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  Murderous Acts: 100 Years of Crime in the Midwest

  Keven McQueen

  In Murderous Acts: 100 Years of Crime in the Midwest, Keven McQueen explores a century of true crimes committed in 10 Midwestern states, from the 1840s to the 1940s. With a touch of gallows humor, McQueen relies on original research to recount infamous transgressions—including Michigan's Robert Irving Latimer case, the serial murders of Nebraskan Jake Bird, and the bloody deeds of Kansas's Bender family—as well as gruesome tales that are less well known, such as the Wisconsin man with a penchant for swinging an axe at the necks of men he didn't care for, the Hoosier who killed his sweetheart in the midst of a Halloween ball, and the French nobleman who wreaked havoc in a St. Louis hotel.

  Murderous Acts will intrigue and delight fans of true crime and will send a shiver down the spine of any reader fascinated by the dark history of America's Heartland.

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  New England Nightmares: True Tales of the Strange and Gothic

  Keven McQueen

  New England is renowned for its quaint towns, beautiful landscapes, and busy ports. But it is also infamous as the setting for unexplained deaths, ghost stories, bizarre murders, and peculiar wills and epitaphs.

  In New England Nightmares: True Tales of the Strange and Gothic, author Keven McQueen explores the darker and stranger side of New England and the Mid-Atlantic. With shocking and unforgettable tales from the tip of Maine all the way to the New Jersey shore, this eerie collection explores our fascination with death and the unknown, including tales of medical students digging up bodies to dissect, of a murderer's bones being wired together after death, and of Dr. Timothy Clark Smith, who requested that he be buried with a breathing tube and glass window so he could see the outside world.

  An intriguing and frightful look into the odder side of the Northeast, New England Nightmares promises to send chills down your spine.

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  New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics

  Minh Nguyen

  This collection presents twenty-seven new essays in Japanese aesthetics by leading experts in the field. Beginning with an extended foreword by renowned scholar and artist Stephen Addiss and a comprehensive introduction that surveys the history of Japanese aesthetics and the ways in which it is similar to and different from Western aesthetics, this groundbreaking work brings together a large variety of disciplinary perspectives—including those of philosophy, literature, and cultural politics—to shed light on the artistic and aesthetic traditions of Japan and the central themes in Japanese art and aesthetics. Contributors explore topics from the philosophical groundings for Japanese aesthetics and the Japanese aesthetics of imperfection and insufficiency to the Japanese love of and respect for nature and the paradoxical ability of Japanese art and culture to absorb enormous amounts of foreign influence and yet maintain its own unique identity. Intended to advance scholarship in multiple areas of inquiry and to serve as a valuable resource for the classroom, New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics will appeal not only to a wide range of humanities scholars but also to graduate and undergraduate students of Japanese aesthetics, art, philosophy, literature, culture, and civilization. Masterfully articulating the contributors’ Japanese-aesthetical concerns and their application to Japanese arts (including literature, theater, film, drawing, painting, calligraphy, ceramics, crafts, music, fashion, comics, cooking, packaging, gardening, landscape architecture, flower arrangement, the martial arts, and the tea ceremony), these engaging and penetrating essays will also appeal to nonacademic professionals and general audiences. This seminal work will be essential reading for anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of Japanese aesthetics.

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  Occupational Science for Occupational Therapy

  Doris E. Pierce

  Occupational Science for Occupational Therapy articulates how occupational science research produces unique insights into occupation and increases the effectiveness of occupational therapy interventions. This text illustrates the four key types of knowledge now being researched in occupational science: descriptive, relational, predictive, and prescriptive. This text also offers a comprehensive review of occupational science’s history of emergence from the needs and interests of occupational therapy, conflicting origins and intents, and ongoing development as a discipline within academia.
  
  In Occupational Science for Occupational Therapy, Dr. Doris Pierce and an outstanding group of occupational scientists explain how their discoveries build the science and support practice. A rich variety of methods and perspectives mark the work of these career scientists as they respond to the knowledge base needs of occupational therapy.
  
