Satellite Boy


Book Description

"Mr. Amelinckx is an adroit storyteller and thorough researcher, and in Satellite Boy he has written a good, engrossing yarn." —The Wall Street Journal Spanning the underworld haunts of Montreal to Havana and Miami in the early days of the Cold War, Satellite Boy reveals the unlikely connection between an audacious bank heist and the “other Space Race” that gave birth to the modern communication age On April 6, 1965, Georges Lemay was relaxing on his yacht in a south Florida marina following one of the largest and most daring bank heists in Canadian history. For four years, the roguishly handsome criminal mastermind hid in plain sight, eluding capture and the combined efforts of the FBI, Interpol, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. His future appeared secure. What Lemay didn’t know was that less than two hundred miles away at Cape Canaveral, a brilliant engineer named Harold Rosen was about to usher in the age of global live television with the launch of the world’s first twenty-four-hour commercial communications satellite. Rosen’s extraordinary accomplishment would not only derail Lemay’s cushy life but change the world forever. Brimming with criminal panache and technological intrigue, and set against a turbulent and iconic period that includes the moon landing and the civil rights movement, Satellite Boy tells the largely forgotten, high-stakes story of the two equally driven men who inadvertently launched the modern era.




Satellite


Book Description

A teenage boy born in space makes his first trip to Earth in this engrossing sci-fi adventure for fans of The Martian from award-winning author Nick Lake. He’s going to a place he’s never been before: home. Moon 2 is a space station that orbits approximately 250 miles above Earth. It travels 17,500 miles an hour, making one full orbit every ninety minutes. It’s also the only home that fifteen-year-old Leo and two other teens have ever known. Born and raised on Moon 2, Leo and the twins, Orion and Libra, are finally old enough and strong enough to endure the dangerous trip to Earth. They’ve been “parented” by teams of astronauts since birth and have run countless drills to ready themselves for every conceivable difficulty they might face on the flight. But has anything really prepared them for life on terra firma? Because while the planet may be home to billions of people, living there is more treacherous than Leo and his friends could ever have imagined, and their very survival will mean defying impossible odds.




Dis-Ease in America


Book Description

Anne-Marie is bipolar, but she's coping well... in her opinion, anyway. She is more productive than ever before and finds new ways to do outrageous things. She's too busy... even to take her pills. But she doesn't need them... outside stimulation is more important. Suddenly, she's very depressed. She can't and won't do anything. She's in the mental hospital, but she won't let them cure her happy side... just the depressed side. Mania isn't a bad thing... it doesn't need changing. Why cure her of HAPPINESS? The mental hospital is stress enough without the depression. People's rights get violated and people are disruptive toward her. The doctor is crazy and wants to zap her brains! Is she going to have to fake her way out?




Class on Screen


Book Description

This book provides an analysis of the global working class on film and considers the ways in which working-class experience is represented in film around the world. The book argues that representation is important because it shapes the way people understand working-class experience and can either reinforce or challenge stereotypical depictions. Film can shape and shift discussions of class, and this book provides an interdisciplinary study of the ways in which working-class experience is portrayed through this medium. It analyses the impact of contemporary films such as Sorry To Bother You, This is England and Le Harve that focus on working class life. Attfield demonstrates that the global working class are characterised by diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, religion and sexuality but that there are commonalities of experience despite geographical distance and cultural difference. The book is structured around themes such as work, culture, diasporas, gender and sexuality, and race.




Narrating Violence in the Postcolonial World


Book Description

This book examines representations of violence across the postcolonial world—from the Americas to Australia—in novels, short stories, plays, and films. The chapters move from what appear to be interpersonal instances of violence to communal conflicts such as civil war, showing how these acts of violence are specifically rooted in colonial forms of abuse and oppression but constantly move and morph. Taking its cue from theories in such fields as postcolonial, violence, gender, and trauma studies, the book thus shows that violence is slippery in form, but also fluid in nature, so that one must trace its movement across time and space to understand even a single instance of it. When analysing such forms and trajectories of violence in postcolonial creative writing and films, the contributors critically examine the ethical issues involved in narrating abuse, depicting violated bodies, and presenting romanticized resolutions that may conceal other forms of violence.




