In Medicine Show, inner conflict is wonderfully realized in the clash of down-home plain speech and European high culture utterances. Freely translating and adapting Catullus (Latin), Villon (Middle French), Corbiere (French), Hikmet (Turkish), and Orpheus (Greek), and placing them alongside Jagger and Richards, skinheads, and psalms, Tom Yuill's book mirrors an old-style hawking of wares, with all the charm and absurdity that results when high culture meets pop, when city meets small town, and when provincialism confronts urbanity. Here, the poems talk to one another, one poem nudging the cusps of many others, those poems touching still others' circumferences. Yuill, by invoking the Rolling Stones as muses and as background music, offers cover versions of Shakespeare, Keats, and Dylan Thomas, ultimately giving us a new kind of verse, funneled through the languages and rhythms of his masters' voices.

When we think about school principals, most of us imagine a figure of vague, yet intimidating authority-for an elementary school student, being sent to the principal's office is roughly on par with a trip to Orwell's Room 101. But with School Principal, Dan C. Lortie aims to change that. Much as he did for teachers with his groundbreaking book Schoolteacher, Lortie offers here an intensive and detailed look at principals, painting a compelling portrait of what they do, how they do it, and why.Lortie begins with a brief history of the job before turning to the daily work of a principal. These men and women, he finds, stand at the center of a constellation of competing interests around and within the school. School district officials, teachers, parents, and students all have needs and demands that frequently clash, and it is the principal's job to manage these conflicting expectations to best serve the public. Unsurprisingly then, Lortie records his subjects' professional dissatisfactions, but he also vividly depicts the pleasures of their work and the pride they take in their accomplishments. Finally, School Principal offers a glimpse of the future with an analysis of current issues and trends in education, including the increasing presence of women in the role and the effects of widespread testing mandated by the government.Lortie's scope is both broad and deep, offering an eminently useful range of perspectives on his subject. From the day-to-day toil to the long-term course of an entire career, from finding out just what goes on inside that office to mapping out the larger social and organizational context of the job, School Principal is a truly comprehensive account of a little-understood profession.

Rock and roll pioneer and Newport native Sonny Burgess is a member of the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. In this book full of personal interviews and remembrances, Burgess and his band tell of their original recordings for Sun Records in the 1950s; their shows with greats such as Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis; and their success in the contemporary rockabilly revival. This also is the history of a once prominent and spirited Delta community of extensive agricultural wealth. Newport was home to numerous music clubs that hosted national artists as well as illicit backroom gambling. Burgess is a product of this history, and his vivacious music is shaped by his hometown and the dramatic transformation of southern rural life it witnessed.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, scientists reconstructed the immensely long history of the earth-and the relatively recent arrival of human life. The geologists of the period, many of whom were devout believers, agreed about this vast timescale. But despite this apparent harmony between geology and Genesis, these scientists still debated a great many questions: Had the earth cooled from its origin as a fiery ball in space, or had it always been the same kind of place as it is nowWas prehuman life marked by mass extinctions, or had fauna and flora changed slowly over time?The first detailed account of the reconstruction of prehuman geohistory, Martin J. S. Rudwick's Worlds Before Adam picks up where his celebrated Bursting the Limits of Time leaves off. Here, Rudwick takes readers from the post-Napoleonic Restoration in Europe to the early years of Britain's Victorian age, chronicling the staggering discoveries geologists made during the period: the unearthing of the first dinosaur fossils, the glacial theory of the last ice age, and the meaning of igneous rocks, among others. Ultimately, Rudwick reveals geology to be the first of the sciences to investigate the historical dimension of nature, a model that Charles Darwin used in developing his evolutionary theory.Featuring an international cast of colorful characters, with Georges Cuvier and Charles Lyell playing major roles and Darwin appearing as a young geologist, Worlds Before Adam is a worthy successor to Rudwick's magisterial first volume. Completing the highly readable narrative of one of the most momentous changes in human understanding of our place in the natural world, Worlds Before Adam is a capstone to the career of one of the world's leading historians of science.

