Iat?, ?n cuvintele Aurei Christi, curg?nd abundent, din surse ascunse, fluidul vivifiant al poeziei, s? nu ne temem de retorica majusculelor, al marei Poezii. (Nicolae Balota).Aici totul e grav. Nici ludicul, nici parodicul, nici oboseala contextului postindustrial ?i nici tendin?ele destructurante ale postmodernilor nu au trecere. Modernitatea Aurei Christi e una esen?ial?, organic?, refractar? modelor, n?zuind spre reinterpretarea semnelor ?i universaliilor; ?ntreb?rile pe care ?i le pune ea au fost ?i ale inainta?ilor, iar r?spunsurile transcend achizi?iile, relev?nd evolu?ia con?tiin?ei ?n mers, relev?nd evolu?ia unei creatoare de m?na ?nt?i, cu totul personal?. Scrieri mai noi, Labirintul exilului (2000), Elegii nordice (2002) ?i altele confirma consecven?a cu sine a unei con?tiin?e exemplare. (Constantin Ciopraga)M? auzi tu, oare, ?nstr?inato? Am citit poeziile tale la ceas de sear?, pe o teras?, av?nd ?n fa?? colinele Ierusalimului. Eu nu sunt un bun comentator de poezie, cei care au scris despre poezia ta te-au “prins“ foarte bine, ai for??, un sim? rar al tragicului ?i antene pentru transcenden??, f?r? s? cazi (din fericire) ?n ceea ce se cheam? “poezie religioas?“. E un instinct p?g?n care te fere?te de o excesiva “cre?tinare“ a poeziei chiar ?i ?n Psalmi. (Leon Volovici). (fragment dintr-o scrisoare)E simplu: ?l vad pe Dumnezeu ca pe un partener de dialog, cu care ma cert nu rareori. Citesc adesea serile din Noul Testament mai ales; ei, ?i atunci ?ncepe fierberea... Nu prea merg la biseric? dec?t atunci c?nd simt imperios nevoia – adev?r pentru care Mama de pilda m? ceart? c?teodat?. Duc biserica mea cu mine; a?a pot s? m? rog oriunde, oric?nd. Spre deosebire de Cioran, eu cred ca nu Diavolul a f?cut lumea, ci Dumnezeu; doar c? spre sf?r?itul Facerii a obosit un pic; se ?nt?mpl? ?ntruc?tva c? ?ntr-o proza a lui Rilke, ?n care cele doua m?ini ale Domnului se iau la ?ntrecere ?i se pare ca st?nga profit? de oboseala dreptei... M? ?i ?ntreb uneori, pe urmele lui Unamuno: cine sunt eu s?-i cer socoteala lui Dumnezeu pentru ca lumea ?n care tr?im e a?a cum e? (Are dreptul, oare, o g?nganie s?-?i aroge obr?znicia de a se ciond?ni cu El, cu nimeni altcineva dec?t cu El?!!) ?i tot ca Unamuno, invoc?ndu-l pe Oberman, ?mi r?spund: da, c?ci pentru lume, pentru univers eu sunt nimeni, nu ?nsemn nimic, pentru mine ?ns? sunt totul.Gr?dini austere a stat – da, incredibil – ?n sertarele c?torva edituri circa ?apte ani; ani de izolare atroce, de singur?tate dorit?, iubit?, hulit? ?i, iar ?i iar, iubit?... E un volum publicat dup? o perioada de secet?, c?nd mi se p?rea – p?n? la o neagr? m?nie! – ca nu voi mai scrie niciodat? poezie... Nici cartea de debut n-am a?teptat-o at?tea... secole. E un volum care a circulat pe internet, prietenii trimi??ndu-mi mesaje, scrisori, cronici ad-hoc despre cartea mea de psalmi ?n r?sp?r. (Aura Christi)Faptul c? Gr?dinile austere au trecut prin PC-ul meu mi-a prilejuit o bucurie, o tulburare de zile aurorale. Nu m-am putut ab?ine ?i am citit c?teva poeme. N-am mai putut apoi s-o las din mana. M-a ?nv?luit ?i m-a luat pe sus cutremurata spiritualitate vital? care str?bate versurile. Asta nu mi se ?nt?mpl? prea des, citind poezie contemporan?. (Zoltan Terner)Mignona ?i b?t?ioas?, cheltuind pasionalitate, r?zboinic? ?n pofida fragilit??ii, ?mpr??tiind texte curajoase pe care amicii internau?i nu ezit? a le califica “dinamit? curat?“, sup?r?nd pe mul?i, scriind febril, asum?ndu-?i riscurile Balcaniei (“lin?at?“, pedepsit?, izolat? etc.), Aura Christi, cit?nd “vorbele atroce“ ale iubitului Nietzsche, vrea s? devin? ceea ce este: poet?. (...) Metamorfoza e izbitoare; discursul a devenit sincopat, auster, de o incanta?ie adumbrit?, celebr?nd “via?a de vis“, test?nd – prin “poemele de iubire“ – temele grave (rela?ia cu maestrul, divinitatea, moartea, poezia) pentru a conchide c?, doar povestit?, via?a e tr?it?. Mul?i dintre exege?ii Aurei Christi au subliniat “fulminant? ascensiune“ a poetei. Penetrant?, Aura Christi a avut ?ansa de a fi fost v?zut? ?n mediile bucure?tene. Dar meritele poetei, dincolo de suportul valoric, stau ?i ?n tenacitatea autoconstruc?iei, promov?nd – programatic – “ruptura“. (Adrian Dinu Rachieru)

