"Inside Quatro uncovers some of the exile history of the ANC and SWAPO that both organisations would prefer not to remember. Here is a first-hand account of the ANC's Quatro prison camp and of the mutiny in Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) in Angola in 1984; articles on the SWAPO 'spy drama' of the 1970s and 1980s; an analysis of a death in exile with implications relating to Jacob Zuma; and a study of the responses of both the ANC and SWAPO to these episodes of intolerance, repression and excess. In all his essays, Trewhela analyses problems of the liberation struggles with a former insider's knowledge and a journalist's ability to ferret out the facts"--Publisher's website.
From the critically acclaimed author of I Want to Show You More comes an unflinching and profound portrait of Maggie and Thomas, and their disintegrating marriage. Married twenty years to Thomas and living in Nashville with their two children, Maggie is drawn ineluctably into a passionate affair while still fiercely committed to her husband and family. What begins as a platonic intellectual and spiritual exchange between writer Maggie and poet James gradually transforms into an emotional and erotically-charged bond that challenges Maggie’s sense of loyalty and morality, drawing her deeper into the darkness of desire. Using an array of narrative techniques and written in spare, elegant prose, Jamie Quatro gives us a compelling account of one woman’s emotional, psychological, physical, and spiritual yearnings — unveiling the impulses and contradictions that reside in us all. Fire Sermon is an unflinchingly honest and formally daring debut novel from a writer of enormous talent.
Sharp-edged and fearless, mixing white-hot yearning with daring humour, Jamie Quatro’s debut short-story collection is a stunning and subversive portrait of modern infidelity, faith, and family. Set around Lookout Mountain on the border of Georgia and Tennessee, Quatro’s hypnotically revealing stories range from the traditional to the fabulist as they expose lives torn between spirituality and sexuality in the New American South. These fifteen linked tales confront readers with dark theological complexities, fractured marriages, and mercurial temptations. Throughout the collection, a mother in her late thirties relates the various stages of her affair while other characters lay bare their own notions of God, illicit sex, raising children, and running: a wife comes home with her husband to find her lover’s corpse in their bed; marathon runners on a Civil War battlefield must carry phallic statues and are punished if they choose to unload their burdens; a girl’s embarrassment over attending a pool party with her quadriplegic mother turns to fierce devotion under the pitying gaze of other guests; and a husband asks his wife to show him how she would make love to another man. Sultry, acute, startlingly intimate, and enticingly cool, I Want To Show You More is the thrilling debut of an exhilarating new voice in American fiction.
Traits that signal belonging dictate our daily routines, including how we eat, move, and connect to others. In recent years, "fat" has emerged as a shared anchor in defining who belongs and is valued versus who does not and is not. The stigma surrounding weight transcends many social, cultural, political, and economic divides. The concern over body image shapes not only how we see ourselves, but also how we talk, interact, and fit into our social networks, communities, and broader society. Fat in Four Cultures is a co-authored comparative ethnography that reveals the shared struggles and local distinctions of how people across the globe are coping with a bombardment of anti-fat messages. Highlighting important differences in how people experience "being fat," the cases in this book are based on fieldwork by five anthropologists working together simultaneously in four different sites across the globe: Japan, the United States, Paraguay, and Samoa. Through these cases, Fat in Four Cultures considers what insights can be gained through systematic, cross-cultural comparison. Written in an eye-opening and narrative-driven style, with clearly defined and consistently used key terms, this book effectively explores a series of fundamental questions about the present and future of fat and obesity.