This book is the result of several years of collaboration with historians, students, archivists, and friends.The final product owes much to a collection of individuals who offered insight, analysis, recommendations, and sometimes their gut-level opinion about the project. In reflecting on its evolution, this study benefited greatly from two individuals in particular. In the embryonic stages of this work, Cynthia Bouton, being the true colleague that she is, took time from her own hectic academic schedule to offer several critiques, probing questions, and trenchant comments about the manu*.At a later stage in the writing, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall canvassed the study, detected gaps, and then pointed me toward additional sources without which the final product would not have been as thorough.

Gaspara Stampa (1523?-1554) is one of the finest female poets ever to write in Italian. Although she was lauded for her singing during her lifetime, her success and critical reputation as a poet emerged only after her verse was republished in the early eighteenth century. Her poetry runs the gamut of human emotion, ranging from ecstasy over a consummated love affair to despair at its end. While these tormented works and their multiple male addressees have led to speculation that Stampa may have been one of Venice's famous courtesans, they can also be read as a rebuttal of typical assumptions about women's roles. Championed by Rainer Maria Rilke, among others, she has more recently been celebrated by feminist scholars for her distinctive and original voice and her challenge to convention.The first complete translation of Stampa into English, this volume collects all of her passionate and lyrical verse. It is also the first modern critical edition of her poems, and in restoring the original sequence of the 1554 text, it allows readers the opportunity to encounter Stampa as she intended. Jane Tylus renders Stampa's verse in precise and graceful English translations, allowing a new generation of students and scholars of poetry, Renaissance literature, and music history to rediscover this incipiently modern Italian poet.

Lucrezia Marinella (1571-1653) is, by all accounts, a phenomenon in early modernity: a woman who wrote and published in many genres, whose fame shone brightly within and outside her native Venice, and whose voice is simultaneously original and reflective of her time and culture. In Enrico; or, Byzantium Conquered, one of the most ambitious and rewarding of her numerous narrative works, Marinella demonstrates her skill as an epic poet.Now available for the first time in English translation, Enrico retells the story of the conquest of Byzantium in the Fourth Crusade (1202-04). Marinella intersperses historical events in her account of the invasion with numerous invented episodes, drawing on the rich imaginative legacy of the chivalric romance. Fast-moving, colorful, and narrated with the zest that characterizes Marinella's other works, this poem is a great example of a woman engaging critically with a quintessentially masculine form and subject matter, writing in a genre in which the work of women poets was typically shunned.?

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.

Many people have contributed to the completion of this book．Its inception can be traced to a seminar that Lary May and Paula Rabinowitz asked me to deliver on hip hop's gangsta culture toward the end of my graduate studies in the American studies program at the University of Minnesota．The media hype and moral panic surrounding gangsta culture in the early 1990s bore an uncanny resemblance to the troublesome reception of Hollywood's white ethnic gangsters in the 1930s, the subject of my research at the time．The chance to discuss the gangster/gangsta relation also fueled the development of an undergraduate course on African American popular culture．So I have the American studies faculty and fellow graduates in Scott Hall, as well as the students on the consequent course, to thank for setting me on the road to writing Under a Bad Sign．A particular shout-out has to go to John Wright, who insisted I dig up Claude McKay's Harlem: Negro Metropolis in the rare books section of Wilson Library to see how deep the provenance and complex the relationship was between black denizens of the American city and their gangster culture heroes.

Since the end of the cold war, Africa has seen a dramatic rise in new political and religious phenomena, including an eviscerated privatized state, neoliberal NGOs, Pentecostalism, a resurgence in accusations of witchcraft, a culture of scamming and fraud, and, in some countries, a nearly universal wish to emigrate. Drawing on fieldwork in Togo, Charles Piot suggests that a new biopolitics after state sovereignty is remaking the face of one of the world's poorest regions.In a country where playing the U.S. Department of State's green card lottery is a national pastime and the preponderance of cybercafs and Western Union branches signals a widespread desire to connect to the rest of the world, Nostalgia for the Future makes clear that the cultural and political terrain that underlies postcolonial theory has shifted. In order to map out this new terrain, Piot enters into critical dialogue with a host of important theorists, including Agamben, Hardt and Negri, Deleuze, and Mbembe. The result is a deft interweaving of rich observations of Togolese life with profound insights into the new, globalized world in which that life takes place.