Six best-loved novels by award-winning author of ‘War Horse’, brought together in this ebook collection. A perfect introduction to Michael Morpurgo’s enthralling storytelling for new readers and a classic collection for fans. ‘Kaspar’: Kaspar the cat first came to the Savoy Hotel in a basket – Johnny Trott knows, because he was the one who carried him in. Johnny was a bellboy, you see, and he carried all of Countess Kandinsky's things to her room, including this very special cat! ‘Born to Run’: When Patrick saves a litter of greyhound puppies from the canal, he convinces his parents to let him keep one. Patrick names his puppy Best Mate, and that’s what he becomes… Until one day Best Mate is kidnapped by a greyhound trainer. The trainer’s step-daughter loves the greyhound and renames him Bright Eyes. But what will happen when he can’t run any more? ‘The Butterfly Lion’: When Bertie is a little boy, he rescues an orphaned white lion cub from the African veld. They are inseparable until Bertie is sent to boarding school far away in England and the lion is sold to a circus. Bertie swears that one day they will see one another again, but it is the butterfly lion which ensures that their friendship will never be forgotten. ‘Alone on a wide, wide sea’: When six-year-old orphan Arthur Hobhouse was shipped to Australia after WWII he lost his sister, his country and everything he knew. Now he has built a special boat for his daughter Allie – a yacht designed to carry her to England, in search of his long-lost sister… ‘Running Wild’: For Will and his mother, going to Indonesia isn't just a holiday. It's an escape, a new start, a chance to put things behind them. Until Oona, the elephant Will is riding on the beach, begins acting strangely, shying away from the sea. That's when the tsunami comes crashing in, and Oona begins to run. But when the tsunami is gone, Oona just keeps on running. ‘Farm Boy’: The fascinating sequel to ‘War Horse’. Set on a farm in rural Devon, this is the story of Grandpa’s memories. Family secrets come to light as Michael’s wonderful writing depicts the moving relationship between grandfather and grandson.

Prevention of Child Poverty with Public Health Leadership Theory and Systems Thinking Approach

Girls abused in London and torsos of black boys found in the Thames; African boys disappearing from school and child traffic in Africa; child sacrifice and Brazilian Pentecostal exorcism. Unrelated events are swiftly connected in an uncanny work of prestidigitation, including hitech digital images of torsos and forensic drawings of abused children. Les correspondances symboliques, Baudelaire would say, or contiguous magic, in Frazer’s more prosaic de*ion. It all could make sense, if we believe in our fears, suspicions, gossip, and prejudices. Furthermore, this incredible work of prestidigitation was engineered by two respectable institutions, known for their enlightened search of truth: the BBC and Scotland Yard. But where was the evidence that all these things were connectedThe “exorcism scandal” bewitched the media in Britain for the whole month of June, until some dissenting voices started to talk about a “racist witch hunt.” 5 By then, however, a population of hundreds of thousands of Africans, in particular Pentecostal Africans, was already under suspicion. “What if some of that was true?” some people still may ask. In fact, shortly before completing this introduction, the local London newspaper Evening Standard published a two-page report on an African church in the United Kingdom, with the title “Miracles and claims of baby-snatching,” mixing rumors of child trafficking, sorcery, syncretism, and extreme wealth. 6 That is how sorcery works: not by fully demonstrating its power, but by opening a possible doubt; one is never fully sure it is not true.

