning physique, and an enviable career. Erika’s carefully crafted methodology for excelling at specific goals is laid bare for the world to see. Nothing comes for free: a detail-oriented and elite mindset is the key to the most incredible life-changing path. Throughout Almost Perfect, readers learn to be the incarnation of coherence through iron discipline and unshakeable self-worth.

This book discusses almost periodic and almost automorphic solutions to abstract integro-differential Volterra equations that are degenerate in time, and in particular equations whose solutions are governed by (degenerate) solution operator families with removable singularities at zero. It particularly covers abstract fractional equations and inclusions with multivalued linear operators as well as abstract fractional semilinear Cauchy problems.

Maybe for the first time in the existing literature, we investigate here the almost periodic type solutions to the abstract Volterra difference equations depending on several variables. We also investigate the generalized almost periodic type sequences and their applications in a rather detailed manner as well as many new important spaces of (metrically) generalized almost periodic type spaces of sequences and functions. We essenitally apply some results from the theory of C-regularized solution operator families to the abstract Volterra integro-differential-difference equations, contributing also to the theory of fractional calculus and fractional differential equations.

The theory of abstract Volterra integro-differential equations and the theory of abstract Volterra difference equations are very attractive fields of research of many authors. The almost periodic features and the asymptotically almost periodic features of solutions to the abstract Volterra differential-difference equations in Banach spaces have been sought in many research articles published by now.

The main aim of this monograph is to continue the work collected in my monographs published with W. de Gruyter recently by providing several new results about the existence and uniqueness of almost periodic type solutions to the abstract Volterra integro-differential-difference equations which could be solvable or unsolvable with respect to the highest derivative (order). We would like to particularly emphasize that this is probably the first research monograph devoted to the study of almost periodic type solutions to the abstract Volterra difference equations depending on several variables. We also consider here many new important spaces of (metrically) generalized almost periodic type spaces of sequences and functions, and their almost automorphic analogues. It is also worth noting that this is probably the first research monograph which concerns the generalized almost periodic type sequences and their applications in a rather detailed manner; for the first time in the existing literature, we also present here some applications of results from the theory of $C$-regularized solution operator families to the abstract Volterra difference equations.

Fractional calculus and discrete fractional calculus are rapidly growing fields of theoretical and applied mathematics, which are incredibly important in modeling of various real phenomena appearing in different fields like aerodynamics, rheology, interval-valued systems, chaotic systems with short memory and image encryption and discrete-time recurrent neural networks. Many important research results regarding the abstract fractional differential equations and the abstract fractional difference equations in Banach spaces have recently been obtained by a great number of authors from the whole world. In this monograph, we also contribute to the theories of (discrete) fractional calculus, fractional differential-difference equations and multi-dimensional Laplace transform.

Although the monograph is far from being complete, we have decided to quote almost eight hundred and fifty research articles which could be of some importance to the interested readers for further developments of the theory established here.

When we study differential equations in Banach spaces whose coefficients are linear unbounded operators, we feel that we are working in ordinary differential equations; however, the fact that the operator coefficients are unbounded makes things quite different from what is known in the classical case. Examples or applications for such equations are naturally found in the theory of partial differential equations. More specifically, if we give importance to the time variable at the expense of the spatial variables, we obtain an “ordinary differential equation” with respect to the variable which was put in evidence. Thus, for example, the heat or the wave equation gives rise to ordinary differential equations of this kind. Adding boundary conditions can often be translated in terms of considering solutions in some convenient functional Banach space. The theory of semigroups of operators provides an elegant approach to study this kind of systems. Therefore, we can frequently guess or even prove theorems on differential equations in Banach spaces looking at a corresponding pattern in finite dimensional ordinary differential equations.

Based on interviews and fieldwork conducted among residents of Pula, a coastal city in Northwestern Croatia, this study explores various aspects of a local feeling of boredom. This is mirrored in the term tapija, a word of Turkish origin describing a property deed, and in Pula’s urban slang it has morphed from its original sense describing a set of affective states into one of lameness, loneliness, unwillingness, and irony. Combining lively conversations with a significant bibliography of the topic, the result is a compelling local anthropological study of boredom in a wider historical and global context.

