Phantom of the Seven Stars


Book Description

Lovely Brenda Carson, scholarly Jerome, pompous Livingston ... everyone aboard the Seven Stars scoffed at the idea of a Phantom Pirate. But I.P. agent Jim Fanning didn't laugh. He knew the luxury-liner's innocent looking cargo was already marked for plunder. Vintage space opera, originally published in Planet Stories, Winter 1940.




Sonic Phantoms


Book Description

In this book, Barbara Ellison and Thomas B. W. Bailey lay out and explore the mystifying and evanescent musical territory of 'sonic phantoms': auditory illusions within the musical material that convey a 'phantasmatic' presence. Structured around a large body of compositional work developed by Ellison over the past decade, sonic phantoms are revealed and illustrated as they arise through a diverse array of musical sources, materials, techniques, and compositional tools: voices (real and synthetic), field recordings, instrument manipulation, object amplification, improvisation, and recording studio techniques. Somehow inherent in all music--and perhaps in all sound--sonic phantoms lurk and stalk with the promise of mystery and elevation. We just need to conjure them.




Phantoms: A Novel


Book Description

Kirkus Reviews • Best Historical Fiction of 2019 The Millions • "Most Anticipated" Books of 2019 Torn apart by war and bigotry, two families confront long-buried secrets in this haunting American novel of World War II and Vietnam. Ray Takahashi’s return from the battlefields of World War II should have been triumphant, but the fragrant, budding orchards of his rural Northern California home hide a secret that has destroyed everything he holds dear. With his hair now trimmed short and his newly broadened shoulders filling in his uniform, nineteen-year-old Ray approaches the small house in which he grew up, tucked behind rows of plum trees he planted with his father, only to find it occupied by a family he has does not know, a white family. Two decades later, John Frazier adjusts to his own homecoming. Detoxing from a dope addiction acquired in the barracks of Vietnam, yet still aching to write the next great American novel, he struggles to silence the phantoms that have trailed him from the muddy jungles. Frazier’s ambitions are put on hold when he finds himself an unwitting witness to a confrontation, decades in the making, between two steely matriarchs: his aunt, Evelyn Wilson, and her former neighbor, Kimiko Takahashi. From the halcyon days of pre–World War II Newcastle, when fruit trees glowed like jewels, through the dusty, cramped nights of Tule Lake, and the wayward years of the post-Vietnam era, Phantoms weaves the splintered stories of two families as they seek an impossible closure. A jarring examination of the personal cost of American exceptionalism and imperialism, and the ghosts that haunt us today, this saga affirms Christian Kiefer’s expanding place in contemporary literature.




Seven Wars in Heaven and on Earth


Book Description




Hawthorne and Melville


Book Description

Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne met in 1850 and enjoyed for sixteen months an intense but brief friendship. Taking advantage of new interpretive tools such as queer theory, globalist studies, political and social ideology, marketplace analysis, psychoanalytical and philosophical applications to literature, masculinist theory, and critical studies of race, the twelve essays in this book focus on a number of provocative personal, professional, and literary ambiguities existing between the two writers. Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S. Person introduce the volume with a lively summary of the known biographical facts of the two writers’ relationship and an overview of the relevant scholarship to date. Some of the essays that follow broach the possibility of sexual dimensions to the relationship, a question that “looms like a grand hooded phantom” over the field of Melville-Hawthorne studies. Questions of influence--Hawthorne’s on Moby-Dick and Pierre and Melville’s on The Blithedale Romance, to mention only the most obvious instances--are also discussed. Other topics covered include professional competitiveness; Melville’s search for a father figure; masculine ambivalence in the marketplace; and political-literary aspects of nationalism, transcendentalism, race, and other defining issues of Hawthorne and Melville’s times. Roughly half of the essays focus on biographical issues; the others take literary perspectives. The essays are informed by a variety of critical approaches, as well as by new historical insights and new understandings of the possibilities that existed for male friendships in nineteenth-century American culture.




