Anderson (North Carolina State University) is clearly obsessed with the Ferris Wheel. He describes the conception and construction of the first example--at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893. Imitators and variations are described and illustrated with period photos and patent drawings. An appendix contains 115 pages of patent drawings. A charming, unique book (that will win no graphics awards). Paper edition (unseen), $29.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
In Play and the Human Condition, Thomas Henricks brings together ways of considering play to probe its essential relationship to work, ritual, and communitas. Focusing on five contexts for play--the psyche, the body, the environment, society, and culture--Henricks identifies conditions that instigate play, and comments on its implications for those settings. Offering a general theory of play as behavior promoting self-realization, Henricks articulates a conception of self that includes individual and social identity, particular and transcendent connection, and multiple fields of involvement. Henricks also evaluates play styles from history and contemporary life to analyze the relationship between play and human freedom. Imaginative and stimulating, Play and the Human Condition shows how play allows us to learn about our qualities and those of the world around us--and in so doing make sense of ourselves.
Forty-six very short science fiction, fantasy and horror stories. Perfect for reading while commuting, standing in line while waiting to renew your driver's licence, waiting for that friend who is always running late for drinks or other situations where you just don't have time to spend on a longer story. Travel to fantasy worlds, fly with super heroes and tremble in the face of unkind mysteries and horrible horrors.
A half-Chinese orphan whose mother sacrificed everything to give him a better chance is raffled off as a prize at Seattle's 1909 World's Fair, only to land in the ownership of the madam of a notorious brothel where he finds friendship and opportunities, in a story based on true events.
Becca Robbins is selling her farm-made jams and preserves at a county fair where business is not the only thing that’s dead… The last person Becca expects to run into at the Swayton County Fall Festival is her ex-husband, Scott Triplett, who’s operating a shooting gallery. Honesty was not always Scott’s policy, and their unexpected reunion is further complicated when the festival becomes a crime scene. On Becca’s second day there, Ferris wheel operator Virgil Morrison is found hanging from his rickety ride, dead from a gunshot. As Becca starts to notice Scott suspiciously sneaking around the fairgrounds, she begins to worry her ex may be involved in the murder. Then there’s the shadow she sees in the creepy corn maze and rumors of a gypsy curse—not to mention Virgil’s mysterious spider tattoo. Now Becca must search through a labyrinth of lies, secrets, and superstition to find a kernel of truth…before the killer starts stalking her.
There were two battles for Hawaii?s sovereignty led by Queen Liliuokalani. This book, The Rights of My People, revisits these battles? the 1893 coup d?etat and the annexation in 1898? from a new perspective, against the backdrop of the harsh remnants of the Civil War, the missionary?s disquieting view of race, and the emerging role of Hawaiian women. The Rights of My People explores the fate of the Crown lands, a quarter of the Hawaii islands, taken in the 1893 coup d?etat and contested aggressively by Liliuokalani through 1910. Woven into the story are threats of execution and assassination.
A collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations. For poet Victoria Chang, memory “isn’t something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally.” It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly, and the silences of her father, who first would not and then could not share more. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered. Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of simultaneously shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In carefully crafted missives on trauma and loss, on being American and Chinese, Victoria Chang shows how grief can ignite a longing to know yourself. In letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as the imagination, Dear Memory offers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories.
It can be said of few men that without them the course of their nation's history would have been very different, yet through the force of his ideas and sheer bloody-mindedness, James Brindley, the first great canal builder, provided the spark that ignited the Industrial Revolution, united the nation and set Britain on course to become the world's first superpower. Born into poverty and barely literate, Brindley had a vision for the country that defied both established society and the natural order, dividing mid-eighteenth-century scientific and political opinion. Crowds flocked to marvel at this new canals and the engineering feats that accompanied them, with Brindley's inventiveness earning him the nickname 'The Schemer'.