Das umfangreiche Typoskript "Wesensmerkmale der deutschen bildenden Kunst", das Alois J. Schardt (1889-1955) im Frühjahr 1933 mit der Absicht verfasste, Direktor der Nationalgalerie in Berlin zu werden, wird in der Forschungsliteratur häufig zitiert, konnte zuvor aber nur im Archiv eingesehen werden. Es bietet zusammen mit zwei weiteren bislang unveröffentlichten Manuskripten die Gelegenheit, sich mit Schardts Konzept vom "Wesen" der deutschen Kunst auseinanderzusetzen. Aufsätze zu seiner Moderne- und Mittelalterforschungen, seiner Museums- und Lehrtätigkeit, seiner Freundschaft mit Lyonel Feininger sowie allgemeinere Beiträge zum Berufsfeld des Kunsthistorikers zwischen den Weltkriegen und zu ästhetischen Positionen dieser Zeit kontextualisieren Schardts Wirken. Der Band versteht sich als Grundlage weiterer Forschungen zur Geschichte der Moderne der Zwischenkriegszeit in Deutschland.

Finalist, Governor General's Literary Award, Translation

Each year, more than 400 minors arrive alone in Canada requesting refugee status. They arrive without their parents, accompanied by no adult at all.

Alone relates the journey of three of them: Afshin, Alain and Patricia. Their story opens a window onto the many heartbreaks, difficult sacrifices and countless hardships that punctuate their obstacle-filled path. But Alone most especially tells of the courage and resilience that these young people demonstrated before being able to finally obtain a life where threats and danger are no longer a part of their everyday existence.

Key Text Features:

author's note

captions

chapters

character drawings

comic

map

dialogue

flags

further information

illustrations

introduction

maps

writing inspiration

Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.6.3

Analyze in detail how a key individual, event, or idea is introduced, illustrated, and elaborated in a text (e.g., through examples or anecdotes).

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.6.7

Integrate information presented in different media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively) as well as in words to develop a coherent understanding of a topic or issue.

Some houses keep their secrets long after the doors are locked.

Irma Willoughby has always been fiercely independent. But as winter closes in, the silence of her isolated farmhouse grows heavier. A stark reminder of her recent widowhood and years of estrangement from her children. The house she refuses to leave holds more than just memories. It holds secrets.

Then her daughter Hilary returns, unannounced and full of questions. She says she’s worried, but Irma can feel the tension. The way she asks about Irma’s late husband. About the brother who died so long ago. About things better left unspoken.

As the temperature drops, strange disturbances begin to stir. A cellar door left open. Family photographs moved. Her husband’s old pipe reappearing without explanation. The past isn’t just haunting Irma. It’s clawing its way to the surface.

With trust fraying and danger circling, Irma must face the one truth she’s never dared admit: the greatest threat may not come from outside, but from within her own family.

In a home filled with ghosts, the most dangerous thing of all might be the truth.

Eight sled dogs and one woman set out from Barrow, Alaska, to mush 2,500 miles. Alone Across the Arctic chronicles this astounding expedition. For an entire year, Pam Flowers and her dogs made this epic journey across North America arctic coast. The first woman to make this trip solo, Pam endures and deals with intense blizzards, melting pack ice, and a polar bear. Yet in the midst of such danger, Pam also relishes the time alone with her beloved team. Their survival—her survival—hinges on that mutual trust and love.

Eight sled dogs and one woman set out from Barrow, Alaska, to mush 2,500 miles. Alone Across the Arctic chronicles this astounding expedition. For an entire year, Pam Flowers and her dogs made this epic journey across North America arctic coast. The first woman to make this trip solo, Pam endures and deals with intense blizzards, melting pack ice, and a polar bear. Yet in the midst of such danger, Pam also relishes the time alone with her beloved team. Their survival—her survival—hinges on that mutual trust and love.

