Download or read book The Outlaw Josey Wales written by Forrest Carter and published by . This book was released on 2010-02-08 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Josey Wales is out for the blood of the pro-Union Jayhawkers who raped & murdered his wife. When Wales refuses to surrender, he begins a life on the run from the law, reluctantly befriending a diverse group of whites & Indians on his quest for revenge and a new life.

Download or read book Bowling Alone Revised and Updated written by Robert D. Putnam and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Updated to include a new chapter about the influence of social media and the Internet—the 20th anniversary edition of Bowling Alone remains a seminal work of social analysis, and its examination of what happened to our sense of community remains more relevant than ever in today’s fractured America. Twenty years, ago, Robert D. Putnam made a seemingly simple observation: once we bowled in leagues, usually after work; but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolized a significant social change that became the basis of the acclaimed bestseller, Bowling Alone, which The Washington Post called “a very important book” and Putnam, “the de Tocqueville of our generation.” Bowling Alone surveyed in detail Americans’ changing behavior over the decades, showing how we had become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and social structures, whether it’s with the PTA, church, clubs, political parties, or bowling leagues. In the revised edition of his classic work, Putnam shows how our shrinking access to the “social capital” that is the reward of communal activity and community sharing still poses a serious threat to our civic and personal health, and how these consequences have a new resonance for our divided country today. He includes critical new material on the pervasive influence of social media and the internet, which has introduced previously unthinkable opportunities for social connection—as well as unprecedented levels of alienation and isolation. At the time of its publication, Putnam’s then-groundbreaking work showed how social bonds are the most powerful predictor of life satisfaction, and how the loss of social capital is felt in critical ways, acting as a strong predictor of crime rates and other measures of neighborhood quality of life, and affecting our health in other ways. While the ways in which we connect, or become disconnected, have changed over the decades, his central argument remains as powerful and urgent as ever: mending our frayed social capital is key to preserving the very fabric of our society.

Download or read book Absolute Power written by David Baldacci and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 1996-01-18 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When burglar Luther Whitney breaks into a Virginia mansion, he witnesses a brutal crime involving the president -- a man who believes he can get away with anything -- and now, Luther may be the only one who can stop him in this #1 New York Times bestselling thriller. In a heavily guarded mansion in the Virginia countryside, professional burglar and break-in artist Luther Whitney is trapped behind a two-way mirror. What he witnesses destroys his faith not only in justice, but in all he holds dear. What follows is an unthinkable abuse of power and criminal conspiracy, as a breathtaking cover-up is set in motion by those appointed to work for one of the most important people in the world -- the President of the United States.

Download or read book Since We Fell written by Dennis Lehane and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Barnes and Noble Best Book of the Year Bookpage Best of 2017 Booklist Best Crime Novel PopSugar Best Book of 2017 The new novel from New York Times bestseller Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River and Shutter Island “Lehane is the master of complex human characters thrust into suspenseful, page-turning situations.” —Gillian Flynn Since We Fell follows Rachel Childs, a former journalist who, after an on-air mental breakdown, now lives as a virtual shut-in. In all other respects, however, she enjoys an ideal life with an ideal husband. Until a chance encounter on a rainy afternoon causes that ideal life to fray. As does Rachel’s marriage. As does Rachel herself. Sucked into a conspiracy thick with deception, violence, and possibly madness, Rachel must find the strength within herself to conquer unimaginable fears and mind-altering truths. By turns heart- breaking, suspenseful, romantic, and sophisticated, Since We Fell is a novel of profound psychological insight and tension. It is Dennis Lehane at his very best.

Download or read book Tangerine written by Edward Bloor and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2006 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 12-year-old Paul who is visually impaired starts to play soccer for his school, and begins to remember the incident that lost him his sight.

Download or read book Why It s OK to Love Bad Movies written by Matthew Strohl and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-01-06 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most people are too busy to keep up with all the good movies they’d like to see, so why should anyone spend their precious time watching the bad ones? In Why It’s OK to Love Bad Movies, philosopher and cinematic bottom feeder Matthew Strohl enthusiastically defends a fondness for disreputable films. Combining philosophy of art with film criticism, Strohl flips conventional notions of "good" and "bad" on their heads and makes the case that the ultimate value of a work of art lies in what it can add to our lives. By this measure, some of the worst movies ever made are also among the best. Through detailed discussions of films such as Troll 2, The Room, Batman & Robin, Twilight, Ninja III: The Domination, and a significant portion of Nicolas Cage’s filmography, Strohl argues that so-called "bad movies" are the ones that break the rules of the art form without the aura of artistic seriousness that surrounds the avant-garde. These movies may not win any awards, but they offer rich opportunities for creative engagement and enable the formation of lively fan communities, and they can be a key ingredient in a fulfilling aesthetic life. Key Features: Written in a humorous, approachable style, appealing to readers with no background in philosophy. Elaborates the rewards of loving bad movies, such as forming unlikely social bonds and developing refinement without narrowness. Discusses a wide range of beloved bad movies, including Plan 9 from Outer Space, The Core, Battlefield Earth, and Freddy Got Fingered. Contains the most extensive discussion of Nicolas Cage ever included in a philosophy book.