As our world becomes increasingly urbanized, an understanding of the context, mechanisms, and consequences of city and suburban environments becomes more critical. Without a sense of what open spaces such as parks and gardens contribute, it's difficult to argue for their creation and maintenance: in the face of schools needing resources, roads and sewers needing maintenance, and people suffering at the hands of others, why should cities and counties spend scarce dollars planting trees and preserving parksIn Constructed Climates, ecologist William G. Wilson demonstrates the value of urban green. Focusing specifically on the role of vegetation and trees, Wilson shows the costs and benefits reaped from urban open spaces, from cooler temperatures to better quality ground water-and why it all matters. While Constructed Climates is a work of science, it does not ignore the social component. Wilson looks at low-income areas that have poor vegetation, and shows how enhancing these areas through the planting of community gardens and trees can alleviate social ills. This book will be essential reading for environmentalists and anyone making decisions for the nature and well-being of our cities and citizens.

Imbued with character and independence, strength and articulateness, humor and conviction, abundant biblical knowledge and intense compassion, Katharina Schutz Zell (1498-1562) was an outspoken religious reformer in sixteenth-century Germany who campaigned for the right of clergy to marry and the responsibility of lay people-women as well as men-to proclaim the Gospel. As one of the first and most daring models of the pastor's wife in the Protestant Reformation, Schutz Zell demonstrated that she could be an equal partner in marriage; she was for many years a respected, if unofficial, mother of the established church of Strasbourg in an age when ecclesiastical leadership was dominated by men.Though a commoner, Schtz Zell participated actively in public life and wrote prolifically, including letters of consolation, devotional writings, biblical meditations, catechetical instructions, a sermon, and lengthy polemical exchanges with male theologians. The complete translations of her extant publications, except for her longest, are collected here in Church Mother, offering modern readers a rare opportunity to understand the important work of women in the formation of the early Protestant church.

Technology permeates nearly every aspect of our daily lives. Cars enable us to travel long distances, mobile phones help us to communicate, and medical devices make it possible to detect and cure diseases. But these aids to existence are not simply neutral instruments: they give shape to what we do and how we experience the world. And because technology plays such an active role in shaping our daily actions and decisions, it is crucial, Peter-Paul Verbeek argues, that we consider the moral dimension of technology.?Moralizing Technology offers exactly that: an in-depth study of the ethical dilemmas and moral issues surrounding the interaction of humans and technology. Drawing from Heidegger and Foucault, as well as from philosophers of technology such as Don Ihde and Bruno Latour, Peter-Paul Verbeek locates morality not just in the human users of technology but in the interaction between us and our machines. Verbeek cites concrete examples, including some from his own life, and compellingly argues for the morality of things. Rich and multifaceted, and sure to be controversial, Moralizing Technology will force us all to consider the virtue of new inventions and to rethink the rightness of the products we use every day.