  This fully evidence-based text also brings the research experience alive for occupational therapy students, describing the passions, challenges, and choices that are the reality of research as an occupation. All research chapters discuss how findings build both science and practice, including learning supports in which students can try out research activities, explore assessment, or develop interventions. Most importantly, Occupational Science for Occupational Therapyprovides new and experienced practitioners a thorough exploration of the latest research in occupation-based practice.
  
  Occupational Science for Occupational Therapy synthesizes key works by occupational scientists, including a foreword by Dr. Elizabeth Yerxa, founder of the science. Occupational therapy and occupational science students, practitioners, and faculty will especially appreciate this book’s comprehensive coverage of work by current leaders of research on occupation-based practice.

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  On Patience: Reclaiming a Foundational Virtue

  Matthew Pianalto

  Many of us are so busy that we might be tempted to think we don’t have time to be patient. However, that idea involves a serious underestimation of what patience is and why it matters. In On Patience, Matthew Pianalto revives a richer understanding of what patience is and why it is centrally important in both virtue theory and everyday life. Drawing from a wide range of philosophical and religious sources, Pianalto shows that our contemporary tendency to equate patience with waiting fails to do justice to other aspects of patience such as tolerance, perseverance, and the opposition of patience to anger. With this broader understanding of patience, Pianalto further shows how patience supports the development of other moral strengths, such as courage, justice, love, and hope. In these ways, On Patience sheds light on Franz Kafka’s remark that, “Patience is the master key to every situation,” and Gregory the Great’s perhaps surprising claim that, “Patience is the root and guardian of all the virtues.” This first book-length contemporary philosophical examination of patience will be of interest to students and scholars not just of virtue ethics, but also of moral philosophy more broadly.

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  OPTIONS: Constructing Your House of Fiction

  Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet

  Here is the perfect handbook for those who have always wanted to write a piece of fiction, be it a novel or short story. 20th-Century movie producer Jerry Wald once formulated what has become known eponymously as Wald’s Law: “Show the audience the inner workings of something they are curious about but don’t really know much about.” Options explains the “inner workings” of fiction, detailing the choices author must constantly make about such elements as character, plotting, setting, dialogue, method of narration, theme—even marketing. And as part of the Applied Creative Thinking series, the book explores how writers can tap into basic creative strategies such as perception shift, pattern recognition, and using metaphor.

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  Orality and Literacy in the Demotic Tales

  Jacqueline E. Jay

  In Orality and Literacy in the Demotic Tales, Jacqueline E. Jay extrapolates from the surviving ancient Egyptian written record hints of the oral tradition that must have run alongside it. The monograph’s main focus is the intersection of orality and literacy in the extremely rich corpus of Demotic narrative literature surviving from the Greco-Roman Period. The many texts discussed include the tales of the Inaros and Setna Cycles, the Myth of the Sun’s Eye, and the Dream of Nectanebo. Jacqueline Jay examines these Demotic tales not only in conjunction with earlier Egyptian literature, but also with the worldwide tradition of orally composed and performed discourse.

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  Preserving the White Man's Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism

  Joshua Lynn

  n Preserving the White Man’s Republic, Joshua Lynn reveals how the national Democratic Party rebranded majoritarian democracy and liberal individualism as conservative means for white men in the South and North to preserve their mastery on the eve of the Civil War.

  Responding to fears of African American and female political agency, Democrats in the late 1840s and 1850s reinvented themselves as "conservatives" and repurposed Jacksonian Democracy as a tool for local majorities of white men to police racial and gender boundaries by democratically withholding rights. With the policy of "popular sovereignty," Democrats left slavery’s expansion to white men’s democratic decision-making. They also promised white men local democracy and individual autonomy regarding temperance, religion, and nativism. Translating white men’s household mastery into political power over all women and Americans of color, Democrats united white men nationwide and made democracy a conservative assertion of white manhood.

  Democrats thereby turned traditional Jacksonian principles―grassroots democracy, liberal individualism, and anti-statism―into staples of conservatism. As Lynn’s book shows, this movement sent conservatism on a new, populist trajectory, one in which democracy can be called upon to legitimize inequality and hierarchy, a uniquely American conservatism that endures in our republic today.