Download or read book The Ultimate Sniper written by Major John Plaster and published by paladin Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through revised text, new photos, specialised illustrations, updated charts and additional information sidebars, The Ultimate Sniper once again thoroughly details the three great skill areas of sniping; marksmanship, fieldcraft and tactics.

Download or read book San Francisco Noir written by Fred Lyon and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection by the acclaimed photographer reveals the shadowy side of the City by the Bay. Following in the footsteps of classic films like The Maltese Falcon and The Lady from Shanghai, veteran photographer Fred Lyon creates images of San Francisco in high contrast with a sense of mystery. In this latest offering from the photographer of San Francisco: Portrait of a City 1940–1960, Lyon presents a darker tone, exploring the hidden corners of his native city. Images taken in the foggy night are illuminated only by streetlights, neon signs, apartment windows, and the headlights of classic cars. Sharply dressed couples stroll out for evening shows, drivers travel down steep hills, and sailors work through the night at the old Fisherman’s Wharf. In many of the photographs, the noir tone is enhanced by double exposures, elements of collage, and blurred motion. These strikingly evocative duotone images expose a view of San Francisco as only Fred Lyon could capture.

Download or read book The Late Show written by Michael Connelly and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2017-07-18 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first installment of the Renée Ballard series, #1 bestselling author Michael Connelly introduces a "complicated and driven" young detective fighting to prove herself on the LAPD's toughest beat (The New York Times). Renee Ballard works the midnight shift in Hollywood, beginning many investigations but finishing few, as each morning she turns everything over to the daytime units. It's a frustrating job for a once up-and-coming detective, but it's no accident. She's been given this beat as punishment after filing a sexual harassment complaint against a supervisor. But one night Ballard catches two assignments she doesn't want to part with. First, a prostitute is brutally beaten and left for dead in a parking lot. All signs point to a crime of premeditation, not passion, by someone with big evil on his mind. Then she sees a young waitress breathe her last after being caught up in a nightclub shooting. Though dubbed a peripheral victim, the waitress buys Ballard a way in, and this time she is determined not to give up at dawn. Against orders and her partner's wishes, she works both cases by day while maintaining her shift by night. As the investigations intertwine, Ballard is forced to face her own demons and confront a danger she could never have imagined. To find justice for these victims who can't speak for themselves, she must put not only her career but her life on the line. Propulsive as a jolt of adrenaline and featuring a bold and defiant new heroine, The Late Show is yet more proof that Michael Connelly is "a master of the genre" (Washington Post).

Download or read book Investigating Iwo written by Breanne Robertson and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Investigating Iwo encourages us to explore the connection between American visual culture and World War II, particularly how the image inspired Marines, servicemembers, and civilians to carry on with the war and to remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice to ensure victory over the Axis Powers. Chapters shed light on the processes through which history becomes memory and gains meaning over time. The contributors ask only that we be willing to take a closer look, to remain open to new perspectives that can deepen our understanding of familiar topics related to the flag raising, including Rosenthal's famous picture, that continue to mean so much to us today"--

Download or read book The Lights of Pointe Noire written by Alain Mabanckou and published by Serpent's Tail. This book was released on 2015-05-14 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the Man Booker International Prize 2015 Alain Mabanckou left Congo in 1989, at the age of twenty-two, not to return until a quarter of a century later. When at last he comes home to Pointe-Noire, a bustling port town on Congo's south-eastern coast, he finds a country that in some ways has changed beyond recognition: the cinema where, as a child, Mabanckou gorged on glamorous American culture has become a Pentecostal temple, and his secondary school has been re-named in honour of a previously despised colonial ruler. But many things remain unchanged, not least the swirling mythology of Congolese culture which still informs everyday life in Pointe-Noire. Mabanckou though, now a decorated French-Congolese writer and esteemed professor at UCLA, finds he can only look on as an outsider at the place where he grew up. As he delves into his childhood, into the life of his departed mother and into the strange mix of belonging and absence that informs his return to Congo, Mabanckou slowly builds a stirring exploration of the way home never leaves us, however long ago we left home.

Download or read book Standoff written by Bill Schneider and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bill Schneider, former CNN senior political analyst, takes us inside the voting booth in “a detailed examination of recent presidential elections studded with sharp observations…A good choice for political junkies” (Kirkus Reviews). In the 1960s, a rift developed between the Old America and the New America that resulted in a populist backlash that ultimately elected Donald Trump in 2016. Bill Schneider describes today’s American populism in Standoff as one that is economically progressive and culturally conservative. Liberals are attacked as cultural elitists (“limousine liberals”), and conservatives as economic elitists (“country club conservatives”). Trump, says Schneider, is the complete populist package. He embraces social populism (anti-immigrant), economic populism (anti-free trade), and isolationism (“America First”). Standoff examines a number of hard-fought elections to show us how we got to Trump. He asserts the power of public opinion. He points to the public that draws the line on abortion and affirmative action. He shows why an intense minority cancels a majority on gun control, immigration, small government, and international interests. Standoff tells us why fifty years of presidential contests have often been confounding. It takes us inside to watch how and why Americans pull the lever, how they choose their issues, and select their leaders. It is usually values that trump economics. Required reading for an understanding of the 2016 election and the political future, Schneider’s “fast-paced” (Publishers Weekly) Standoff shows how Americans vote and why their votes sometimes seem to make no practical sense.