A breathtaking award-winning novel about an extraordinary, all-consuming love affair One night an eighteen-year-old Irish girl, recently arrived in London to attend drama school, meets an older man—a well-regarded actor in his own right. While she is naive and thrilled by life in the big city, he is haunted by more than a few demons, and the clamorous relationship that ensues risks undoing them both. A captivating story of passion and innocence, joy and discovery set against the vibrant atmosphere of 1990s London over the course of a single year, The Lesser Bohemians glows with the eddies and anxieties of growing up, and the transformative intensity of a powerful new love. Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award Shortlisted for the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize Shortlisted for the 2016 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards Eason Novel of the Year
Learn how to use R to turn raw data into insight, knowledge, and understanding. This book introduces you to R, RStudio, and the tidyverse, a collection of R packages designed to work together to make data science fast, fluent, and fun. Suitable for readers with no previous programming experience, R for Data Science is designed to get you doing data science as quickly as possible. Authors Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund guide you through the steps of importing, wrangling, exploring, and modeling your data and communicating the results. You'll get a complete, big-picture understanding of the data science cycle, along with basic tools you need to manage the details. Each section of the book is paired with exercises to help you practice what you've learned along the way. You'll learn how to: Wrangle—transform your datasets into a form convenient for analysis Program—learn powerful R tools for solving data problems with greater clarity and ease Explore—examine your data, generate hypotheses, and quickly test them Model—provide a low-dimensional summary that captures true "signals" in your dataset Communicate—learn R Markdown for integrating prose, code, and results
Following the publication of Al Venter’s successful Portugal’s Guerrilla Wars in Africa - shortlisted by the New York Military Affairs Symposium’s 'Arthur Goodzeit Book Award for 2013' - his Battle for Angola delves still further into the troubled history of this former Portuguese African colony. This is a completely fresh work running to almost 600 pages including 32 pages of color photos, with the main thrust on events before and after the civil war that followed Lisbon’s over-hasty departure back to the metrópole. There are also several sections that detail the role of South African mercenaries in defeating the rebel leader Dr Jonas Savimbi (considered by some as the most accomplished guerrilla leader to emerge in Africa in the past century). There are many chapters that deal with Pretoria’s reaction to the deteriorating political and military situation in Angola, the role of the Soviets and mercenaries in the political transition, as well as the civil war that followed. With the assistance of several notable military authorities he elaborates in considerable detail on South Africa’s 23-year Border War, from the first guerrilla incursions to the last. In this regard he received solid help from the former the head of 4 Reconnaissance Regiment, Colonel Douw Steyn, who details several cross-border Recce strikes, including the sinking by frogmen of two Soviet ships and a Cuban freighter in an Angolan deepwater port. Throughout, the author was helped by a variety of notable authorities, including the French historian Dr René Pélissier and the American academic and former naval aviator Dr John (Jack) Cann. With their assistance, he covers several ancillary uprisings and invasions, including the Herero revolt of the early 20th century; the equally troubled Ovambo insurrection, as well as the invasion of Angola by the Imperial German Army in the First World War. Former deputy head of the South African Army Major General Roland de Vries played a seminal role. It was he - dubbed ‘South Africa’s Rommel’ by his fellow commanders - who successfully nurtured the concept of ‘mobile warfare’ where, in a succession of armored onslaughts ‘thin-skinned’ Ratel Infantry Fighting Vehicles tackled Soviet main battle tanks and thrashed them. There is a major section on South African Airborne – the ‘Parabats’ –by Brigadier-General McGill Alexander, one of the architects of that kind of warfare under Third World conditions. Finally, the role of Cuban Revolutionary Army receives the attention it deserves: officially there were almost 50,000 Cuban troops deployed in the Angolan war, though subsequent disclosures in Havana suggest that the final total was much higher.
Bestselling author don Miguel Ruiz reveals the source of self-limiting beliefs that rob us of joy and create needless suffering. Based on ancient Toltec wisdom, The Four Agreements offer a powerful code of conduct that can rapidly transform our lives to a new experience of freedom, true happiness, and love. • A New York Times bestseller for over 7 years • Over 5.2 million copies sold in the U.S. • Translated into 38 languages worldwide Don Miguel Ruiz’s book is a roadmap to enlightenment and freedom.” — Deepak Chopra, Author, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success “An inspiring book with many great lessons . . .” — Wayne Dyer, Author, Real Magic “In the tradition of Castaneda, Ruiz distills essential Toltec wisdom, expressing with clarity and impeccability what it means for men and women to live as peaceful warriors in the modern world.” — Dan Millman, Author, Way of the Peaceful Warrior
Democratization is a sociopolitical process and the society that may grow out of it where people make decisions on matters affecting them. It is an unending struggle to win such rights and power, to hold and to extend them. The contending classes are essentially the poor and weak majority of the people and the elite of wealth, status, and power. This book begins with the study of politics in democratic Athens 508-322 BCE, and how it revolved around the divisions between an uneducated poor majority of citizens and a small, wealthy elite. All citizens were deemed equally capable of holding political office, and life in democratic Athens was itself an education through the wide political experience a citizen necessarily acquired. The second study is of Britain’s centuries long and profoundly incomplete democratization, polarizing usually the urban poor, unequally against the Grandees, the oligarchy, and subsequent elites. A third exemplifier is South Africa, beginning in the 1970s-80s when two big processes were going on simultaneously: an external armed struggle led by the African National Congress (ANC), and a path-breaking domestic democratization represented by the United Democratic Front and the trade unions. The democratization that emerges here is a matter of aspiration and impulse by determined men and women, which fail more often than they succeed, yet appear again in other times and places. Two main models of democracy are in contention. A representative from revolving around free elections, in which competing elites "get themselves elected" utilizing their wealth and celebrity. The liberal form achieved preeminence in Britain and the United States over some 150 years, but is now under serious threat from its own dysfunctionalities and the alienation of its citizens from its institutions and their elitist, self-serving values. And there is the participatory model, now being approached again since the mid-1970s in many places, from Portugal, Poland and Czechoslovakia, to South Africa, Tunisia, Egypt, and Iceland. Many such impulses will fail, but they offer hope, and on the record, immense satisfaction to their participants.