By 1700, Guatemala's capital was a mixed-race "city of women." As in many other cities across colonial Spanish America, labor and migration patterns in Guatemala produced an urban female majority and high numbers of single women, widows, and female household heads. In this history of religious and spiritual life in the Guatemalan capital, Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara focuses on the sizeable population of ordinary, non-elite women living outside of both marriage and convent. Although officials often expressed outright hostility towards poor unmarried women, many of these women managed to position themselves at the forefront of religious life in the city.

Through an analysis of over 500 wills, hagiographies, religious chronicles, and ecclesiastical records, Alone at the Altar examines how laboring women forged complex alliances with Catholic priests and missionaries and how those alliances significantly shaped local religion, the spiritual economy, and late colonial reform efforts. It considers the local circumstances and global Catholic missionary movements that fueled official collaboration with poor single women and support for diverse models of feminine piety. Extending its analysis past Guatemalan Independence to 1870, this book also illuminates how women's alliances with the Catholic Church became politicized in the Independence era and influenced the rise of popular conservatism in Guatemala.

Are we alone in the universe? Surely amidst the immensity of the cosmos there must be other intelligent life out there. Don't be so sure, says John Gribbin, one of today's best popular science writers. In this fascinating and intriguing new book, Gribbin argues that the very existence of intelligent life anywhere in the cosmos is, from an astrophysicist's point of view, a miracle. So why is there life on Earth and (seemingly) nowhere else? What happened to make this planet special? Taking us back some 600 million years, Gribbin lets you experience the series of unique cosmic events that were responsible for our unique form of life within the Milky Way Galaxy.

• Written by one of our foremost popular science writers, author of the bestselling In Search of Schrödinger's Cat
• Offers a bold answer to the eternal question, "Are we alone in the universe?"
• Explores how the impact of a "supercomet" with Venus 600 million years ago created our moon, and along with it, the perfect conditions for life on Earth

From one of our most talented science writers, this book is a daring, fascinating exploration into the dawning of the universe, cosmic collisions and their consequences, and the uniqueness of life on Earth.

Are we alone in the universe? Surely amidst the immensity of the cosmos there must be other intelligent life out there. Don't be so sure, says John Gribbin, one of today's best popular science writers. In this fascinating and intriguing new book, Gribbin argues that the very existence of intelligent life anywhere in the cosmos is, from an astrophysicist's point of view, a miracle. So why is there life on Earth and (seemingly) nowhere else? What happened to make this planet special? Taking us back some 600 million years, Gribbin lets you experience the series of unique cosmic events that were responsible for our unique form of life within the Milky Way Galaxy.

• Written by one of our foremost popular science writers, author of the bestselling In Search of Schrödinger's Cat
• Offers a bold answer to the eternal question, "Are we alone in the universe?"
• Explores how the impact of a "supercomet" with Venus 600 million years ago created our moon, and along with it, the perfect conditions for life on Earth

From one of our most talented science writers, this book is a daring, fascinating exploration into the dawning of the universe, cosmic collisions and their consequences, and the uniqueness of life on Earth.

The divination baskets of south Central Africa are woven for a specific purpose. The baskets, known as lipele, contain sixty or so small articles, from seeds, claws, and minuscule horns to wooden carvings. Each article has its own name and symbolic meaning, and collectively they are known as jipelo. For the Luvale and related peoples, the lipele is more than a container of souvenirs; it is a tool, a source of crucial information from the ancestral past and advice for the future.

In Along an African Border, anthropologist Sónia Silva examines how Angolan refugees living in Zambia use these divination baskets to cope with daily life in a new land. Silva documents the special processes involved in weaving the baskets and transforming them into oracles. She speaks with diviners who make their living interpreting lipele messages and speaks also with their knowledge-seeking clients. To the Luvale, these baskets are capable of thinking, hearing, judging, and responding. They communicate by means of jipelo articles drawn in configurations, interact with persons and other objects, punish wrongdoers, assist people in need, and, much like humans, go through a life course that is marked with an initiation ceremony and a special burial. The lipele functions in a state between object and person.

Notably absent from lipele divination is any discussion or representation in the form of symbolic objects of the violence in Angola or the Luvale's relocation struggles—instead, the consultation focuses on age-old personal issues of illness, reproduction, and death. As Silva demonstrates in this sophisticated and richly illustrated ethnography, lipele help people maintain their links to kin and tradition in a world of transience and uncertainty.