Australian Genre Film


Book Description

Australian Genre Film interrogates key genres at the core of Australia’s so-called new golden age of genre cinema, establishing the foundation on which more sustained research on film genre in Australian cinema can develop. The book examines what characterises Australian cinema and its output in this new golden age, as contributors ask to what extent Australian genre film draws on widely understood (and largely Hollywood-based) conventions, as compared to culturally specific conventions of genre storytelling. As such, this book offers a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of Australian genre film, undertaken through original analyses of 13 significant Australian genres: action, biopics, comedy, crime, horror, musical, road movie, romance, science fiction, teen, thriller, war, and the Western. This book will be a cornerstone work for the burgeoning field of Australian film genre studies and a must-read for academics; researchers; undergraduate students; postgraduate students; and general readers interested in film studies, media studies, cultural studies, Australian studies, and sociology.




The Routledge Handbook of Indigenous Film


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Indigenous Film is dedicated to bringing the work of Indigenous filmmakers around the world to a larger audience. By giving voice to transnational and transcultural Indigenous perspectives, this collection makes a significant contribution to the discourse on Indigenous filmmaking and provides an accessible overview of the contemporary state of Indigenous film. Comprising 37 chapters by an international team of contributors, the Handbook is divided into six parts: Decolonial Intermedialities and Revisions of Western Media Colonial Histories, Trauma, Resistances Indigenous Lands, Communities, Bodies Queer Cultures and Border Crossings Youth Cultures and Emancipation Art, Comedy, and Music. Within these sections Indigenous and non-Indigenous experts from around the world examine various aspects of Indigenous film cultures, analyze the works of Indigenous directors and producers worldwide, and focus on readings (contextual, historical, political, aesthetic, and activist) of individual Indigenous films. The Handbook specifically explores Indigenous film in Canada, Mexico, the United States, Central and South America, Northern Europe, Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific, and the Philippines. This richly interdisciplinary volume is an essential resource for students and scholars of Indigenous Studies, Cultural Studies, Area Studies, Film and Media Studies, Feminist and Queer Studies, History, and anyone interested in Indigenous cultures and cinema.




Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema


Book Description

The child has existed in cinema since the Lumière Brothers filmed their babies having messy meals in Lyons, but it is only quite recently that scholars have paid serious attention to her/his presence on screen. Scholarly discussion is now of the highest quality and of interest to anyone concerned not only with the extent to which adult cultural conversations invoke the figure of the child, but also to those interested in exploring how film cultures can shift questions of agency and experience in relation to subjectivity. Childhood and Nation in World Cinema recognizes that the range of films and scholarship is now sufficiently extensive to invoke the world cinema mantra of pluri-vocal and pluri-central attention and interpretation. At the same time, the importance of the child in figuring ideas of nationhood is an undiminished tic in adult cultural and social consciousness. Either the child on film provokes claims on the nation or the nation claims the child. Given the waning star of national film studies, and the widely held and serious concerns over the status of the nation as a meaningful cultural unit, the point here is not to assume some extraordinary pre-social geopolitical empathy of child and political entity. Rather, the present collection observes how and why and whether the cinematic child is indeed aligned to concepts of modern nationhood, to concerns of the State, and to geo-political organizational themes and precepts.




Satellite Love


Book Description

A beautifully unconventional debut novel about a girl, a boy, and a satellite—and a bittersweet meditation on loneliness, alienation, and what it means to be human. Longlisted for Canada Reads, shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Literary Fiction and for Speculative Fiction. Named CBC Radio's Q Book Pick of the Month, a CBC Books Spring Reading List Title, a Shelf Life Books Book of the Month, a Toronto Life and Nikkei Voice summer read recommendation, one of Daily Hive's 10 Essential Reads to Celebrate Asian Canadian Writers, and one of Quill & Quire booksellers' Books of the Year. On the eve of the new millennium, in a city in southern Japan that progress has forgotten, sixteen-year-old Anna Obata looks to the stars for solace. An outcast at school, and left to fend for herself and care for her increasingly senile grandfather at home, Anna copes with her loneliness by searching the night sky for answers. But everything changes the evening the Low Earth Orbit satellite (LEO for short) returns her gaze and sees her as no one else has before. After Leo is called down to Earth, he embarks on an extraordinary journey to understand his own humanity as well as the fragile mind of the young woman who called him into being. As Anna withdraws further into her own mysterious plans, he will be forced to question the limits of his devotion and the lengths he will go to protect her. Full of surprising imaginative leaps and yet grounded by a profound understanding of the human heart, Satellite Love is a brilliant and deeply moving meditation on loneliness, faith, and the yearning for meaning and connection. It is an unforgettable story about the indomitable power of the imagination and the mind's ability to heal itself, no matter the cost, no matter the odds.