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  Prince of Peace: Zulma's Story

  Marie Mitchell

  Like many Guatemalan girls, 14-year-old Zulma works to support her family instead of going to school. She always has to be the responsible one instead of her mama who has such bad taste in men, her rebellious, boy-crazy older sister, and a younger sister she promised to raise. When tragedy strikes, the sisters are sent to Prince of Peace, a home for girls near Guatemala City. Once there, Zulma finally gets what she wants—an education—so she won’t have to sell jewelry to tourists forever to support herself. But, when more trouble arises, Zulma’s forced to choose between family loyalty and her own happiness.

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  Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth, and the Neoliberal Logic of Carceral Expansion

  Judah Schept

  The growth of mass incarceration in the United States eludes neat categorization as a product of the political Right. Liberals played important roles in both laying the foundation for and then participating in the conservative tough on crime movement that is largely credited with the rise of the prison state. But what of those politicians and activists on the Left who reject punitive politics in favor of rehabilitation and a stronger welfare state? Can progressive policies such as these, with their benevolent intentions, nevertheless contribute to the expansion of mass incarceration? In Progressive Punishment, Judah Schept offers an ethnographic examination into the politics of incarceration in Bloomington, Indiana in order to consider the ways that liberal discourses about therapeutic justice and rehabilitation can uphold the logics, practices and institutions that comprise the carceral state. Schept examines how political leaders on the Left, despite being critical of mass incarceration, advocated for a “justice campus” that would have dramatically expanded the local criminal justice system. At the root of this proposal, Schept argues, is a confluence of neoliberal-style changes in the community that naturalized prison expansion as political common sense among leaders negotiating crises of deindustrialization, urban decline, and the devolution of social welfare. In spite of the momentum that the proposal gained, Schept uncovers resistance among community organizers, who developed important strategies and discourses to challenge the justice campus, disrupt some of the logics that provided it legitimacy, and offer new possibilities for a non-carceral community. A well-researched and well-narrated study, Progressive Punishment offers a novel perspective on the relationship between liberal politics, neoliberalism, and mass incarceration.

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  Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live: Theoretical Perspectives from the Virtual Margins

  Kishonna Gray

  Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live provides a much-needed theoretical framework for examining deviant behavior and deviant bodies within one of the largest virtual gaming communities—Xbox Live. Previous research on video games has focused mostly on violence and examining violent behavior resulting from consuming this medium. This limited scope has skewed criminologists' understanding of video games and video game culture. Xbox Live has proven to be more than just a gaming platform for users. It has evolved into a multimedia entertainment outlet for more than 20 million users. This book examines the nature of social interactions within Xbox Live, which are often riddled with deviant behavior, including but not limited to racism and sexism. The text situates video games within a hegemonic framework deploying whiteness and masculinity as the norm. The experiences of the marginalized bodies are situated within the framework of deviance as they fail to conform to the hegemonic norm and become victims of racism, sexism, and other types of harassment.

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  re)Tracing Africa: A Multidisciplinary Study of African History, Societies, and Culture

  Ogechi E. Anyanwu Dr

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  Robert Worth Bingham and the Southern Mystique: From the Old South to the New South and Beyond

  William Ellis

  Robert Worth Bingham (1871-1937) rose to great heights as a newspaper publisher, political leader, and ambassador, but his life is surrounded by controversy to this days. Charges that he contributed to the death of his second wife, an heiress whose bequest of five million dollars helped purchase the Louisville Courier-Journal and Times, followed him to the Grave. For three quarters of a century the history of the Bingham family of Louisville, Kentucky, has been one of tragedy and controversy as well as wealth, power, and prestige. The breakup of the Bingham dynasty in 1986, vividly chronicled on CBS television's "Sixty Minutes," generated a flurry of books and articles on Bingham and his family, much of it portraying Bingham as a villain. In some accounts, Bingham drove his first wife to suicide and gave syphilis to the second before murdering her to gain control of her inheritance. William E. Ellis's Robert Worth Bingham and the Southern Mystique is an evenhanded, well-researched, and comprehensive biography of a controversial man. Ellis reveals Bingham's strengths as well as his frailties, and he specifically refutes some of the charges made against Bingham. Born in North Carolina, Bingham was influenced throughout his life by the mystique of the Old South. Owing to his dedication to what he considered to be the true path of southern progressivism, he demonstrated both the best and worst of this movement. Throughout his career he voiced opposition to several cherished Kentucky political traditions, and during the Progressive Era and 1920s he opposed the state's powerful liquor and racing interests. As a newspaper publisher an New Deal diplomat, Bingham was instrumental in 1930s foreign policy. Ellis has thoroughly researched Bingham's influence in Kentucky and national politics, tobacco cooperatives, the newspaper field, and international diplomacy, as well as his often turbulent personal life. He presents a comprehensive and realistic portrait of the man.

