Jack Stoner is having a bad day. A psycho thief wants to kill him for being a snitch, a serial killer has set him up as a murder suspect, and he's about to cross paths with an organized crime boss, which will cause a sexy female F.B.I. Agent to enter his life and add to his troubles. On top of all this, he's having problems remembering he is really a cop named Jake Slater, who has been left undercover far too long. Follow him through Nevada's glitter towns on an emotional and action-packed tour of the dirty little secret Law Enforcement calls undercover work.
This multifaceted book is the latest collaboration between Glenn Kaino and Derek DelGaudio, who work together as the conceptual performance art duo A.Bandit to make magical art. A.Bandit is an experimental performance art group started by conceptual artist Glenn Kaino and magician Derek DelGaudio. Together they have exhibited and performed their work in venues that span a diverse range of cultural activities. The book introduces their pioneering work in the fields of art and magic, along with interviews and stories from noteworthy practitioners from both fields. It will be a generous access point into the normally secret practice from which A.Bandit operates. The book itself will contain several secret elements and magical features that will distinguish it as a type of performance in and of itself.
The Two Faces of American Freedom boldly reinterprets the American political tradition from the colonial period to modern times, placing issues of race relations, immigration, and presidentialism in the context of shifting notions of empire and citizenship. Today, while the U.S. enjoys tremendous military and economic power, citizens are increasingly insulated from everyday decision-making. This was not always the case. America, Aziz Rana argues, began as a settler society grounded in an ideal of freedom as the exercise of continuous self-rule—one that joined direct political participation with economic independence. However, this vision of freedom was politically bound to the subordination of marginalized groups, especially slaves, Native Americans, and women. These practices of liberty and exclusion were not separate currents, but rather two sides of the same coin. However, at crucial moments, social movements sought to imagine freedom without either subordination or empire. By the mid-twentieth century, these efforts failed, resulting in the rise of hierarchical state and corporate institutions. This new framework presented national and economic security as society’s guiding commitments and nurtured a continual extension of America’s global reach. Rana envisions a democratic society that revives settler ideals, but combines them with meaningful inclusion for those currently at the margins of American life.
Justice is a human virtue that is at once unconditional and conditional. Under favorable circumstances, we can be motivated to act justly by the belief that we must live up to what justice requires, irrespective of whether we benefit from doing so. But our will to act justly is subject to conditions. We find it difficult to exercise the virtue of justice when others regularly fail to. Even if we appear to have overcome the difficulty, our reluctance often betrays itself in certain moral emotions. In this book, Jiwei Ci explores the dual nature of justice, in an attempt to make unitary sense of key features of justice reflected in its close relation to resentment, punishment, and forgiveness. Rather than pursue a search for normative principles, he probes the human psychology of justice to understand what motivates moral agents who seek to behave justly, and why their desire to be just is as precarious as it is uplifting. A wide-ranging treatment of enduring questions, The Two Faces of Justice can also be read as a remarkably discerning contribution to the Western discourse on justice re-launched in our time by John Rawls.
By the mid-21st Century, technology had become much too complicated for humans to handle -- and the computer network that had grown up to keep civilization from tripping over its own shoelaces was also beginning to be overwhelmed. Something Had To Be Done.As a solution, Raymond Dyer's project developed the first genuinely self-aware artificial intelligence -- code name: Spartacus. But could Spartacus be trusted to obey its makers? And if it went rogue, could it be shut down? As an acid test, Spartacus was put in charge of a space station and programmed with a survival instinct. Dyer and his team had the job of seeing how far the computer would go to defend itself when they tried to pull the plug. Dyer didn't expect any serious problems to arise in the experiment.Unfortunately, he had built more initiative into Spartacus than he realized....And a superintelligent computer with a high dose of initiative makes a dangerous guinea pig.
The award-winning “classic psychological thriller” by the author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley (USA Today). In a grubby Athens hotel, Rydal Keener is bored and killing time with petty scams. But when he runs into another American, Chester MacFarland, dragging a man’s body down the hotel hall, Rydal impulsively agrees to help, perhaps because Chester looks like his father. Then Rydal meets Collete, Chester’s younger wife, and captivated, becomes entangled in their sordid lives, as the drama marches to a shocking climax at the ruins of the labyrinth at Knossos. A winner of a Crime Writers of America award, The Two Faces of January was the basis of a film starring Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Dunst, and Oscar Isaac. “An offbeat, provocative and absorbing suspense novel.” —The New York Times “Patricia Highsmith is one of the few suspense writers whose work transcends genre.” —The Austin American-Statesman
Innovative sounds in pop, rock and soul in the 1960s and 1970s meant that music appealed to more people than ever before. While some songs appealed to a broad audience, some targeted a much narrower demographic, meaning songs on the pop charts might not do as well on the adult contemporary or soul charts, or vice versa. This book examines forty songs featured on song charts of the 1960s and 1970s. Charts considered are Billboard Pop, Billboard Soul, Adult Contemporary, Cashbox and British Charts. Each listing includes discussion of the factors that contributed to the songs' popularity. Author interviews with songwriters, musicians and artists such as KC (of KC and the Sunshine Band), Mark Farner (of Grand Funk), Jerry Butler, Ron Dante (of the Archies and the Cuff Links), Freda Payne, Lou Christie, Tommy Roe, The Spinners and others tell the stories behind some of the era's most popular songs.
My unstructured upbringing, and cares to the wind attitude, led to my frequent incarceration, from childhood to adulthood, it's a disturbing story, which is primarily aimed at the adult reading audience, who enjoy reading about reality situations and crime. I have always been a reader, and to a large extent, that helped me become a self taught person. Born on the banks of the Colorado River in Arizona, and raised up in the Marcos De Niza barrio projects in South Phoenix, I experienced the injustices of the cotton fields, Maricopa County Juvenile Detention Home, and Arizona State Industrial School at Fort Grant, Arizona. I wandered the desperate streets of Los Angeles, and the forlorn railroad tracks, alone, like a lost person without a purpose in life. I was locked up in the jails of Phoenix, and Los Angeles, before winding up in the California State penitentiary system. Upon my release, I struggled to stay out of the pen, and took the jobs that society at large would never want to take. Through numerous personal tragedies, incarcerations, and unfortunate circumstances, I lost control of my life. No one was ever able to change my destructive behavior. The changes when they occurred came from within me, when I could no longer cope, with the situations I had cast my self into. Looking back, I can now see what I couldn't see, during those hopeless time periods. I was very fortunate, to finally be able to leave that life behind me, through relationships that believed in me, and successfully worked, and built myself a civil service work career, from which I retired. I now spend my days enjoying life's simple pleasures, after all my previous tragic missteps. My objective in life now, is to become an accomplished writer.
Over the course of a career now in its fourth decade, Bruce Springsteen has earned one of the most passionate, devoted followings in all rock &'n' roll. He's selling more records and concert tickets in his fifties than he sold in his twenties. Yet to many fans he remains an enigma. How has Springsteen produced such a consistent body of work and retained his currency while other top rock 'n' rollers have gone by the wayside? Jimmy Guterman, an accessible and entertaining music writer, has been writing about Springsteen since the late 1970s. In Runaway American Dream, he delves deep into dramatic and crucial moments from every phase of Springsteen's career, interpreting the songs and incisively commenting on the man and the culture at large to deliver a nuanced portrait of The Boss from the earliest days right up to Springsteen's 2005 album, Devils & Dust.