Download or read book Darkness Take My Hand written by Dennis Lehane and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Master of new noir Dennis Lehane magnificently evokes the dignity and savagery of working-class Boston in Darkness, Take My Hand, a terrifying tale of redemption. Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro’s latest client is a prominent Boston psychiatrist, running scared from a vengeful Irish mob. The private investigators know about cold-blooded retribution. Born and bred on the mean streets of blue-collar Dorchester, they’ve seen the darkness that lives in the hearts of the unfortunate. But an evil for which even they are unprepared is about to strike, as secrets that have long lain dormant erupt, setting off a chain of violent murders that will stain everything – including the truth. With razor-sharp dialogue and penetrating prose, Darkness, Take My Hand is another superior crime novel from the author of Mystic River; Gone, Baby, Gone; and Shutter Island.

Download or read book Official and Confidential written by Anthony Summers and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-01-17 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times–bestselling author’s revealing, “important” biography of the longtime FBI director (The Philadelphia Inquirer). No one exemplified paranoia and secrecy at the heart of American power better than J. Edgar Hoover, the original director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. For this consummate biography, renowned investigative journalist Anthony Summers interviewed more than eight hundred witnesses and pored through thousands of documents to get at the truth about the man who headed the FBI for fifty years, persecuted political enemies, blackmailed politicians, and lived his own surprising secret life. Ultimately, Summers paints a portrait of a fatally flawed individual who should never have held such power, and for so long.

Download or read book Terrence Malick written by Robert Sinnerbrink and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-11 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many critics have approached Terrence Malick's work from a philosophical perspective, arguing that his films express philosophy through cinema. With their remarkable images of nature, poetic voiceovers, and meditative reflections, Malick's cinema certainly invites philosophical engagement. In Terrence Malick: Filmmaker and Philosopher, Robert Sinnerbrink takes a different approach, exploring Malick's work as a case of cinematic ethics: films that evoke varieties of ethical experience, encompassing existential, metaphysical, and religious perspectives. Malick's films are not reducible to a particular moral position or philosophical doctrine; rather, they solicit ethically significant forms of experience, encompassing anxiety and doubt, wonder and awe, to questioning and acknowledgment, through aesthetic engagement and poetic reflection. Drawing on a range of thinkers and approaches from Heidegger and Cavell, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, to phenomenology and moral psychology Sinnerbrink explores how Malick's films respond to the problem of nihilism the loss of conviction or belief in prevailing forms of value and meaning and the possibility of ethical transformation through cinema: from self-transformation in our relations with others to cultural transformation via our attitudes towards towards nature and the world. Sinnerbrink shows how Malick's later films, from The Tree of Life to Voyage of Time, provide unique opportunities to explore cinematic ethics in relation to the crisis of belief, the phenomenology of love, and film's potential to invite moral transformation.

Download or read book The Fountainhead written by Ayn Rand and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-04-26 with total page 753 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revolutionary literary vision that sowed the seeds of Objectivism, Ayn Rand's groundbreaking philosophy, and brought her immediate worldwide acclaim. This modern classic is the story of intransigent young architect Howard Roark, whose integrity was as unyielding as granite...of Dominique Francon, the exquisitely beautiful woman who loved Roark passionately, but married his worst enemy...and of the fanatic denunciation unleashed by an enraged society against a great creator. As fresh today as it was then, Rand’s provocative novel presents one of the most challenging ideas in all of fiction—that man’s ego is the fountainhead of human progress... “A writer of great power. She has a subtle and ingenious mind and the capacity of writing brilliantly, beautifully, bitterly...This is the only novel of ideas written by an American woman that I can recall.”—The New York Times

Download or read book Film written by Maria Pramaggiore and published by Pearson College Division. This book was released on 2008-07-31 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Film: A Critical Introduction "provides a comprehensive framework for studying films, with an emphasis on writing as a means of exploring film's aesthetic and cultural significance. This text's consistent and comprehensive focus on writing allows students to master film vocabulary and concepts while learning to formulate rich interpretations. Part I introduces readers to the importance of film analysis, offering helpful strategies for discerning the way films produce meaning. Part II examines the fundamental elements of film, including narrative form, mise en scene, cinematography, editing, and sound, and shows how these concepts can be used to interpret films. Part III moves beyond textual analysis to explore film as a cultural institution and introduce students to essential areas of film studies research.