Cambridge English Prepare! Level 7 Student's Book


Book Description

Prepare! is a lively 7-level general English course with comprehensive Cambridge English for Schools exam preparation integrated throughout. This flexible course brings together all the tools and technology you expect to get the results you need. Whether teaching general English or focusing on exams, Prepare! leaves you and your students genuinely ready for what comes next: real Cambridge English exams, or real life. The Level 7 Student's Book engages students and builds vocabulary range with motivating, age-appropriate topics. Its unique approach is driven by cutting-edge language research from English Profile and the Cambridge Learner Corpus. 'Prepare to...' sections develop writing and speaking skills. A Student's Book and Online Workbook is also available, separately.




Borderlands


Book Description

Boundaries, borderlines, limits on the one hand and rites of passage, contact zones, in-between spaces on the other have attracted renewed interest in a broad variety of cultural discourses after a long period of decenterings and delimitations in numerous fields of social, psychological, and intellectual life. Anthropological dimensions of the subject and its multifarious ways of world-making represent the central challenge among the concerns of the humanities. The role of literature and the arts in the formation of cultural and personal identities, theoretical and political approaches to the relation between self and other, the familiar and the foreign, have become key issues in literary and cultural studies; forms of expressivity and expression and question of mediation as well as new enquiries into ethics have characterized the intellectual energies of the past decade. The aim of Borderlands is to represent a variety of approaches to questions of border crossing and boundary transgression; approaches from different angles and different disciplines, but all converging in their own way on the post-colonial paradigm. Topics discussed include globalization, cartography and ontology, transitional identity, ecocritical sensibility, questions of the application of post-coloniality, gender and sexuality, and attitudes towards space and place. As well as studies of the cinema of the settler colonies, the films of Neil Jordan, and 'Othering' in Canadian sports journalism, there are treatments of the Nigerian novel, South African prison memoirs, and African women's writing. Authors examined include Elizabeth Bowen, Bruce Chatwin, Mohamed Choukri, Nuruddin Farah, Jamaica Kincaid, Pauline Melville, Bharati Mukherjee, Michael Ondaatje, and Leslie Marmon Silko.




Driven


Book Description

An exclusive look at one of the world's most successful and controversial companies, and the mysterious family behind it. BMW is arguably the most admired carmaker in the world. It's financial performance is the envy of its competitors, and BMW products inspire near-fanatical loyalty. While many carmakers struggle with falling sales, profits and market share, demand for BMWs continues to grow, frequently outpacing production. Now, David Kiley-Detroit Bureau Chief at USA Today and author of Getting the Bugs Out, which covered Volkswagen's demise and rebirth, goes inside the fabled German automaker to see how it does what it does so well. With unprecedented access to BMW executives, Kiley goes behind the walls of BMW's famed "Four Cylinders" headquarters in Munich at a time when the company is in its most aggressive, and some say riskiest, expansion in its history and when some of the company's new products, like the 7 Series sedan and Z4 roadster, are for the first time drawing as many barbs from critics as bouquets. Kiley covers intimate details of the boardroom drama surrounding the company's nearly disastrous acquisition and subsequent sale of the British Rover Group and its expansion into selling MINI and Rolls Royce cars. Besides being a world-class carmaker, BMW is also considered one of the smartest consumer marketing companies and Kiley explores the extraordinary value and management of the BMW brand mystique. He also takes a revealing look at the mysterious and ultra-private Quandt family of Bad Homburg Germany, which owns a controlling stake in BMW: Johanna and Susanne Quandt, two of the wealthiest women in Europe and Stefan Quandt, one of the wealthiest bachelors on the continent. David Kiley (Ann Arbor, MI) is the Detroit Bureau Chief at USA Today who has covered the auto industry for 17 years. He has been featured on Nightline, CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, NPR and the Today show. He is also the author of Getting the Bugs Out: The Rise, Fall, and Comeback of Volkswagen in America (0-471-26304-4), also available from Wiley.




Boating


Book Description




Scholastic Book of World Records 2025


Book Description

It's another incredible year for world records, social media sensations, and pop-culture trends! This must-have guide to 2025 covers everything from science, tech, sports, music, movies, animals, and more. What is the most popular dog breed? What is the most successful movie of all time? Which NBA player was the youngest to reach 30,000 points? This book is packed with the answers to these questions and MORE! Read all about the biggest, best, and most buzzworthy world records in music, movies, sports, technology, video games, science, nature, states, and animals.