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Absence of Mercy: A Lightner and Law Mystery (A\lightner And Law Mystery Ser. #1)
by S. M. GoodwinA string of grisly murders in Pre-Civil War New York propels an unlikely pair of detectives into a deadly tinderbox in S. M. Goodwin's debut novel, a sure hit for fans of Will Thomas and C. S. Harris.Jasper Lightner is a decorated Crimean War hero and the most admired inspector in London's Metropolitan Police. Along with a chest full of medals, he's got a head injury that's left large chunks of his memory missing. But Jasper's biggest problem is his father, the Duke of Kersey, who, enraged by a series of front-page newspaper stories extolling Jasper's exploits, decides he's had enough of the embarrassment and uses his political connections to keep his son out of the headlines--and off the police force.Jasper is sent packing to New York City on a year-long assignment to train detectives, and discovers a police department hovering on the brink of armed conflict. Assigned to investigate the murder of philanthropist and reformer Stephen Finch, Jasper joins forces with a man who might be even more of an outsider than he is: Hieronymus Law, a detective who had investigated two almost identical killings--and who is rumored to have taken money to help frame an innocent woman for murder.Law is bent on restoring his good name. But can Jasper trust Hy enough to bring him into the investigation? As the city devolves into madness and law enforcement falls into the hands of dangerous gangs, this unlikely team has no choice but to work together to pursue an adversary more sinister than either has faced alone.
Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self
by Marilynne RobinsonEssays from the lectures delivered at Yale University, the Dwight Harrington Terry Foundation. Includes bibliographical references.
An Absence So Great (Portraits of the Heart #2)
by Jane KirkpatrickWhile growing in confidence as a photographer, 18-year-old Jessie Ann Gaebele's personal life is at a crossroads. But even a job she loves can't keep painful memories from seeping into her heart when the shadows of a forbidden love threaten to darken the portrait of her life.
The Absent God in the Works of William Wordsworth (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)
by Eliza BorkowskaCalled by one of its reviewers "Wordsworth’s biographia literaria," this book takes its reader on a fascinating journey into the mind of the poet whose attitude to God and religion points to a major shift in Western culture. The monograph probes the philosophical foundations of Wordsworth’s religious outlook, drawing attention to this First Generation Romantic poet as the author who happened to record in his verse the rise to prominence of some of the intellectual and spiritual challenges and the most troublesome uncertainties that have defined Western man ever since. The book constitutes a self-contained whole and can be read independently. Simultaneously, it creates an unusual duet with the companion volume, The Presence of God in the Works of William Wordsworth. These two works can be regarded as contraries—or negatives: one offering an ironically positive reading of Wordsworth’s religious discourse, the other offering a reading which is positively negative.
The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books
by Elina GertsmanGuided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Medieval art, according to modern scholars, abhors the same. The notion of horror vacui—the fear of empty space—is thus often construed as a definitive feature of Gothic material culture. In The Absent Image, Elina Gertsman argues that Gothic art, in its attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the invisible, actively engages emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures.Exploring complex conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics, piety, and image-making, Gertsman considers the concept of nothingness in concert with the imaginary, revealing profoundly inventive approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture, from ingenious images of the world’s creation ex nihilo to figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of conception and death.Innovative and challenging, this book will find its primary audience with students and scholars of art, religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. It will be particularly welcomed by those interested in phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approaches to the visual culture of the later Middle Ages.
The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books
by Elina GertsmanWinner of the 2022 Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art AssociationGuided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Medieval art, according to modern scholars, abhors the same. The notion of horror vacui—the fear of empty space—is thus often construed as a definitive feature of Gothic material culture. In The Absent Image, Elina Gertsman argues that Gothic art, in its attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the invisible, actively engages emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures.Exploring complex conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics, piety, and image-making, Gertsman considers the concept of nothingness in concert with the imaginary, revealing profoundly inventive approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture, from ingenious images of the world’s creation ex nihilo to figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of conception and death.Innovative and challenging, this book will find its primary audience with students and scholars of art, religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. It will be particularly welcomed by those interested in phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approaches to the visual culture of the later Middle Ages.
The Absent Jews: Kurt Forstreuter and the Historiography of Medieval Prussia
by Cordelia HessFor nearly a century, it has been a commonplace of Central European history that there were no Jews in medieval Prussia—the result, supposedly, of the ruling Teutonic Order’s attempts to create a purely Christian crusader’s state. In this groundbreaking historical investigation, however, medievalist Cordelia Hess demonstrates the very weak foundations upon which that assumption rests. In exacting detail, she traces this narrative to the work of a single, minor Nazi-era historian, revealing it to be ideologically compromised work that badly mishandles its evidence. By combining new medieval scholarship with a biographical and historiographical exploration grounded in the 20th century, The Absent Jews spans remote eras while offering a fascinating account of the construction of historical knowledge.