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  Rock climbing in Kentucky's Red River Gorge : an oral history of community, resources, and tourism

  James Maples

  Rock Climbing in Kentucky's Red River Gorge documents, for the first time, fifty years of oral history from this famous climbing community. Through extensive interviews, Maples reconstructs the growth of rock climbing in the region--including a twice-failed dam project, mysterious first routes, unauthorized sport-route growth on public lands, and a controversial archaeological dig. The book details five decades of collaborations to secure ongoing access to some of the world's most beautiful and technically demanding routes and the challenges along the way.
  
  More than a recounting of the past, however, Rock Climbing in Kentucky's Red River Gorge uses the region's extraordinary history to argue that climbing has the potential to be a valuable source of sustainable economic activity in rural areas throughout Appalachia today and in the years to come. The book concludes by offering policy recommendations and lessons learned about building beneficial partnerships among climbers, local communities, and public land managers to encourage community development and ecotourism alongside preservation.

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  Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology

  Avi Brisman

  The Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology was the first comprehensive and international anthology dedicated to green criminology. It presented green criminology to an international audience, described the state of the field, offered a description of a range of environmental issues of regional and global importance, and argued for continued criminological attention to environmental crimes and harms, setting an agenda for further study.

  In the six years since its publication, the field has continued to grow and thrive. This revised and expanded second edition of the Handbook reflects new methodological orientations, new locations of study such as Asia, Canada and South America, and new responses to environmental harms. While a number of the original chapters have been revised, the second edition offers a range of fresh chapters covering new and emerging areas of study, such as:

  • conservation criminology,
  • eco-feminism,
  • environmental victimology,
  • fracking,
  • migration and eco-rights, and
  • e-waste.

  This handbook continues to define and capture the field of green criminology and is essential reading for students and researchers engaged in green crime and environmental harm.

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  Scaling the Scholarship Mountain: Achieving Scholarly Productivity

  Charlie Sweet, Hal Blythe, Russell Carpenter, and Bill Phillips

  This book is intended to aid you in the climb from your formal education experience to the real world of the scholar. Through a combined total of over 150 years of experience in scholarly productivity, the authors have discovered some key steps toward becoming a scholar. In the pages that follow, they will share these steps through explanations, examples, and exercises.

  Since the authors have also edited several publications in the past, and one currently serves as editor of the prestigious Journal of Faculty Development, we had decided to include a special section in this book to further aid you in scaling the scholarship mountain. “From the Editor’s Desk” Post ‘Ems are timely observations made in reference to important concepts introduced in the text. Each comment is designed to call attention to a specific point, establishing its place in the successful ascent to scholarly productivity.

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  Seeing the Unseen

  Kenneth Tunnell

  A new book of interest is Seeing the Unseen by Kenneth D. Tunnell. Seeing the Unseen is Tunnell’s photographic self-reflection on the meaning of making photographs and features his infrared photographs of cemeteries. Seeing the Unseen is available from the publisher (Lulu.com), Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other book sellers. You can contact Tunnell at: ken.tunnell@eku.edu.

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  Smoke 'Em if you Got 'Em

  Melissa Vandenberg

  Over the past fifteen years, the artist Melissa Vandenberg has been working across a diverse range of media, including sculpture, works on paper and performance, to challenge the viewers to consider their personal constructions of self, identity, place and nation. As Vandenberg explains, her art 'questions the notion of a "homeland" and how national identity intertwines with individual identity.' Maus Contemporary is hosting a comprehensive solo show of this talented and innovative artist. Titled smoke 'em if you got 'em, the exhibition will bring together older and more recent bodies of Vandenberg's work.