The divination baskets of south Central Africa are woven for a specific purpose. The baskets, known as lipele, contain sixty or so small articles, from seeds, claws, and minuscule horns to wooden carvings. Each article has its own name and symbolic meaning, and collectively they are known as jipelo. For the Luvale and related peoples, the lipele is more than a container of souvenirs; it is a tool, a source of crucial information from the ancestral past and advice for the future.

In Along an African Border, anthropologist Sónia Silva examines how Angolan refugees living in Zambia use these divination baskets to cope with daily life in a new land. Silva documents the special processes involved in weaving the baskets and transforming them into oracles. She speaks with diviners who make their living interpreting lipele messages and speaks also with their knowledge-seeking clients. To the Luvale, these baskets are capable of thinking, hearing, judging, and responding. They communicate by means of jipelo articles drawn in configurations, interact with persons and other objects, punish wrongdoers, assist people in need, and, much like humans, go through a life course that is marked with an initiation ceremony and a special burial. The lipele functions in a state between object and person.

Notably absent from lipele divination is any discussion or representation in the form of symbolic objects of the violence in Angola or the Luvale's relocation struggles—instead, the consultation focuses on age-old personal issues of illness, reproduction, and death. As Silva demonstrates in this sophisticated and richly illustrated ethnography, lipele help people maintain their links to kin and tradition in a world of transience and uncertainty.

Along the Bolivian Highway traces the emergence of a new middle class in Bolivia, a society commonly portrayed as the site of struggle between a superwealthy white minority and a destitute indigenous majority. Miriam Shakow shows how Bolivian middle classes have deeply shaped politics and social life. While national political leaders like Evo Morales have proclaimed a new era of indigenous power and state-led capitalism in place of racial exclusion and neoliberal free trade, Bolivians of indigenous descent who aspire to upward mobility have debated whether to try to rise within their country's longstanding hierarchies of race and class or to break down those hierarchies. The ascent of indigenous politics, and a boom in coca and cocaine production beginning in the 1970s, have created dilemmas for "middling" Bolivians who do not fit the prevailing social binaries of white elite and indigenous poor. In their family relationships, political activism, and community life, the new middle class confronted competing moral imperatives.

Focusing on social and political struggles that hinged on class and racial status in a provincial boomtown in central Bolivia, Shakow recounts the experiences of first-generation teachers, agronomists, lawyers, and prosperous merchants. They puzzled over whom to marry, how to claim public interest in the face of accusations of selfishness, and whether to seek political patronage jobs amid high unemployment. By linking the intimate politics within families to regional and national power struggles, Along the Bolivian Highway sheds light on what it means to be middle class in the global south.

Along the Bolivian Highway traces the emergence of a new middle class in Bolivia, a society commonly portrayed as the site of struggle between a superwealthy white minority and a destitute indigenous majority. Miriam Shakow shows how Bolivian middle classes have deeply shaped politics and social life. While national political leaders like Evo Morales have proclaimed a new era of indigenous power and state-led capitalism in place of racial exclusion and neoliberal free trade, Bolivians of indigenous descent who aspire to upward mobility have debated whether to try to rise within their country's longstanding hierarchies of race and class or to break down those hierarchies. The ascent of indigenous politics, and a boom in coca and cocaine production beginning in the 1970s, have created dilemmas for "middling" Bolivians who do not fit the prevailing social binaries of white elite and indigenous poor. In their family relationships, political activism, and community life, the new middle class confronted competing moral imperatives.

Focusing on social and political struggles that hinged on class and racial status in a provincial boomtown in central Bolivia, Shakow recounts the experiences of first-generation teachers, agronomists, lawyers, and prosperous merchants. They puzzled over whom to marry, how to claim public interest in the face of accusations of selfishness, and whether to seek political patronage jobs amid high unemployment. By linking the intimate politics within families to regional and national power struggles, Along the Bolivian Highway sheds light on what it means to be middle class in the global south.