Absent Management in Banking: How Banks Fail and Cause Financial Crisis
by Christian DinesenOffering a historical analysis of management in banking from the Medici to present day, this book explores how banks can cause devastating financial crisis when they fail. Rather than labelling management as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, the author focuses on the concept of absent management, which can occur as a result of complexity. The complexity of banking, which intensified alongside the phenomenal growth of banks in the 20th and 21st centuries, resulted in banks that are mismanaged or, at times, even unmanaged. Drawing on business school case studies including Barings and Lehman Brothers, this book showcases how absent management in banking has caused crises, depressions and recessions, and how ultimately it will continue to do so.
Absent-Minded Beggars: Yeomanry and Volunteers in the Boer War
by Will BennettThe British Army suffered one of its greatest crises when in December 1899 the Boer irregulars inflicted three reverses in South Africa in 'Black Week'. A nation grown accustomed to success was stunned. Part of the answer was a very British blend of patriotism and pragmatism. For the first time civilian volunteers and part-time soldiers were allowed to fight overseas to the horror of traditionalist professional soldiers. Yet, by the end of the Boer War, almost 90,000 men had volunteered to serve the Colours. Much of sporting high society joined the newly formed Imperial Yeomanry. The Volunteers sent infantrymen to serve alongside the regulars and the City of London financed the raising of the City Imperial Volunteers. Men also came forward from the colonies. This book tells the story of these volunteer units.
The Absent-Minded Imperialists
by Bernard PorterThe British empire was a huge enterprise. To foreigners it more or less defined Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its repercussions in the wider world are still with us today. One might expect this to have been reflected in her society and culture. This is the first book to examine this assumption critically against the broader background of contemporary British society. Bernard Porter, a leading imperial historian, argues that the empire had a far lower profile in Britain than it did abroad. He argues that though Britain was an imperial nation in this period, she was never a genuine imperial society.
The Absent Moon: A Memoir of a Short Childhood and a Long Depression
by Luiz SchwarczA literary sensation in Brazil, Luiz Schwarcz&’s brave and tender memoir interrogates his ordeal of bipolar disorder in the context of a family story of murder, dispossession, and silence—the long echo of the Holocaust across generationsWhen Luiz Schwarcz was a child, he was told little about his grandfather and namesake, Láios—&“Luiz&” in Hungarian. Only later in life did he learn that his grandfather, a devout Hungarian Jew, had defied his country&’s Nazi occupiers by holding secret religious services in his home. After being put on a train to a German death camp with his son André, Láios ordered André to leap from the train to freedom at a rail crossing, while Láios himself was carried on to his death. What Luiz did know was that his father André, who had emigrated to Brazil, was an unhappy and silent man. Young Luiz assumed responsibility for his parents&’ comfort, as many children of trauma do, and for a time he seemed to be succeeding: he blossomed into the family prodigy, eventually growing into a groundbreaking literary publisher in São Paulo. He found a home in the family silence—a home that he filled with books and with reading.But then, at a high point of outward success, Luiz was brought low by a devastating mental breakdown. The Absent Moon is the story of his journey to that point and of his journey back from it, as Luiz learned to forge a more honest relationship with his own mind, with his family, and with their shared past. The culmination of that path is this extraordinary book, which is beautiful, tragic, noble, piercingly honest, and ultimately redemptive—the product of a lifetime&’s reflection, given powerful literary shape in the refiner&’s fire by a master storyteller.
The Absent Mother in the Cultural Imagination: Missing, Presumed Dead
by Berit ÅströmThis anthology explores the recurring trope of the dead or absent mother in Western cultural productions. Across historical periods and genres, this dialogue has been employed to articulate and debate questions of politics and religion, social and cultural change as well as issues of power and authority within the family. Åström seeks to investigate the many functions and meanings of the dialogue by covering extensive material from the 1200s to 2014 including hagiography, romances, folktales, plays, novels, children’s literature and graphic novels, as well as film and television. This is achieved by looking at the discourse both as products of the time and culture that produced the various narratives, and as part of an on-going cultural conversation that spans the centuries, resulting in an innovative text that will be of great interest to all scholars of gender, feminist and media studies.