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  Strictly Fantasy: The Cultural Roots of Tabletop Role-Playing Games (Studies in Gaming)

  Gerald R. Nachtwey

  Role-playing games seemed to appear of nowhere in the early 1970s and have been a quiet but steady presence in American culture ever since. This new look at the hobby searches for the historical origins of role-playing games deep in the imaginative worlds of Western culture. It looks at the earliest fantasy stories from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at the fans--both readers and writers--who wanted to bring them to life, at the Midwestern landscape and the middle-class households that were the hobby's birthplace, and at the struggle to find meaning and identity amidst cultural conflicts that drove many people into these communities of play. This book also addresses race, religion, gender, fandom, and the place these games have within American capitalism. All the paths of this journey are connected by the very quality that has made fantasy role-playing so powerful: it binds the limitless imagination into a "strict" framework of rules. Far from being an accidental offshoot of marginalized fan communities, role-playing games' ability to hold contradictions in dynamic, creative tension made them a necessary and central product of the twentieth century.

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  Tapestry of Russian Christianity: Studies in History and Culture

  Jennifer B. Spock, Editor; Nickolas Lupinin, Editor; and Donald Ostrowski, Editor

  Tapestry of Russian Christianity: Studies in History and Culture. Nickolas Lupinin, Donald Ostrowski and Jennifer B. Spock, eds. Columbus, Ohio: Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures and the Resource Center for Medieval Slavic Studies, The Ohio State University, 2016.

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  Teaching Applied Creative Thinking: A New Pedagogy for the 21st Century

  Charlie Sweet, Russell Carpenter, and Hal Blythe

  The authors of Teaching Applied Creative Thinking: A New Pedagogy for the 21st Century believe this book to be the first in the field about teaching creative thinking in the new millennium. While many books talk about creativity and provide the justification for adding creative thinking as a student learning outcome, this book focuses on applying creativity to the teaching and learning process. The authors ask, “does anyone truly believe the world’s problems are going to be solved by students with only a high proficiency in common core competencies?”

  With student learning outcomes as a goal, we must rethink teaching and learning to include creativity. Posed for the 21st-Century learner, their new paradigm, Mentor-from-the-Middle, replicates scholarly inquiry by developing a scholarly frame of mind. The teacher assumes new roles in this paradigm of scholar, mentor, facilitator, coach, model, and critical reflector. These roles in turn combine to help transform the learner into an active creative thinker.

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  The Archive of Thotsutmis, Son of Panouphis Early Ptolemaic Ostraca from Deir el Bahari (O. Edgerton)

  Jacqueline E. Jay

  The Archive of Thotsutmis, Son of Panouphis presents for the first time one of the largest collections of Demotic ostraca to have been discovered intact by archaeologists in the twentieth century. Rarely have such deposits been found in situ. Excavated by Ambrose Lansing on behalf of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1915–16 at the site of Deir el Bahari, the integrity and context of this find are critical to the proper understanding of the texts it contained. Through the publication and analysis of this archive of Demotic and Greek texts recorded on ostraca, Muhs, Scalf, and Jay reconstruct the microhistory of Thotsutmis, son of Panouphis, and his family, who worked in Egypt on the west bank of Thebes as priests in the mortuary industry during the early Ptolemaic Period in the third century BC. The forty-two ostraca published in this volume provide a rare opportunity to explore the intersections between an intact ancient archive of private administrative documents and the larger social and legal contexts into which they fit. What the reconstructed microhistory reveals is an ancient family striving to make it among the wealthy and connected social network of Theban choachytes and pastophoroi, while they simultaneously navigated the bureaucratic maze of taxes, fees, receipts, and legal procedures of the Ptolemaic state.

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  The Art Teacher's Guide to Exploring Art and Design in the Community

  Ilona Szekely

  How can community art build connection in diverse communities? Where is the art in contemporary libraries? How do you bring subway art into the classroom?
  
  Drawing on an abundance of examples from Finland, Italy, New Zealand, Spain and the USA, including the NYC 2nd Ave Subway, the Detroit's Heidelberg Project, the Favel Painting Foundation and bicycle rack sculpture, Szekely inspires readers to look beyond the classroom walls to develop meaningful art experiences for students. She shows the myriad art forms, media expressions, and design professions that have the influence and potential to shape the local environment, reaching far beyond the traditional museum and gallery venue.
  