Candid, compelling, and heartbreaking a father's story of a talent taken too soon and a legacy that will live on for generations On July 23, 2011, Amy Winehouse's family, friends, and fans around the world mourned the tragedy that this remarkable, talented, and extraordinarily generous young woman was now gone. A legion of dedicated fans had lost their idol; a devastated family had lost their Amy. With this difficult news came an outpouring of love and grief from her fans, along with troubling questions about Amy's very public struggles with drugs and alcohol, as people tried to understand how such a soulful singer had been silenced so young. Now, in this intimate and tender account, her father and confidant, Mitch, offers an inside view of Amy's life as she lived it, putting to rest once and for all the controversies that have long surrounded her. Sifting fact from fiction, he pre-sents a portrait of Amy unlike any other, detailing the events and the people that shaped her youth from her mischievous childhood to her grandmother's Jazz Age stories, to her father singing Frank Sinatra around the house. Shedding light on Amy's musical coming-of-age, Mitch explores how she honed her distinctive sound, created her unforgettable look, and channeled her own life into hits such as "You Know I'm No Good," "Rehab," and "Back to Black" some of the most memorable and personal pop music in years. While her beehive hair, larger-than-life voice, and outrageous personality made her famous, her life offstage made her infamous. Here Mitch holds nothing back about Amy's addiction to drugs and alcohol, mixing the painful with the poignant as he describes the realities of her dependencies and the toll they took on the family and friends who refused to give up on her. Revealing the truth about Amy's substance abuse and dispelling many of the tabloid-fueled rumors about her tumultuous marriage to Blake Fielder-Civil, Mitch exposes the years of behind-the-scenes drama that consumed his life and explains how, for those who knew Amy in her last months, the greatest tragedy of all was that she finally appeared to be conquering her demons. Filled with insights into Amy Winehouse's music, photographs from her life, and stories of the real woman behind the headlines, Amy, My Daughter is an emotional journey into music, addiction, and the unbreakable bond between a daughter and her father.

From one of Time magazine 100 most influential people in the world, a rousing defense of the role of science in our lives The latest developments in physics have the potential to radically revise our understanding of the world: its makeup, its evolution, and the fundamental forces that drive its operation. Knocking on Heaven Door is an exhilarating and accessible overview of these developments and an impassioned argument for the significance of science. There could be no better guide than Lisa Randall. The bestselling author of Warped Passages is an expert in both particle physics (the study of the smallest objects we know of) and cosmology (the study of the largest). In Knocking on Heaven Door , she explores how we decide which scientific questions to study and how we go about answering them. She examines the role of risk, creativity, uncertainty, beauty, and truth in scientific thinking through provocative conversations with leading figures in other fields (such as the chef David Chang, the forecaster Nate Silver, and the screenwriter Scott Derrickson), and she explains with wit and clarity the latest ideas in physics and cosmology. Randall describes the nature and goals of the largest machine ever built: the Large Hadron Collider, the enormous particle accelerator below the border of France and Switzerland as well as recent ideas underlying cosmology and current dark matter experiments. The most sweeping and exciting science book in years, Knocking on Heaven Door makes clear the biggest scientific questions we face and reveals how answering them could ultimately tell us who we are and where we came from.