An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American Culture, 1945-1960
by Caroline Chung SimpsonThere have been many studies on the forced relocation and internment of nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. But An Absent Presence is the first to focus on how popular representations of this unparalleled episode in U. S. history affected the formation of Cold War culture. Caroline Chung Simpson shows how the portrayal of this economic and social disenfranchisement haunted--and even shaped--the expression of American race relations and national identity throughout the middle of the twentieth century. Simpson argues that when popular journals or social theorists engaged the topic of Japanese American history or identity in the Cold War era they did so in a manner that tended to efface or diminish the complexity of their political and historical experience. As a result, the shadowy figuration of Japanese American identity often took on the semblance of an "absent presence. " Individual chapters feature such topics as the case of the alleged Tokyo Rose, the Hiroshima Maidens Project, and Japanese war brides. Drawing on issues of race, gender, and nation, Simpson connects the internment episode to broader themes of postwar American culture, including the atomic bomb, McCarthyism, the crises of racial integration, and the anxiety over middle-class gender roles. By recapturing and reexamining these vital flashpoints in the projection of Japanese American identity, Simpson fills a critical and historical void in a number of fields including Asian American studies, American studies, and Cold War history.
Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons
by Daniel Heller-RoazenAn intellectually adventurous account of the role of nonpersons that explores their depiction in literature and challenges how they are defined in philosophy, law, and anthropology In thirteen interlocking chapters, Absentees explores the role of the missing in human communities, asking an urgent question: How does a person become a nonperson, whether by disappearance, disenfranchisement, or civil, social, or biological death? Only somebody can become a “nobody,” but, as Daniel Heller-Roazen shows, the ways of being a nonperson are as diverse and complex as they are mysterious and unpredictable. Heller-Roazen treats the variously missing persons of the subtitle in three parts: Vanishings, Lessenings, and Survivals. In each section and with multiple transhistorical and transcultural examples, he challenges the categories that define nonpersons in philosophy, ethics, law, and anthropology. Exclusion, infamy, and stigma; mortuary beliefs and customs; children’s games and state censuses; ghosts and “dead souls” illustrate the lives of those lacking or denied full personhood. In the archives of fiction, Heller-Roazen uncovers figurations of the missing—from Helen of Argos in Troy or Egypt to Hawthorne’s Wakefield, Swift’s Captain Gulliver, Kafka’s undead hunter Gracchus, and Chamisso’s long-lived shadowless Peter Schlemihl. Readers of The Enemy of All and No One’s Ways will find a continuation of those books’ intense intellectual adventures, with unexpected questions and arguments arising every step of the way. In a unique voice, Heller-Roazen’s thought and writing capture the intricacies of the all-too-human absent and absented.
The Absolute at Large (Bison Frontiers Of Imagination Ser.)
by Karel Capek"One of the genuine masterpieces of sci-fi." — R. D. MullenIn this satirical and enduringly relevant work of science fiction, the acclaimed Czech author Karel Čapek offers a prescient fable of the benefits and dangers of atomic power. Originally published in 1922, the story is set in a then-futuristic Czechoslovakia of 1943, in which an inventor develops the Karburator, a device with the potential to provide abundant low-cost energy. But the reactor's exciting possibilities are shadowed by its dangerous side effect: instead of carbon dioxide, it emits the Absolute, a spiritual essence that inspires a powerful religious fervor. Greed triumphs over ethics as the inventor and his business partner proceed with mass production of the Karburator, resulting in simmering religious strife that ignites a world war.Karel Čapek is best known for popularizing the term "robot" in his play R.U.R., a seminal work of science fiction in which the robots are metaphors for a world dehumanized by social organization and technology. He offers another strikingly foresighted vision in The Absolute at Large, written decades before global warming awareness yet predicting the catastrophic consequences of the unchecked pursuit of profit by business and industry.
Absolute Destruction
by Isabel V. HullIn a book that is at once a major contribution to modern European history and a cautionary tale for today, Isabel V. Hull argues that the routines and practices of the Imperial German Army, unchecked by effective civilian institutions, increasingly sought the absolute destruction of its enemies as the only guarantee of the nation's security. So deeply embedded were the assumptions and procedures of this distinctively German military culture that the Army, in its drive to annihilate the enemy military, did not shrink from the utter destruction of civilian property and lives. Carried to its extreme, the logic of "military necessity" found real security only in extremities of destruction, in the "silence of the graveyard. " Hull begins with a dramatic account, based on fresh archival work, of the German Army's slide from administrative murder to genocide in German Southwest Africa (1904-7). The author then moves back to 1870 and the war that inaugurated the Imperial era in German history, and analyzes the genesis and nature of this specifically German military culture and its operations in colonial warfare. In the First World War the routines perfected in the colonies were visited upon European populations. Hull focuses on one set of cases (Belgium and northern France) in which the transition to total destruction was checked (if barely) and on another (Armenia) in which "military necessity" caused Germany to accept its ally's genocidal policies even after these became militarily counterproductive. She then turns to the Endkampf (1918), the German General Staff's plan to achieve victory in the Great War even if the homeland were destroyed in the process-a seemingly insane campaign that completes the logic of this deeply institutionalized set of military routines and practices. Hull concludes by speculating on the role of this distinctive military culture in National Socialism's military and racial policies. Absolute Destruction has serious implications for the nature of warmaking in any modern power. At its heart is a warning about the blindness of bureaucratic routines, especially when those bureaucracies command the instruments of mass death.
Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead and Undead in Japan's Imperialism, 1895-1945
by Mark DriscollIn this major reassessment of Japanese imperialism in Asia, Mark Driscoll foregrounds the role of human life and labor. Drawing on subaltern postcolonial studies and Marxism, he directs critical attention to the peripheries, where figures including Chinese coolies, Japanese pimps, trafficked Japanese women, and Korean tenant farmers supplied the vital energy that drove Japan’s empire. He identifies three phases of Japan’s capitalist expansion, each powered by distinct modes of capturing and expropriating life and labor: biopolitics (1895–1914), neuropolitics (1920–32), and necropolitics (1935–45). During the first phase, Japanese elites harnessed the labor of marginalized subjects as Japan colonized Taiwan, Korea, and south Manchuria, and sent hustlers and sex workers into China to expand its market hegemony. Linking the deformed bodies laboring in the peripheries with the “erotic-grotesque” media in the metropole, Driscoll centers the second phase on commercial sexology, pornography, and detective stories in Tokyo to argue that by 1930, capitalism had colonized all aspects of human life: not just labor practices but also consumers’ attention and leisure time. Focusing on Japan’s Manchukuo colony in the third phase, he shows what happens to the central figures of biopolitics as they are subsumed under necropolitical capitalism: coolies become forced laborers, pimps turn into state officials and authorized narcotraffickers, and sex workers become “comfort women. ” Driscoll concludes by discussing Chinese fiction written inside Manchukuo, describing the everyday violence unleashed by necropolitics.
Absolute Heart (Infernal Instruments of the Dragon #1)
by Michael Vance GurleyInfernal Instruments of the DragonAs the British Empire builds power based on new clockwork and steam technology, Ireland draws its might from its potent magical traditions. Only two boys with little in common can end the fighting between the two nations and prevent a terrible worldwide war. Gavin Haveland’s dreams are in the sky with the airships, while his reality as a High Councilman’s son means hiding secrets that will get him executed if revealed. Orion of Oberon is not just a powerful mage, he’s the nephew of the Irish queen, and the one she’s sent him on a quest for the ancient Dragon Stones that will bolster her fading power. In the process, he might restore his family to their rightful place in society. With enemies determined to stop them by any means necessary and war or peace hinging on their success, Gavin and Orion must find a way to work together, despite the centuries of mistrust between their nations.
Absolute Honour
by C. C. Humphreys"A rip-roaring adventure packed with action, drama, and passion."--Kate Mosse, author of Labyrinth Honour matters above all to Jack Absolute. But in order to restore his own, he must pay the price in blood. Blooded on the battlefields of Canada, fresh from a winter spent in a voluptuous widow's bed, the dashing Jack Absolute has every reason to feel good. And life only gets better when the ship returning him to England captures a rich prize, with Jack's sword winning him a large share of the booty. But gold is not all the enemy ship holds. Fever nearly kills Jack, his life barely saved by a new comrade, Red Hugh McClune. Their resulting friendship takes him to Bath to recover--and into a passionate romance with McClune's beautiful cousin, Laetitia. Yet neither cousin is who they seem, and tragedy soon strikes Jack. This time, he escapes with his life, but loses what he loves most--his honour. The thrilling finale to C.C. Humphrey's historical adventure series, Absolute Honour sweeps readers into a world of bravery, betrayal, passion, and glory at whatever cost. From daring espionage in Rome to the battlefields of Spain to a climactic duel against an unbeatable foe, Jack seeks to restore that honour with consequences he could never foresee and a price to be paid in blood. "Jack in all his swashbuckling glory...Humphrey's acting background brings drama to life in Jack's legendary tale."--Booklist "A vigorously imagined, dashingly done espionage adventure."--Literary Review (UK)
Absolute Madness: A True Story of a Serial Killer, Race, and a City Divided
by Catherine PeloneroAbsolute Madness tells the disturbing true story of Joseph Christopher, a white serial killer who targeted black males and struck fear into the residents of New York in the 1980s. Dubbed both the 22-Caliber Killer and the Midtown Slasher, Christopher allegedly claimed eighteen victims during a savage four-month spree across the state. The investigation, aided by famed FBI profiler John Douglas, drew national attention and biting criticism from Jesse Jackson and other civil rights leaders. The killer, when at last he was unmasked, seemed an unlikely candidate to have held New York in a grip of terror. His capture was neither the end of the story nor the end of the racial strife, which flared anew during circuitous prosecutions and judicial rulings that prompted cries of a double standard in the justice system. Both a wrenching true crime story and an incisive portrait of dangerously discordant race relations in America, Absolute Madness also chronicles a lonely, vulnerable man’s tragic descent into madness and the failure of the American mental health system that refused his pleas for help.