  Underpinned by a clear philosophical foundation, the field-tested approaches show readers how to go beyond the study of reproductions or dwelling on of the masters who are framed in art museums, instead having meaningful art experiences using everyday objects and diverse collective experiences. She also shows that innovative and exciting art lessons don't need large amounts of funding, transportation or even a museum within the local community. Each chapter includes photographs, talking points and key lesson ideas along with links to further resources.

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  The Big R: A Forensic Accounting Action Adventure

  Edmund Fenton, D. Larry Crumbley, and Douglas Ziegenfuss

  Risk.

  It's a factor calculated into all big-time sports operations. But baseball was completely unprepared for the risk this season ― major league murder in the stands.

  When Fleet Walker, internal auditor for the New York Yankees, figures out that the killers are striking on the anniversaries of perfect games, he becomes embroiled in a plot to hold the national pastime for ransom. Working with a forensic accountant and a FBI agent, he is on the trail of the killers, using his skills as an auditor and his knowledge of baseball history to try to save baseball and its fans.

  This teaching novel is designed to supplement a forensic auditing, internal auditing, or fraud examination course. Topics covered include interviewing, internal controls, risk assessment, fraud detection, litigation support, forensic accounting consulting, and many more. Students will enjoy the suspense of this psychological thriller that integrates the fundamentals of forensic accounting and brings its applications to life, and they will learn important techniques and concepts as the mystery unfolds and Fleet Walker moves closer to nabbing the killers.

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  The Buddha and Religious Diversity

  Abraham Velez de Cea

  Providing a rigorous analysis of Buddhist ways of understanding religious diversity, this book develops a new foundation for cross-cultural understanding of religious diversity in our time.

  Examining the complexity and uniqueness of Buddha’s approach to religious pluralism using four main categories – namely exclusivism, inclusivism, pluralistic-inclusivism and pluralism – the book proposes a cross-cultural and interreligious interpretation of each category, thus avoiding the accusation of intellectual colonialism. The key argument is that, unlike the Buddha, most Buddhist traditions today, including Theravāda Buddhism and even the Dalai Lama, consider liberation and the highest stages of spiritual development exclusive to Buddhism. The book suggests that the Buddha rejects many doctrines and practices found in other traditions, and that, for him, there are nonnegotiable ethical and doctrinal standards that correspond to the Dharma. This argument is controversial and likely to ignite a debate among Buddhists from different traditions, especially between conservative and progressive Buddhists.

  The book fruitfully contributes to the literature on inter-religious dialogue, and is of use to students and scholars of Asian Studies, World Religion and Eastern Philosophy.

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  The Comprehensive Handbook of School Safety

  Scotty Dunlap

  In most schools you will probably see one, if not all of the following:

  • Metal detectors to prevent handguns and other weapons from being brought onto school property
  • Students in standardized uniforms to prevent the appearance of gang affiliations
  • Police officers patrolling the property to deter violent activity as well as respond to incidents

  Such evolutions have forever changed how we view the safety of our students. However, the phrase "school safety" goes beyond these issues of security put in place to protect students, faculty, and staff. Environmental factors also play a role. The Comprehensive Handbook of School Safety expands the dialogue on school safety to comprehensively address the spectrum of safety risks such as bullying, fire safety, playground and transportation safety, and more. Based on research and practical experience, it helps school administrators develop appropriate programs that protect all individuals from harm.

  Author E. Scott Dunlap brings his experience in OSHA and DOT compliance, behavior-based safety, and organizational safety culture to bear on the issue of school safety. He presents school safety from a holistic perspective and details vulnerability assessment tools and incident investigation forms to help schools develop a comprehensive safety program. By focusing on this range of issues, the book’s dynamic perspective puts the keys to achieving an effective safety program within easy reach.

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  The Evening Hour: A Novel

  Carter Sickels

  Most of the wealth in Dove Creek, West Virginia, is in the earth-in the coal seams that have provided generations with a way of life. Born and raised here, twenty-seven-year-old Cole Freeman has sidestepped work as a miner to become an aide in a nursing home. He's got a shock of bleached blond hair and a gentle touch well suited to the job. He's also a drug dealer, reselling the prescription drugs his older patients give him to a younger crowd looking for different kinds of escape.
  