In this riveting and surprising personal history, John Lithgow shares a backstage view of his own struggle, crisis, and discovery, revealing the early life and career that took place out of the public eye and before he became a nationally known star. Above all, Lithgow memoir is a tribute to his most important influence: his father, Arthur Lithgow, who, as an actor, director, producer, and great lover of Shakespeare, brought theater to John boyhood. From bedtime stories to Arthur illustrious productions, performance and storytelling were constant and cherished parts of family life. Drama tells of the Lithgowscountless moves between Arthur gigs John attended eight secondary schools before flourishing onstage at Harvard and details with poignancy and sharp recollection the moments that introduced a budding young actor to the undeniable power of theater. Before Lithgow gained fame with the film The World According to Garp and the television show 3rd Rock from the Sun , his early years were full of scenes both hilarious and bittersweet. A shrewd acting performance saved him from duty in Vietnam. His involvement with a Broadway costar brought an end to his early first marriage. The theater worlds of New York and London come alive as Lithgow relives his collaborations with renowned performers and directors, including Mike Nichols, Bob Fosse, Liv Ullmann, and Meryl Streep. His ruminations on the nature of theater, film acting, and storytelling cut to the heart of why actors are driven to perform, and why people are driven to watch them do it. Lithgow memory is clear and his wit sharp, and much of the humor that runs throughout Drama comes at his own expense. But he also chronicles the harrowing moments of his past, reflecting with moving candor on friends made and lost, mistakes large and small, and the powerful love of a father who set him on the road to a life onstage. Illuminating, funny, affecting, and thoroughly engrossing, Drama raises the curtain on the making of one of our most beloved actors.

The universe is not made of atoms; it made of tiny stories. Featuring 62 contributors from the 14,946 contributions to the Tiny Stories collaboration on HITRECORD.ORG

Dwyane Wade, the eight-time All-Star for the Miami Heat, has miraculously defied the odds throughout his career and his life. In 2006, in just his third season in the NBA, Dwyane was named the Finals' MVP, after leading the Miami Heat to the Championship title, basketball's ultimate prize. Two years later, after possible career-ending injuries, he again rose from the ashes of doubt to help win a gold medal for the United States at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. As co-captain, he helped lead the Heat to triumph in the 2012 NBA Championship. Little wonder that legendary coach Pat Riley has called Dwyane "B.I.W." Best In the World. As incredible as those achievements have been, it's off the court where Dwyane has sought his most cherished goal: being a good dad to his sons, Zaire and Zion, by playing a meaningful role in their lives. Recounting his fatherhood journey, Dwyane begins his story in March 2011 with the news that after a long, bitter custody battle, he has been awarded sole custody of his sons in a virtually unprecedented court decision. A Father First chronicles the lessons Dwyane has learned as a single dad from the moment of the judge's ruling that instantly changed his life and the lives of his boys, and then back to the events in the past that shaped his dreams, prayers, and promises. As the son of divorced parents determined to get along so that he and his sister Tragil could have loving relationships with both of them, Dwyane's early years were spent on Chicago's South Side. With poverty, violence, and drugs consuming the streets and their mom descending into addiction, Tragil made the heroic decision to take her younger brother to live with their father. After moving his household to suburban Robbins, Illinois, Dwyane Wade Sr. became Dwyane's first basketball coach. While this period laid the groundwork for Dwyane's later mission for fathers to take greater responsibility for their kids, he was also inspired by his mother's miraculous victory over addiction and her gift for healing others. Both his mother and his father showed him that the unconditional love between parents and children is a powerful guiding force. In A Father First , we meet the coaches, mentors, and teammates who played pivotal roles in Dwyane's stunning basketball career from his early days shooting hoops on the neighborhood courts in Chicago, to his rising stardom at Marquette University in Milwaukee, to his emergence as an unheralded draft pick by the Miami Heat. This book is a revealing, personal story of one of America's top athletes, but it is also a call to action from a man who had to fight to be in his children's lives that will show mothers and fathers how to step up and be parents themselves.

Lady Philippa Marbury is . . . odd The brilliant, bespectacled daughter of a double marquess cares more for books than balls, for science than the season, and for laboratories than love. She looking forward to marrying her simple fianc and living out her days quietly with her dogs and her scientific experiments. But before that, Pippa has two weeks to experience all the rest fourteen days to research the exciting parts of life. It not much time, and to do it right she needs a guide familiar with London darker corners. She needs . . . a Scoundrel She needs Cross, the clever, controlled partner in London most exclusive gaming hell, with a carefully crafted reputation for wickedness. But reputations often hide the darkest secrets, and when the unconventional Pippa boldly propositions him, seeking science without emotion, she threatens all he works to protect. He is tempted to give Pippa precisely what she wants . . . but the scoundrel is more than he seems, and it will take every ounce of his willpower to resist giving the lady more than she ever imagined.