An Absolute Massacre: The New Orleans Race Riot of July 30, 1866
by James G. Jr.In the summer of 1866, racial tensions ran high in Louisiana as a constitutional convention considered disenfranchising former Confederates and enfranchising blacks. On July 30, a procession of black suffrage supporters pushed through an angry throng of hostile whites. Words were exchanged, shots rang out, and within minutes a riot erupted with unrestrained fury. When it was over, at least forty-eight men -- an overwhelming majority of them black -- lay dead and more than two hundred had been wounded. In An Absolute Massacre, James G. Hollandsworth, Jr., examines the events surrounding the confrontation and offers a compelling look at the racial tinderbox that was the post-Civil War South.
Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy
by John Julius Norwich<p>With the papacy embattled in recent years, it is essential to have the perspective of one of the world's most accomplished historians. In Absolute Monarchs, John Julius Norwich captures nearly two thousand years of inspiration and devotion, intrigue and scandal. The men (and maybe one woman) who have held this position of infallible power over millions have ranged from heroes to rogues, admirably wise to utterly decadent. Norwich, who knew two popes and had private audiences with two others, recounts in riveting detail the histories of the most significant popes and what they meant politically, culturally, and socially to Rome and to the world. <p>Norwich presents such brave popes as Innocent I, who in the fifth century successfully negotiated with Alaric the Goth, an invader civil authorities could not defeat, and Leo I, who two decades later tamed (and perhaps paid off) Attila the Hun. Here, too, are the scandalous figures: Pope Joan, the mythic woman said (without any substantiation) to have been elected in 855, and the infamous "pornocracy," the five libertines who were descendants or lovers of Marozia, debauched daughter of one of Rome's most powerful families. <p>Absolute Monarchs brilliantly portrays reformers such as Pope Paul III, "the greatest pontiff of the sixteenth century," who reinterpreted the Church's teaching and discipline, and John XXIII, who in five short years starting in 1958 "opened up the church to the twentieth century," instituting reforms that led to Vatican II. Norwich brings the story to the present day with Benedict XVI, who is coping with a global priest sex scandal. Epic and compelling, Absolute Monarchs is the astonishing story of some of history's most revered and reviled figures, men who still cast light and shadows on the Vatican and the world today. </p>
Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction
by Arved AshbyIn this book, the author sees recordings as socially progressive and instruments of a musical vernacular, and argues that, just as photography redefined visual art, recording technology has transformed our understanding of art music.
Absolute Power: How the Pope Became the Most Influential Man in the World
by Paul CollinsThe sensational story of the last two centuries of the papacy, its most influential pontiffs, troubling doctrines, and rise in global authorityIn 1799, the papacy was at rock bottom: The Papal States had been swept away and Rome seized by the revolutionary French armies. With cardinals scattered across Europe and the next papal election uncertain, even if Catholicism survived, it seemed the papacy was finished.In this gripping narrative of religious and political history, Paul Collins tells the improbable success story of the last 220 years of the papacy, from the unexalted death of Pope Pius VI in 1799 to the celebrity of Pope Francis today. In a strange contradiction, as the papacy has lost its physical power--its armies and states--and remained stubbornly opposed to the currents of social and scientific consensus, it has only increased its influence and political authority in the world.
Absolute Power: The Legacy of Corruption in the Clinton-Reno Justice Department
by David LimbaughLimbaugh, a nationally syndicated columnist and a political commentator, shows how federal law was politicized and precedents were set for a legal war against the rule of law and the traditional civil liberties of the US during the Clinton administration, beginning with Clinton's appointment of Janet Reno as attorney general. The author is brother of radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)