  In this economically depressed, shifting landscape, Cole is floundering. The mining corporation is angling to buy the Freeman family's property, and Cole's protests only feel like stalling. Although he has often dreamed of leaving, he has a sense of duty to this land, especially after the death of his grandfather. His grandfather is not the only loss: Cole's one close friend, Terry Rose, has also slipped away from him, first to marriage, then to drugs. While Cole alternately attempts romance with two troubled women, he spends most of his time with the elderly patients at the home, desperately trying to ignore the decay of everything and everyone around him. Only when a disaster befalls these mountains is Cole forced to confront his fears and, finally, take decisive action-if not to save his world, to at least save himself.
  
  The Evening Hour marks the powerful debut of a writer who brings originality, nuance, and an incredible talent for character to an iconic American landscape in the throes of change.

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  The Prettiest Star

  Carter Sickels

  Small-town Appalachia doesn't have a lot going for it, but it's where Brian is from, where his family is, and where he's chosen to return to die. At eighteen, Brian, like so many other promising young gay men, arrived in New York City without much more than a love for the freedom and release from his past that it promised. But within six short years, AIDS would claim his lover, his friends, and his future. With nothing left in New York but memories of death, Brian decides to write his mother a letter asking to come back to the place, and family, he was once so desperate to escape. Set in 1986, a year after Rock Hudson's death shifted the public consciousness of the epidemic and brought the news of AIDS into living rooms and kitchens across America, The Prettiest Star is part Dog Years by Mark Doty and part Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt. But it is also an urgent story now: it a novel about the politics and fragility of the body; it is a novel about sex and shame. And it is a novel that speaks to the question of what home and family means when we try to forge a life for ourselves in a world that can be harsh and unpredictable. It is written at the far reaches of love and understanding, and zeroes in on the moments where those two forces reach for each other, and sometimes touch.

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  The Prophet of Cuernavaca: Ivan Illich and the Crisis of the West

  Todd Hartch

  Catholic priest and radical social critic Ivan Illich is best known for books like Deschooling Society and Medical Nemesis that skewered the dominant institutions of the West in the 1970s. Although commissioned in 1961 by American bishops to run a missionary training center in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Illich emerged as one of the major critics of the missionary movement. As he became a more controversial figure, his center evolved into CIDOC (Centro Intercultural de Documentación), an informal university that attracted a diverse group of intellectuals and seekers from around the world. They came to Illich's center to learn Spanish, to attend seminars, and to sit at the feet of Illich, whose relentless criticism of the Catholic Church and modern Western culture resonated with the revolutionary spirit of the times. His 1967 article, "The Seamy Side of Charity," a harsh attack on the American missionary effort in Latin America, and other criticisms of the Church led to a trial at the
  Vatican in 1968, after which he left the priesthood. Illich's writings struck at the foundations of western society, and envisioned utopian transformations in the realms of education, transportation, medicine, and economics. He was an inspiration to a generation of liberation theologians and other left-wing intellectuals.
  
  In The Prophet of Cuernavaca Todd Hartch traces the development of Illich's ideas from his work as a priest through his later secular period, offering one of the first book-length historical treatments of his thought in English.

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  The Rebirth of Latin American Christianity

  Todd Hartch

  As the demographic center of Christianity has shifted to the global South, Latin America has become one of the most important regions in the world for both Catholicism and Protestantism. This book shows that despite facing serious problems that had the potential to marginalize the religion, Christianity in the region has been revitalized in several ways since 1950. Military governments, urbanization, and widespread poverty posed serious challenges, but the prophetic response of Chile’s bishops, the upbeat music of Brazil’s “singing priests,” and the active faith of millions of other Christians saved the day. Meanwhile, the rapid growth of Protestantism, especially in the form of Pentecostalism, forced Catholics to adopt a more active and dynamic approach to their religion. Although many Catholics left their church to become Pentecostals, many others responded to the Protestant challenge by joining new Catholic movements such as the Charismatic Renewal, base ecclesial communities, and Focolare. Christianity in the region has been energized to such an extent that today Latin America is sending missionaries to Africa, Europe, and the United States.