A Christmas Cruise in Space This is newly-promoted Glen Price's first time as cruise director. He wants to make his mark and do something special for the passengers. But his plan to project a giant Christmas star above the ship turns disastrous when the ship suddenly loses power. Can Glen salvage what's left of the event and still make it a meaningful Christmas? A science-fiction Christmas short story set in the "Jewel of The Stars" universe.
As the students of Coolidge High School prepare for their annual Christmas play, excitement mounts. Performed at the local theater, the play, with the students in complete charge of, the performances has become a tradition in town. Everything is going well until the morning of the final performance when calamity hits. Should the students cancel the final performance or try to turn the disaster into something good?
The complete story of Tangiwai -- Christmas Eve 1953 -- as told by someone who was there -- when 151 people lost their lives through forces and circumstances beyond man's control. At the time, Tangiwai was rated the eighth worst railway tragedy in the world by the toll of those killed and injured. Since that sad Christmas Eve many questions are still being asked: Was it negligence by man? Why were recurring lahars ignored? Was it an accident waiting to happen? The name Tangiwai means 'weeping waters' or 'waters of sorrow', from tangi, to weep or lament; and wai, water. It was so named to commemorate the loss of a Maori paramount chief who, according to legend, perished in a raging torrent that suddenly overwhelmed the normally placid crossing place in the Whangaehu River. Fiordland greenstone is also known as Tangiwai because the flecks in it resemble tears.
The development of railways in Britain came in the 1830s as a result of the needs of industry and of a public eager for the novelty and cheapness of rail travel. These early railways were beset by accidents caused by collisions and mechanical failure, and the 1870s produced more disasters than any other decade before or since. On Christmas Eve in 1874 the worst accident in the history of the GWR occurred at Shipton-on-Cherwell when the 10 A.M. from London Paddington to Birkenhead derailed, killing 34 passengers. The fracture of a single tire was enough to cause this catastrophe due to the lack of continuous braking and inadequate communication between the driver and passengers. The authors detail the history surrounding this tragic event using the accounts of eyewitnesses, archive newspaper articles, and reports.
When Alice agreed to appear in a reality cooking show with her father, she had no idea she'd find herself in the middle of a mystery! Will Alice and her new friends be able to save the show? A light-hearted and funny middle grade novel for fans of Rebecca Stead and Lynda Mullaly Hunt. Alice Fleck's father is a culinary historian, and for as long as she can remember, she's been helping him recreate meals from the past -- a hobby she prefers to keep secret from kids her age. But when her father's new girlfriend enters them into a cooking competition at a Victorian festival, Alice finds herself and her hobby thrust into the spotlight. And that's just the first of many surprises awaiting her. On arriving at the festival, Alice learns that she and her father are actually contestants on Culinary Combat, a new reality TV show hosted by Tom Truffleman, the most famous and fierce judge on TV! And to make matters worse, she begins to suspect that someone is at work behind the scenes, sabotaging the competition. It's up to Alice, with the help of a few new friends, to find the saboteur before the entire competition is ruined, all the while tackling some of the hardest cooking challenges of her life . . . for the whole world to see.
On Christmas Eve 1917, an overcrowded, out-of-control streetcar exited the Mount Washington tunnel, crashing into pedestrians. Twenty-three were killed and more than eighty injured in the worst transit incident in Pittsburgh history. The crash scene on Carson Street was chaotic as physicians turned the railway offices into a makeshift hospital and bystanders frantically sought to remove the injured and strewn bodies from the wreckage. Most of the victims, many women and children, were from the close-knit neighborhoods of Knoxville, Beltzhoover and Mount Oliver. In the aftermath, public outrage over the tragedy led to criminal prosecution, civil suits and the bankruptcy of the Pittsburgh Railways Company, which operated the service. Author Mary Jane Kuffner Hirt explores the tragic history of the Mount Washington transit tunnel disaster.
Through detailed analysis of films such as The Towering Inferno, Independence Day, Titanic and The Day After Tomorrow, this book looks at the ways in which disaster movies can be read in relation to both contextual considerations and the increasing commercial demands of contemporary Hollywood. Featuring new material on cinematic representations of disaster in the wake of 9/11 and how we might regard disaster movies in light of recent natural disasters, the volume explores the continual reworking of this previously undervalued genre.
Are you and your congregation ready to serve your neighbors when disaster strikes? Storms, earthquakes, violence—it seems each week brings catastrophe to a different community. When that catastrophe arrives, people of faith can make a big difference, just as they did in Joplin, Newtown, Haiti, and countless other scenes of suffering. Help and Hope shares their stories to show why disaster preparedness is a sacred calling and gives you the tools to be healers, places of refuge, enablers of communication—whatever is needed after disaster hits your town.
Cate Marvin uses language the way a gymnast uses her body; she is a formalist who has thoroughly learned the pleasures and gains of abandon. But it is her excursions into wild image and passionate song that win the reader's heart. The heart is central inWorld's Tallest Disaster, which is essentially a book of love poems--love lost and found, love requited, love abandoned and betrayed. What Cate Marvin has done in her remarkably assured and powerful first collection is to remind us in fresh terms of the news that stays news: that our desire is "Not a sea of longing,// but the brack of wanting what's physical/ to help us forget we are physical." "Violently passionate and firmly symmetrical, like tango or the blues, these poems-at first-are about sexual passion. . . . But in the great tradition of love poetry, these poems don't stop with love. They move from eros to imagination. Or they thrash between the two. . . . This is an encouraging book in the context of American poetry's fashions or factions, because it evades categories. [Marvin's] is an urgent as well as an artful voice."--from the Foreword by Robert Pinsky Marketing Plans o Author tour in Ohio, Kentucky, and NYC o Brochure and postcard mailings o Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines Book tour dates including: o Cincinnati o Louisville o New York City Cate Marvin was born in Washington, D.C. She received her B.A. from Marlboro College in Vermont, and holds two M.F.A.s: one from the University of Houston in poetry, the other from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in fiction. She has been awarded scholarships to attend both Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences. Her poems have appeared in such magazines asNew England Review, The Antioch Review, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, andPloughshares, among others. She is lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at the university there.
The imagining of disaster has intensified across a wide range of media entertainment formats and genres in recent years and themes of disaster are regularly deployed in fictional films, television drama series, drama-documentaries, comic books and video games. This being the case, it is therefore vital that film and media scholars pay attention to the ways in which disaster is presented to us, to the figurative strategies employed, to the representational history of disaster in media, to the metaphorical resonances of disaster themes, and even to the ways in which entertainment media texts might be understood as part of a broader discourse of disaster within certain historical and cultural contexts. Dramatising Disaster presents new and innovative research from both early career and more established academics. Some of the chapters in this edited collection are based upon papers originally presented at a highly successful conference study day held by the School of Film, Television and Media at the University of East Anglia in 2011, while others are specifically solicited contributions. Distinct from previous, more particularised film and media studies in this area, this edited collection is focused not upon a specific disaster or specific disaster context, but upon the wider topic of disaster in popular culture.