When eight-year-old Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana (1590-1662) entered one of the preeminent convents in Bologna in 1598, she had no idea what cloistered life had in store for her. Thanks to clandestine instruction from a local maestro di cappella-and despite the church hierarchy's vehement opposition to all convent music-Vizzana became the star of the convent, composing works so thoroughly modern and expressive that a recent critic described them as "e;historical treasures."e; But at the very moment when Vizzana's works appeared in 1623-she would be the only Bolognese nun ever to publish her music-extraordinary troubles beset her and her fellow nuns, as episcopal authorities arrived to investigate anonymous allegations of sisterly improprieties with male members of their order.?Craig A. Monson retells the story of Vizzana and the nuns of Santa Cristina to elucidate the role that music played in the lives of these cloistered women. Gifted singers, instrumentalists, and composers, these nuns used music not only to forge links with the community beyond convent walls, but also to challenge and circumvent ecclesiastical authority. Monson explains how the sisters of Santa Cristina-refusing to accept what the church hierarchy called God's will and what the nuns perceived as a besmirching of their honor-fought back with words and music, and when these proved futile, with bricks, roof tiles, and stones. These women defied one Bolognese archbishop after another, cardinals in Rome, and even the pope himself, until threats of excommunication and abandonment by their families brought them to their knees twenty-five years later. By then, Santa Cristina's imaginative but frail composer literally had been driven mad by the conflict.?Monson's fascinating narrative relies heavily on the words of its various protagonists, on both sides of the cloister wall, who emerge vividly as imaginative, independent-minded, and not always sympathetic figures. In restoring the musically gifted Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana to history, Monson introduces readers to the full range of captivating characters who played their parts in seventeenth-century convent life.?

The contributors wish to thank the Hornbake Library at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, for access to their holdings of Thom Gunn’s manu*s; the Graduate Research Board and the Department of English at the University of Maryland, for material support; Thom’s brother Ander, for the use of his photograph of Thom for this volume’s cover; and Mike Kitay, for permission to print excerpts from unpublished writings and the several published poems, in their entireties, in this volume.

With the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in the 1880s came the emergence of a modern and profoundly multicultural New Mexico. Native Americans, working-class Mexicans, elite Hispanos, and black and white newcomers all commingled and interacted in the territory in ways that had not been previously possible. But what did it mean to be white in this multiethnic milieuAnd how did ideas of sexuality and racial supremacy shape ideas of citizenry and determine who would govern the region?Coyote Nation considers these questions as it explores how New Mexicans evaluated and categorized racial identities through bodily practices. Where ethnic groups were numerous and-in the wake of miscegenation-often difficult to discern, the ways one dressed, bathed, spoke, gestured, or even stood were largely instrumental in conveying one's race. Even such practices as cutting one's hair, shopping, drinking alcohol, or embalming a deceased loved one could inextricably link a person to a very specific racial identity.A fascinating history of an extraordinarily plural and polyglot region, Coyote Nation will be of value to historians of race and ethnicity in American culture.

In the years following the Civil War, a veritable army of homeless men swept across America's "e;wageworkers' frontier"e; and forged a beguiling and bedeviling counterculture known as "e;hobohemia."e; Celebrating unfettered masculinity and jealously guarding the American road as the preserve of white manhood, hoboes took command of downtown districts and swaggered onto center stage of the new urban culture. Less obviously, perhaps, they also staked their own claims on the American polity, claims that would in fact transform the very entitlements of American citizenship.In this eye-opening work of American history, Todd DePastino tells the epic story of hobohemia's rise and fall, and crafts a stunning new interpretation of the "e;American century"e; in the process. Drawing on sources ranging from diaries, letters, and police reports to movies and memoirs, Citizen Hobo breathes life into the largely forgotten world of the road, but it also, crucially, shows how the hobo army so haunted the American body politic that it prompted the creation of an entirely new social order and political economy. DePastino shows how hoboes-with their reputation as dangers to civilization, sexual savages, and professional idlers-became a cultural and political force, influencing the creation of welfare state measures, the promotion of mass consumption, and the suburbanization of America. Citizen Hobo's sweeping retelling of American nationhood in light of enduring struggles over "e;home"e; does more than chart the change from "e;homelessness"e; to "e;houselessness."e; In its breadth and scope, the book offers nothing less than an essential new context for thinking about Americans' struggles against inequality and alienation.

Economists who make normative proposals traditionally assume that policy should advance “efficiency,”usually in the Kaldor or Hicks sense, which defines efficiency in terms of whether the project's winners can hypothetically compensate the project's losers．A compensation criterion is used because it can be based on ordinal utilities, which puts a smaller information burden on the decision maker than cardinal utilities do．Ordinal utilities, unlike cardinal utilities, can (in principle) be inferred from observations of consumer behavior．By seeing how people trade off goods, willingness-to-pay (or willingness-to-accept) amounts can be derived and summed, so that alternative policy outcomes can be easily compared.

