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BY THE DIRECTOR AND CO-AUTHOR OF THE ACADEMY AWARD WINNING THE GREAT BEAUTY THE FILM OF YOUTH, STARRING MICHAEL CAINE, HARVEY KEITEL, RACHEL WEISZ, PAUL DANO AND JANE FONDA IS RELEASED IN THE UK ON 29 JANUARY In a luxury spa hotel in the Swiss Alps, octogenarian friends Fred Ballinger and Mick Boyle look back on their eventful and successful lives as composer and film director, surrounded by a host of colourful and eccentric fellow guests. But despite the tranquil setting, trouble is brewing. Fred's daughter and Mick's son are having marital problems, and both men, without knowing it, are entering a critical stage in their careers - for it is never too late to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Ghulam Bombaywala sells bagels in Houston. Demetrios dishes up pizza in Connecticut. The Wangs serve tacos in Los Angeles. How ethnicity has influenced American eating habits—and thus, the make-up and direction of the American cultural mainstream—is the story told in We Are What We Eat. It is a complex tale of ethnic mingling and borrowing, of entrepreneurship and connoisseurship, of food as a social and political symbol and weapon—and a thoroughly entertaining history of our culinary tradition of multiculturalism. The story of successive generations of Americans experimenting with their new neighbors’ foods highlights the marketplace as an important arena for defining and expressing...
Stephen Crane’s short, compact life—“a life of fire,” he called it—is surrounded by myths, distortions, and fabrications. Paul Sorrentino has sifted through garbled chronologies and contradictory eyewitness accounts, scoured the archives, and followed in Crane’s footsteps. The result is the most accurate account of the poet and novelist to date.
Today the baseball catcher is a familiar but uninspiring figure. Decked out in the so-called tools of ignorance, he stolidly goes about his duty without attracting much attention. But it wasn't always that way, as Peter Morris shows in this lively and original study. In baseball's early days, catchers stood a safe distance back of the batter. Then the introduction of the curveball in the 1870s led them to move up directly behind home plate, even though they still wore no gloves or protective equipment. Extraordinary courage became the catcher's most notable requirement, but the new positioning also demanded that the catcher have lightning-fast reflexes, great hands, and a cannon for a throwing arm. With so great a range of needed skills, a special mystique came to surround the position, and it began to seem that a good catcher could single-handedly make the difference between winning and losing.
If not for an unlikely alliance among a bespectacled cowboy, a former Confederate general, and a millionaire newspaper publisher, the Spanish-American War might never have been. How these three outsize characters—Theodore Roosevelt, Joseph “Fighting Joe” Wheeler, and William Randolph Hearst—helped ignite the war that established the United States’ offshore empire is the rousing tale that Matthew Bernstein tells in Team of Giants. From his days as a Dakota deputy sheriff, Theodore Roosevelt had dreamed of leading a cowboy regiment into battle. With a little help from his friends, in 1898 he got his wish. While Roosevelt raised the Rough Riders in San Antonio, Congressman Wheeler del...
This incisive study takes on one of the grimmest secrets in America's national life—the history of lynching and, more generally, the public punishment of African Americans. Jacqueline Goldsby shows that lynching cannot be explained away as a phenomenon peculiar to the South or as the perverse culmination of racist politics. Rather, lynching—a highly visible form of social violence that has historically been shrouded in secrecy—was in fact a fundamental part of the national consciousness whose cultural logic played a pivotal role in the making of American modernity. To pursue this argument, Goldsby traces lynching's history by taking up select mob murders and studying them together with...
The Black Dahlia case. The Manson murders. The Zodiac Killer. The slaughter of JonBenet Ramsay. These killings, among many others in Bill James's astonishing chronicle of the history of American crime, have all created a frenzy of interest and speculation about human nature. And while many of us choose to avoid the news about gruesome murders, Bill James contends that these crime stories, which create such frenzy (and have throughout history), are as important to understanding our society, culture and history as anything we may consider to be a more 'serious' subject. The topic envelopes our society so completely, we almost forget about it. James looks at the ways in which society has changed by examining the development of how crimes have been committed, investigated and prosecuted. The booktakes on such issues as the rise of an organized police force, the controversial use of the death penalty, the introduction of evidence such as fingerprinting and DNA, and the unexpected ways in which the most shocking crimes have shaped the criminal justice system and our perceptions of violence.
This book argues that language and literature actively produced chance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by categorizing injuries and losses as innocent of design. Automobile collisions and occupational injuries became "car accidents" and "industrial accidents." During the post-Civil War period of racial, ethnic, and class-based hostility, chance was an abstract enemy against which society might unite. By producing chance, novels by William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Anna Katharine Green, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and James Cain documented and helped establish new modes of collective interdependence. Chance here is connected not with the competitive individualism of the Gilded Age, but with important progressive and social democratic reforms, including developments in insurance, which had long employed accident narratives to shape its own "mutual society." Accident Society reveals the extent to which American collectivity has depended—and continues to depend—on the literary production of chance.
A guide for students, groups, and organizations seeking to foster interfaith dialogue and promote understanding across religious lines In this book, renowned interfaith leader Eboo Patel offers a clear, detailed, and practical guide to interfaith leadership, illustrated with compelling examples. Patel explains what interfaith leadership is and explores the core competencies and skills of interfaith leadership, before turning to the issues interfaith leaders face and how they can prepare to solve them. Interfaith leaders seek points of connection and commonality—in their neighborhoods, schools, college campuses, companies, organizations, hospitals, and other spaces where people of different faiths interact with one another. While it can be challenging to navigate the differences and disagreements that can arise from these interactions, skilled interfaith leaders are vital if we are to have a strong, religiously diverse democracy. This primer presents readers with the philosophical underpinnings of interfaith theory and outlines the skills necessary to practice interfaith leadership today.
Dr. Sara Alderson can deal with eighty-hour workweeks as a resident at Children’s Hospital. Dealing with crises in the Emergency Room or the OR is second nature to her. But now she faces a challenge that all of her training and experience hasn’t prepared her for: Lizzie, her four-year-old daughter, has inherited her ability to see other people’s dreams. After Lizzie befriends a young boy on a trip to Washington, DC, and then wakes up in a panic that night because of a “bad funny dream,” Sara knows exactly what it means: her daughter is visiting the boy’s dreams. Complicating matters is the fact that the boy’s father is a Congressman, and he’s dreaming about a “scary man in a big black car” threatening his Daddy. Unraveling a case of political corruption and blackmail would be hard enough for Sara under the best of circumstances. But when she has to view everything through the eyes of a toddler, it may be an impossible task. Dream Child is the second book of the Dream Doctor Mysteries.