The world wildest collection of animal knowledge and lore! Lions, and tigers, and bears . . . and dinosaurs, dragons, and monsters. Oh my! For hundreds of years, the most popular books in the Western world next to the Bible were bestiaries, fanciful encyclopedias collecting all of human knowledge and mythology about the animal kingdom. In these pages, eagles and elephants lived next to griffins and sea monsters. Now, in The Big, Bad Book of Beasts , award-winning author Michael Largo has updated the medieval bestsellers for the twenty-first century, illuminating little-known facts, astonishing secrets, and bizarre superstitions about the beasts that inhabit our world and haunt our imaginations. You'll learn about the biggest bug ever, the smallest animal in the world, and the real creatures that inspired the fabled unicorns. You'll discover how birds learned to fly, why cats rub against your legs, and a thousand other facts that will make you look at nature in a wonderfully new way. Did you knowThe fastest animal in the world is the peregrine falcon, which reaches speeds of over 200 miles per hours. Circus ringmaster P.T. Barnum fooled many when he displayed a mermaid carcass that was later proved to be monkey bones sewed together with the body of a fish. Discovered in a remote volcanic crater in New Guinea, the Bosavi wolly rat grows to the size of a cat. President Andrew Jackson bought an African gray parrot to keep his wife company. The bird outlived them both and was removed from Jackson funeral for cussing in both English and Spanish. A to Z: From Aardvark to Zooplankton! For all ages! Includes 289 illustrations!

Can Christians Trust Talesfrom HeavenYes! Millions have read the testimonies of those who have been to heaven and returned. But what do these stories mean for ChristiansHow do they fit with what the Bible teachesWhat do they say about who goes to heavenDebate has raged throughout the church about whether we should trust these testimonies, since they don't always align with what we think the Bible teaches. Reverend John Price, a pastor who has been a pioneer in integrating near-death accounts into ministry, surveys the Bible and Christian doctrines to discover that these firsthand accounts of encounters with God are fully compatible with Christian spirituality. Price began his ministry not believing in heaven. In Revealing Heaven , after hearing over two hundred accounts of near-death experiences, Price narrates the stories of those who helped change his mind and now makes a case not only for why Christians can trust near-death accounts but for why we should treat these amazing stories as precious gifts from God.

The thief of hearts . . . Bored with stuffy balls and pompous suitors, Miss Natalie Haislett longs for romance and adventure and dreams of wedding England most notorious thief, the Black Knight. To this end, she approaches the renowned rakehell Jonathan Drake, reputed to be a friend of Natalie would-be lover, and begs him for an introduction . . . unaware that the outlaw she so desires is as close to her as a kiss. Intrigued by Natalie devotion and determination and intending to use the unsuspecting beauty to pull off a brazen jewel theft Drake agrees to escort Natalie to France, where the Black Knight is rumored to be. But while traveling in the guise of a married couple, an intimate friendship blossoms and the fires of reckless passion are stoked as the daring bandit sets his sights on the priceless treasure he knows he must purloin: his lady heart.

Francis Crick the quiet genius who led a revolution in biology by discovering, quite literally, the secret of life will be bracketed with Galileo, Darwin, and Einstein as one of the greatest scientists of all time. In his fascinating biography of the scientific pioneer who uncovered the genetic code the digital cipher at the heart of heredity that distinguishes living from non-living things acclaimed bestselling science writer Matt Ridley traces Crick's life from middle-class mediocrity in the English Midlands through a lackluster education and six years designing magnetic mines for the Royal Navy to his leap into biology at the age of thirty-one and its astonishing consequences. In the process, Ridley sheds a brilliant light on the man who forever changed our world and how we understand it.

In Shattered Love , Richard Chamberlain poignantly recounts his lifelong struggle to find happiness. Tracing a fascinating path over his meteoric rise to success, he chronicles his struggle to come to terms with his own imperfections, his growing desire to be honest about his sexual orientation, and his yearning to live with an open heart. And along the way he imparts the lessons he has learned about overcoming our own self imposed obstacles to happiness.