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As El Salvador returns to peace after more than a decade of civil war, Eduardo Sosa, an unemployed sociologist, becomes fascinated by a homeless man who lives in a beat-up yellow Chevrolet Assuming his identity, Sosa unleashes a reign of terror on San Salvador with his snake accomplices. A macabre high-speed romp, in which violence and comedy become almost indistinguishable.
Survivor's riveting tale. Leftwing, interracial church transplants to utopia overseas. Premeditated government conspiracy destabilizes and destroys. Breathtaking, one-of-a-kind tour-de-force.
A rattlesnake slithers into a cave and shakes and wriggles in a rattlesnake dance of pure bliss, while other hissing snakes join the underground ball. Full-color illustrations.
From dust jacket: "Over forty years ago, before the complete ban on photography, he visited and revisted this tribe during their Snake ceremonies. From the hundreds of pictures he made of all phases of the dance, have been selected a lavish array of illustrations to enhance this revealing story of the strange religious rite, where the intrepid dancers whirl and cavort with their arms and mouths loaded with vicious rattlesnakes."
The most pervasive gods in ancient Rome had no traditional mythology attached to them, nor was their worship organized by elites. Throughout the Roman world, neighborhood street corners, farm boundaries, and household hearths featured small shrines to the beloved lares, a pair of cheerful little dancing gods. These shrines were maintained primarily by ordinary Romans, and often by slaves and freedmen, for whom the lares cult provided a unique public leadership role. In this comprehensive and richly illustrated book, the first to focus on the lares, Harriet Flower offers a strikingly original account of these gods and a new way of understanding the lived experience of everyday Roman religion. Weaving together a wide range of evidence, Flower sets forth a new interpretation of the much-disputed nature of the lares. She makes the case that they are not spirits of the dead, as many have argued, but rather benevolent protectors—gods of place, especially the household and the neighborhood, and of travel. She examines the rituals honoring the lares, their cult sites, and their iconography, as well as the meaning of the snakes often depicted alongside lares in paintings of gardens. She also looks at Compitalia, a popular midwinter neighborhood festival in honor of the lares, and describes how its politics played a key role in Rome’s increasing violence in the 60s and 50s BC, as well as in the efforts of Augustus to reach out to ordinary people living in the city’s local neighborhoods. A reconsideration of seemingly humble gods that were central to the religious world of the Romans, this is also the first major account of the full range of lares worship in the homes, neighborhoods, and temples of ancient Rome.
The first presentation of Aby Warburg's rarely seen Pueblo art collection, from his famous 1895-96 visit to the US In 1895, the great German art historian and theorist Aby Warburg (1866-1929) came to the US, where he spent the bulk of his time meeting with Indigenous Americans. The encounter produced two famous works: his 1923 lecture on the Hopi snake ritual, and a body of photographs--both of them much discussed by art historians. Almost unknown until now, however, was the collection of objects he acquired from Pueblo tribes throughout the American Southwest, which he later donated to the Museum fur Völkerkunde (today the Museum am Rothenbaum) in Hamburg. Following Warburg's transdisciplinary approach, this substantial publication examines his guiding principles in assembling his collection, as well as his reading of Pueblo art and culture. The fascination of the Hopi snake ritual among Warburg's contemporaries is highlighted, as is the reception history of the text. Also represented here are the views and strategies of Hopi officials, which have previously been neglected in this context, to regain cultural sovereignty.
"Yemen is the dark horse of the Middle East. Every so often it enters the headlines for one alarming reason or another -- links with al-Qaeda, kidnapped Westerners, explosive population growth -- then sinks into obscurity again. But, as Victoria Clark argues in this riveting book, we ignore Yemen at our peril. The poorest state in the Arab world, it is still dominated by its tribal makeup and has become a perfect breeding ground for insurgent and terrorist movements. Clark returns to the country where she was born to discover a perilously fragile state that deserves more of our understanding and attention. On a series of visits to Yemen between 2004 and 2009, she meets politicians, influential tribesmen, oil workers and jihadists as well as ordinary Yemenis. Untangling Yemen's history before examining the country's role in both al-Qaeda and the wider jihadist movement today, Clark presents a lively, clear, and up-to-date account of a little-known state whose chronic instability is increasingly engaging the general reader"--Publisher description.
Retells the author's experiences being bitten by a rattlesnake and observing the snakes in the wild, describes the Hopi rattlesnake dance, and covers rattlesnake anatomy and behavior
Ambition will fuel him. Competition will drive him. But power has its price. It is the morning of the reaping that will kick off the tenth annual Hunger Games. In the Capitol, eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow is preparing for his one shot at glory as a mentor in the Games. The once-mighty house of Snow has fallen on hard times, its fate hanging on the slender chance that Coriolanus will be able to outcharm, outwit, and outmaneuver his fellow students to mentor the winning tribute. The odds are against him. He's been given the humiliating assignment of mentoring the female tribute from District 12, the lowest of the low. Their fates are now completely intertwined - every choice Coriolanus makes could lead to favor or failure, triumph or ruin. Inside the arena, it will be a fight to the death. Outside the arena, Coriolanus starts to feel for his doomed tribute . . . and must weigh his need to follow the rules against his desire to survive no matter what it takes.
