Dictionary of Contemporary Spain


Book Description

First published in 1999. An eclectic dictionary that covers Spanish industry, media, culture, entertainment, politics, and the arts. With entries ranging from Abascal, Nati, a top model of the Spanish jet set to Zonas Humedas, wetlands with special importance due to their location for routes of migratory birds.




The Teachings and Practices of the Early Quanzhen Taoist Masters


Book Description

Stephen Eskildsen's book offers an in-depth study of the beliefs and practices of the Quanzhen (Complete Realization) School of Taoism, the predominant school of monastic Taoism in China. The Quanzhen School was founded in the latter half of the twelfth century by the eccentric holy man Wan Zhe (1113–1170), whose work was continued by his famous disciples commonly known as the Seven Realized Ones. This study draws upon surviving texts to examine the Quanzhen masters' approaches to mental discipline, intense asceticism, cultivation of health and longevity, mystical experience, supernormal powers, death and dying, charity and evangelism, and ritual. From these primary sources, Eskildsen provides a clear understanding of the nature of Quanzhen Taoism and reveals its core emphasis to be the cultivation of clarity and purity of mind that occurs not only through seated meditation, but also throughout the daily activities of life.




The Dictator's Seduction


Book Description

The dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961, was one of the longest and bloodiest in Latin American history. The Dictator’s Seduction is a cultural history of the Trujillo regime as it was experienced in the capital city of Santo Domingo. Focusing on everyday forms of state domination, Lauren Derby describes how the regime infiltrated civil society by fashioning a “vernacular politics” based on popular idioms of masculinity and fantasies of race and class mobility. Derby argues that the most pernicious aspect of the dictatorship was how it appropriated quotidian practices such as gossip and gift exchange, leaving almost no place for Dominicans to hide or resist. Drawing on previously untapped documents in the Trujillo National Archives and interviews with Dominicans who recall life under the dictator, Derby emphasizes the role that public ritual played in Trujillo’s exercise of power. His regime included the people in affairs of state on a massive scale as never before. Derby pays particular attention to how events and projects were received by the public as she analyzes parades and rallies, the rebuilding of Santo Domingo following a major hurricane, and the staging of a year-long celebration marking the twenty-fifth year of Trujillo’s regime. She looks at representations of Trujillo, exploring how claims that he embodied the popular barrio antihero the tíguere (tiger) stoked a fantasy of upward mobility and how a rumor that he had a personal guardian angel suggested he was uniquely protected from his enemies. The Dictator’s Seduction sheds new light on the cultural contrivances of autocratic power.




Democracy in Mexico


Book Description




Converso Non-Conformism in Early Modern Spain


Book Description

This book examines the effects of Jewish conversions to Christianity in late medieval Spanish society. Ingram focuses on these converts and their descendants (known as conversos) not as Judaizers, but as Christian humanists, mystics and evangelists, who attempt to create a new society based on quietist religious practice, merit, and toleration. His narrative takes the reader on a journey from the late fourteenth-century conversions and the first blood purity laws (designed to marginalize conversos), through the early sixteenth-century Erasmian and radical mystical movements, to a Counter-Reformation environment in which conversos become the advocates for pacifism and concordance. His account ends at the court of Philip IV, where growing intolerance towards Madrid’s converso courtiers is subtly attacked by Spain’s greatest painter, Diego Velázquez, in his work, Los Borrachos. Finally, Ingram examines the historiography of early modern Spain, in which he argues the converso reform phenomenon continues to be underexplored.




Functional Neuroradiology


Book Description

Functional Neuroradiology: Principles and Clinical Applications, is a follow-up to Faro and Mohamed’s groundbreaking work, Functional (BOLD)MRI: Basic Principles and Clinical Applications. This new 49 chapter textbook is comprehensive and offers a complete introduction to the state-of-the-art functional imaging in Neuroradiology, including the physical principles and clinical applications of Diffusion, Perfusion, Permeability, MR spectroscopy, Positron Emission Tomography, BOLD fMRI and Diffusion Tensor Imaging. With chapters written by internationally distinguished neuroradiologists, neurologists, psychiatrists, cognitive neuroscientists, and physicists, Functional Neuroradiology is divided into 9 major sections, including: Physical principles of all key functional techniques, Lesion characterization using Diffusion, Perfusion, Permeability, MR spectroscopy, and Positron Emission Tomography, an overview of BOLD fMRI physical principles and key concepts, including scanning methodologies, experimental research design, data analysis, and functional connectivity, Eloquent Cortex and White matter localization using BOLD fMRI and Diffusion Tensor Imaging, Clinical applications of BOLD fMRI in Neurosurgery, Neurology, Psychiatry, Neuropsychology, and Neuropharmacology, Multi-modality functional Neuroradiology, Beyond Proton Imaging, Functional spine and CSF imaging, a full-color Neuroanatomical Brain atlas of eloquent cortex and key white matter tracts and BOLD fMRI paradigms. By offering readers a complete overview of functional imaging modalities and techniques currently used in patient diagnosis and management, as well as emerging technology, Functional Neuroradiology is a vital information source for physicians and cognitive neuroscientists involved in daily practice and research.




CT- and MR-Guided Interventions in Radiology


Book Description

Interventional radiology is an indispensable and still expanding area of modern medicine that encompasses numerous diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. The revised and extended second edition of this volume covers a broad range of non-vascular interventions guided by CT or MR imaging. Indications, materials, techniques, and results are all carefully discussed. A particularly comprehensive section is devoted to interventional oncology as the most rapidly growing branch of interventional radiology. In addition, detailed information is provided that will assist in establishing and developing an interventional service. This richly illustrated book will be a most valuable source of information and guidance for all radiologists who deal with non-vascular procedures.




America's Forgotten Colony


Book Description

Analysis of the American presence on the Isle of Pines illustrates how US influence adapted and endured in republican-era Cuba.




Political Leaders and Changing Local Democracy


Book Description

This book studies political leadership at the local level, based on data from a survey of the mayors of cities of more than 10,000 inhabitants in 29 European countries carried out between 2014 and 2016. The book compares these results with those of a similar survey conducted ten years ago. From this comparative perspective, the book examines how to become a mayor in Europe today, the attitudes of these politicians towards administrative and territorial reforms, their notions of democracy, their political priorities, whether or not party politicization plays a role at the municipal level, and how mayors interact with other actors in the local political arena. This study addresses students, academics and practitioners concerned at different levels with the functioning and reforms of the municipal level of local government.




Ragtime


Book Description

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.