If Tyler Cross ever gets out, it won’t be for good behavior, Angola is not a prison. Its purpose is not to lock up criminals, let alone to rehabilitate them. Angola exists only to make money. It is a business… and business in booming. What seemed like a risk-free gig that should have made him some easy cash turns into a fast-track to Hell for Tyler Cross. A hell called “Angola”, the biggest high-security prison in the United States, surrounded by swamps and crushed by sweltering Louisiana heat. And just to put the cherry on the cake, the Mafia have put a price on his head, and there are a whole load of Sicilians in Angola… From the award-winning writer of the hit graphic novel, The Death of Stalin.
Some day, Tyler Cross will pay for his crimes. Until then, crime is his payday. When Tyler Cross went down south for this job he didn’t realize the whole job was about to go south… It’s 1950. Tyler Cross has just stolen 17 kilos of pure heroin from the Mafia. He’s on foot, alone, in deepest, darkest Texas with just his Colt for company. He’s heading for Black Rock, a down-and-out southern town under the thumb of an oil magnate and his sons. The hillbillies of Black Rock won’t be forgetting this gangster’s visit any time soon…
The cross stirs intense feelings among Christians as well as non-Christians. Robin Jensen takes readers on an intellectual and spiritual journey through the two-thousand-year evolution of the cross as an idea and an artifact, illuminating the controversies—along with the forms of devotion—this central symbol of Christianity inspires. Jesus’s death on the cross posed a dilemma for Saint Paul and the early Church fathers. Crucifixion was a humiliating form of execution reserved for slaves and criminals. How could their messiah and savior have been subjected to such an ignominious death? Wrestling with this paradox, they reimagined the cross as a triumphant expression of Christ’s sacrificial love and miraculous resurrection. Over time, the symbol’s transformation raised myriad doctrinal questions, particularly about the crucifix—the cross with the figure of Christ—and whether it should emphasize Jesus’s suffering or his glorification. How should Jesus’s body be depicted: alive or dead, naked or dressed? Should it be shown at all? Jensen’s wide-ranging study focuses on the cross in painting and literature, the quest for the “true cross” in Jerusalem, and the symbol’s role in conflicts from the Crusades to wars of colonial conquest. The Cross also reveals how Jews and Muslims viewed the most sacred of all Christian emblems and explains its role in public life in the West today.
International migration presents the human face of globalization, with consequences that make headlines throughout the world. The Cross-Border Connection addresses a paradox at the core of this phenomenon: emigrants departing one society become immigrants in another, tying those two societies together in a variety of ways. In nontechnical language, Roger Waldinger explains how interconnections between place of origin and destination are built and maintained and why they eventually fall apart. “When are immigrants ‘us’? When are they ‘them’? Waldinger implores readers to reframe the debate from a before-after dichotomy to a new transnational approach, revealing migrants to be here, there, and in-between at all stages of their migration tenure...The book’s real strength is in the elegance of the author’s argument, supported by evidence that transnationalism itself is not static but an ongoing dialectic.” —R. A. Harper, Choice “The Cross-Border Connection is to be commended for putting substance into the black box of transnationalism, offering scholars a dynamic model to account for the ebb and flow of transnationalism in the real world and yielding testable propositions about the circumstances under which cross-border connections can be expected to expand or contract.” —Douglas S. Massey, American Journal of Sociology
A poignant graphic novel that explores the life and death of American hero Chris Kyle. Discover the story of Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL sniper who earned several awards for his service, for the first time in graphic novel form. He published his autobiography only a year before he was murdered, and has since been lauded as an American hero. This tragic tale adapts part of his memoir and also continues exploring the consequences and fate of those left behind after he was killed.