At the height of Mara de Zayas's popularity in the mid-eighteenth century, the number of editions in print of her work was exceeded only by the novels of Cervantes. But by the end of the nineteenth century, Zayas had been excluded from the Spanish literary canon because of her gender and the sociopolitical changes that swept Spain and Europe. Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion gathers a representative sample of seven stories, which features Zayas's signature topics-gender equality and domestic violence-written in an impassioned tone overlaid with conservative Counter-Reformation ideology. This edition updates the scholarship since the most recent English translations, with a new introduction to Zayas's entire body of stories, and restores Zayas's author's note and prologue, omitted from previous English-language editions. Tracing her slow but steady progress from notions of ideal love to love's treachery, Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion will restore Zayas to her rightful place in modern letters.

The Caribbean "e;market woman"e; is ingrained in the popular imagination as the archetype of black womanhood in countries throughout the region. Challenging this stereotype and other outdated images of black women, Downtown Ladies offers a more complex picture by documenting the history of independent international traders-known as informal commercial importers, or ICIs-who travel abroad to import and export a vast array of consumer goods sold in the public markets of Kingston, Jamaica.Both by-products of and participants in globalization, ICIs operate on multiple levels and, since their emergence in the 1970s, have made significant contributions to the regional, national, and global economies. Gina Ulysse carefully explores how ICIs, determined to be self-employed, struggle with government regulation and other social tensions to negotiate their autonomy. Informing this story of self-fashioning with reflections on her own experience as a young Haitian anthropologist, Ulysse combines the study of political economy with the study of individual and collective identity to reveal the uneven consequences of disrupting traditional class, color, and gender codes in individual societies and around the world.

At the height of the Greek Civil War in 1948, thirty-eight thousand children were evacuated from their homes in the mountains of northern Greece. The Greek Communist Party relocated half of them to orphanages in Eastern Europe, while their adversaries in the national government placed the rest in children's homes elsewhere in Greece. A point of contention during the Cold War, this controversial episode continues to fuel tensions between Greeks and Macedonians and within Greek society itself. Loring M. Danforth and Riki Van Boeschoten present here for the first time a comprehensive study of the two evacuation programs and the lives of the children they forever transformed.Marshalling archival records, oral histories, and ethnographic fieldwork, the authors analyze the evacuation process, the political conflict surrounding it, the children's upbringing, and their fates as adults cut off from their parents and their homeland. They also give voice to seven refugee children who poignantly recount their childhood experiences and heroic efforts to construct new lives in diaspora communities throughout the world. A much-needed corrective to previous historical accounts, Children of the Greek Civil War is also a searching examination of the enduring effects of displacement on the lives of refugee children.

Lawsuits are rare events in most people's lives. High-stakes cases are even less commonplace. Why is it, then, that scholarship about the Japanese legal system has focused almost exclusively on epic court battles, large-scale social issues, and corporate governanceMark D. West's Law in Everyday Japan fills a void in our understanding of the relationship between law and social life in Japan by shifting the focus to cases more representative of everyday Japanese life.Compiling case studies based on seven fascinating themes-karaoke-based noise complaints, sumo wrestling, love hotels, post-Kobe earthquake condominium reconstruction, lost-and-found outcomes, working hours, and debt-induced suicide-Law in Everyday Japan offers a vibrant portrait of the way law intermingles with social norms, historically ingrained ideas, and cultural mores in Japan. Each example is informed by extensive fieldwork. West interviews all of the participants-from judges and lawyers to defendants, plaintiffs, and their families-to uncover an everyday Japan where law matters, albeit in very surprising ways.

The story of the rise of radicalism in the early nineteenth century has often been simplified into a fable about progressive social change. The diverse social movements of the era-religious, political, regional, national, antislavery, and protemperance-are presented as mere strands in a unified tapestry of labor and democratic mobilization. Taking aim at this flawed view of radicalism as simply the extreme end of a single dimension of progress, Craig Calhoun emphasizes the coexistence of different kinds of radicalism, their tensions, and their implications.?The Roots of Radicalism reveals the importance of radicalism's links to preindustrial culture and attachments to place and local communities, as well the ways in which journalists?who had been pushed out of "e;respectable"e; politics connected to artisans and other workers. Calhoun shows how much public recognition mattered to radical movements and how religious, cultural, and directly political-as well as economic-concerns motivated people to join up. Reflecting two decades of research into social movement theory and the history of protest, The Roots of Radicalism offers compelling insights into the past that can tell us much about the present, from American right-wing populism to democratic upheavals in North Africa.

As the banking crisis and its effects on the world economy have made plain, the stock market is of colossal importance to our livelihoods. In Framing Finance, Alex Preda looks at the history of the market to figure out how we arrived at a point where investing is not only commonplace, but critical, as market fluctuations threaten our plans to send our children to college or retire comfortably. As Preda discovers through extensive research, the public was once much more skeptical. For investing to become accepted, a deep-seated prejudice against speculation had to be overcome, and Preda reveals that over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries groups associated with stock exchanges in New York, London, and Paris managed to redefine finance as a scientific pursuit grounded in observational technology. But Preda also notes that as the financial data in which they trafficked became ever more difficult to understand, charismatic speculators emerged whose manipulations of the market undermined the benefits of widespread investment. And so, Framing Finance ends with an eye on the future, proposing a system of public financial education to counter the irrational elements that still animate the appeal of finance.

References to the economy are ubiquitous in modern life, and virtually every facet of human activity has capitulated to market mechanisms. In the early modern period, however, there was no common perception of the economy, and discourses on money, trade, and commerce treated economic phenomena as properties of physical nature. Only in the early nineteenth century did economists begin to posit and identify the economy as a distinct object, divorcing it from natural processes and attaching it exclusively to human laws and agency.In The Natural Origins of Economics, Margaret Schabas traces the emergence and transformation of economics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from a natural to a social science. Focusing on the works of several prominent economists-David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill-Schabas examines their conceptual debt to natural science and thus locates the evolution of economic ideas within the history of science. An ambitious study, The Natural Origins of Economics will be of interest to economists, historians, and philosophers alike.

Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a visionary German novelist, theorist, poet, and artist who made a lasting impression on such icons of modernism as Walter Benjamin, Bruno Taut, and Walter Gropius. Fascinated with the potential of glass architecture, Scheerbart's satirical fantasies envisioned an electrified future, a world composed entirely of crystalline, colored glass.In 1912, Scheerbart published The Light Club of Batavia, a Novelle about the formation of a club dedicated to building a spa for bathing-not in water, but in light-at the bottom of an abandoned mineshaft. Translated here into English for the first time, this rare story serves as a point of departure for Josiah McElheny, who, with an esteemed group of collaborators, offers a fascinating array of responses to this enigmatic work.The Light Club makes clear that the themes of utopian hope, desire, and madness in Scheerbart's tale represent a part of modernism's lost project: a world based on political and spiritual ideals rather than efficiency and logic. In his compelling introduction, McElheny describes Scheerbart's life as well as his own enchantment with the writer, and he explains the ways in which The Light Club of Batavia inspired him to produce art of uncommon breadth. The Light Club also features inspired writings from Gregg Bordowitz and Ulrike Mller, Andrea Geyer, and Branden W. Joseph, as well as translations of original texts by and about Scheerbart. A unique response by one visionary artist to another, The Light Club is an unforgettable examination of what it might mean to see radical potential in absolute illumination.

When middle-class residents fled American cities in the 1960s and 1970s, government services and investment capital left too. Countless urban neighborhoods thus entered phases of precipitous decline, prompting the creation of community-based organizations that sought to bring direly needed resources back to the inner city. Today there are tens of thousands of these CBOs-private nonprofit groups that work diligently within tight budgets to give assistance and opportunity to our most vulnerable citizens by providing services such as housing, child care, and legal aid.Through ethnographic fieldwork at eight CBOs in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Bushwick, Nicole P. Marwell discovered that the complex and contentious relationships these groups form with larger economic and political institutions outside the neighborhood have a huge and unexamined impact on the lives of the poor. Most studies of urban poverty focus on individuals or families, but Bargaining for Brooklyn widens the lens, examining the organizations whose actions and decisions collectively drive urban life.