“The fascinating story of arguably the greatest queen in sub-Saharan African history, who surely deserves a place in the pantheon of revolutionary world leaders.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Though largely unknown in the West, the seventeenth-century African queen Njinga was one of the most multifaceted rulers in history, a woman who rivaled Queen Elizabeth I in political cunning and military prowess. In this landmark book, based on nine years of research and drawing from missionary accounts, letters, and colonial records, Linda Heywood reveals how this legendary queen skillfully navigated—and ultimately transcended—the ruthless, male-dominated power struggles of her time. “Queen Njinga of Angola has long been among the many heroes whom black diasporians have used to construct a pantheon and a usable past. Linda Heywood gives us a different Njinga—one brimming with all the qualities that made her the stuff of legend but also full of all the interests and inclinations that made her human. A thorough, serious, and long overdue study of a fascinating ruler, Njinga of Angola is an essential addition to the study of the black Atlantic world.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates “This fine biography attempts to reconcile her political acumen with the human sacrifices, infanticide, and slave trading by which she consolidated and projected power.” —New Yorker “Queen Njinga was by far the most successful of African rulers in resisting Portuguese colonialism...Tactically pious and unhesitatingly murderous...a commanding figure in velvet slippers and elephant hair ripe for big-screen treatment; and surely, as our social media age puts it, one badass woman.” —Karen Shook, Times Higher Education
A new history explores the commercial heart of evangelical Christianity. American evangelicalism is big business. For decades, the world’s largest media conglomerates have sought out evangelical consumers, and evangelical books have regularly become international best sellers. In the early 2000s, Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life spent ninety weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list and sold more than thirty million copies. But why have evangelicals achieved such remarkable commercial success? According to Daniel Vaca, evangelicalism depends upon commercialism. Tracing the once-humble evangelical book industry’s emergence as a lucrative center of the US book trade, Vaca argues that evangelical Christianity became religiously and politically prominent through business activity. Through areas of commerce such as branding, retailing, marketing, and finance, for-profit media companies have capitalized on the expansive potential of evangelicalism for more than a century. Rather than treat evangelicalism as a type of conservative Protestantism that market forces have commodified and corrupted, Vaca argues that evangelicalism is an expressly commercial religion. Although religious traditions seem to incorporate people who embrace distinct theological ideas and beliefs, Vaca shows, members of contemporary consumer society often participate in religious cultures by engaging commercial products and corporations. By examining the history of companies and corporate conglomerates that have produced and distributed best-selling religious books, bibles, and more, Vaca not only illustrates how evangelical ideas, identities, and alliances have developed through commercial activity but also reveals how the production of evangelical identity became a component of modern capitalism.
The graphic novel which inspired the hotly tipped and highly controversial new movie directed by Armando Iannucci, due in theatres in March, and starring a host of high profile actors, including Michael Palin, Steve Buscemi and Jason Isaacs. Fear, corruption and treachery abound in this political satire set in the aftermath of Stalin's death in the Soviet Union in 1953. When the leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, has a stroke - the political gears begin to turn, plunging the super-state into darkness, uncertainty and near civil war. The struggle for supreme power will determine the fate of the nation and of the world. And it all really happened.
Snake charmers, bards, acrobats, magicians, trainers of performing animals, and other nomadic artisans and entertainers have been a colorful and enduring element in societies throughout the world. Their flexible social system, based on highly specialized individual skills and spatial mobility, contrasts sharply with the more rigid social system of sedentary peasants and traditional urban dwellers. Joseph Berland brings into focus the ethnographic and psychological differences between nomadic and sedentary groups by examining how the experiences of South Asian gypsies and their urban counterparts contribute to basic perceptual habits and skills. No Five Fingers Are Alike, based on three years of participant research among rural Pakistani groups, provides the first detailed description in print of Asian gypsies. By applying methods of anthropological observation as well as psychological experimentation, Berland develops a theory about the relationship between social experience and mental growth. He suggests that there are certain social conditions under which mental growth can be accelerated. His work promises to stand as an important contribution to the cross-cultural literature on cognitive development.
Set in the early 20th century banana republic of La Colonia, a young woman’s ‘virginity’ becomes the center of a disturbing mystery. Love, lies, and mortal danger surround her relationship with the man hired to protect her, and they soon find themselves at the mercy of a terrifying hitman called The Iguana, who will stop at nothing to conceal the truth and prevent an insurrection.
