Elizabeth Keckley (1818–1907) was a former slave turned successful seamstress who is most notably known as being Mary Todd Lincoln's personal modiste... and confidante, and the author of her autobiography, Behind the Scenes Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House. Mrs. Keckly utilized her intelligence, keen business savvy, and sewing and design skills to arrange and ultimately buy her freedom (and that of her son George as well), and later enjoyed regular business with the wives of the government elite as her base clientele. After several years in St. Louis, she moved to Washington, D.C. in the spring of 1860, where she had the country's most elite women of the time requesting her services. Through shrewd networking and hard work, she ended up making gowns and dresses for more notable wives such as Mrs. Varina Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis, and Mrs. Mary Anne Randolph Custis Lee, wife of Robert E. Lee. Of all her clients, she had the closest and most long-standing relationship with Mary Todd Lincoln, devoting many of her days during Abraham Lincoln's administration to being available to her and the First Family in a myriad of ways.

Behind the Short Story provides the “inside scoop” on how a successful story emerges from first to final draft by compiling critical analysis... techniques, writing exercises, representative stories, and useful insights into the writing process from award-winning, student-oriented teachers who are also successful short story writers.  Covering the process of writing and elements of fiction at the same time, unique craft commentaries explore the decisions writers make on issues of structure, character, setting, etc. and offer practical suggestions for pre-writing, drafting, and revising.

Behind the Smile is an inside look at the world of Caribbean tourism as seen through the lives of the men and women in the tourist industry in Barbados.... The workers represent every level of tourism, from maid to hotel manager, beach gigolo to taxi driver, red cap to diving instructor. These highly personal accounts offer insight into complex questions surrounding tourism: how race shapes interactions between tourists and workers, how tourists may become agents of cultural change, the meaning of sexual encounters between locals and tourists, and the real economic and ecological costs of development through tourism. This updated edition updates the text and includes several new narratives and a new chapter about American students' experiences during summer field school and home stays in Barbados.

Behind the Smile is an inside look at the world of Caribbean tourism as seen through the lives of the men and women in the tourist industry in Barbados.... The workers represent every level of tourism, from maid to hotel manager, beach gigolo to taxi driver, red cap to diving instructor. These highly personal accounts offer insight into complex questions about tourism: how race shapes interactions between tourists and workers, how tourists may become agents of cultural change, the meaning of sexual encounters between locals and tourists, and the real economic and ecological costs of development through tourism. This updated edition includes several new narratives and a new chapter about American students' experiences during summer school and home stays in Barbados.

"Students reading Scott have come away with a real appreciation of the hardships under which these workers built Magnitogorsk and of the nearly... incredible enthusiasm with which many of them worked." —Ronald Grigor Suny"A genuine grassroots account of Soviet life—a type of book of which there have been far too few." —William Henry Chamberlin, New York Times, 1943"... a rich portrait of daily life under Stalin." —New York Times Book ReviewGeneral readers, students, and specialists alike will find much of relevance for understanding today's Soviet Union in this new edition of John Scott's vivid exploration of daily life in the formative days of Stalinism.

In 1913, stricken by tuberculosis, young Anah, Aki, and Leah are sent away from their family for treatment at St. Joseph's, an orphanage in Hawai'i's... Kalihi Valley. Of the three, two will die there, and only Anah, the eldest, will survive. But the ghosts of the dead sisters will haunt Anah as she prepares to begin married life away from the orphanage. Desperate for the love of their sister, but jealous of her ability to live in the physical world, they are determined to thwart Anah's happiness. As Anah struggles to appease the dead, it becomes apparent that only through one of her own daughters can redemption be attained. Poignant, lyrical, and utterly compelling, Behold the Many is a stunning novel that glows with longing and life.

Proceeding from the prayerful dialogue between Jesus and His Eternal Father, Ratzinger shows how one can only approach the mystery of the Heart of... Christ through the imitation of his prayer.

A mother and daughter’s illusions are shattered when they head to the local Sikh Temple, as they’re immersed in a world of desperate aspiration and... dangerous deals. Behzti (Dishonour) touched such a nerve in a Sikh community during its UK production that the playwright was forced into hiding because of death threats.

Banned in China for its candid exploration of a young girl's sexual awakening yet widely acclaimed as being "the first novel of 'tough youth' in China"... (Beijing Today), Beijing Doll cuts a daring path through China's rock-and-roll subculture. This cutting edge novel -- drawn from the diaries the author kept throughout her teenage years -- takes readers to the streets of Beijing where a disaffected generation spurns tradition for lives of self expression, passion, and rock-and-roll. Chun Sue's explicit sensuality, unflinching attitude towards sex, and raw, lyrical style break new ground in contemporary Chinese literature.

When China opened its doors to the West in the late 1970s, Western businesses jumped at the chance to sell their products to the most populous nation in... the world. Boardrooms everywhere buzzed with excitement—a Coke for every citizen, a television for every family, a personal computer for every office. At no other time have the institutions of Western capitalism tried to do business with a communist state to the extent that they did in China under Deng Xiaoping. Yet, over the decade leading up to the bloody events in and around Tiananmen Square, that experiment produced growing disappointment on both sides, and a vision of capturing the world’s largest market faded.Picked as one of Fortune Magazine's "75 Smartest Books We Know," this updated version of Beijing Jeep, traces the history of the stormy romance between American business and Chinese communism through the experiences of American Motors and its operation in China, Beijing Jeep, a closely watched joint venture often visited by American politicians and Chinese leaders. Jim Mann explains how some of the world’s savviest executives completely misjudged the business climate and recounts how the Chinese, who acquired valuable new technology at virtually no expense to themselves, ultimately outcapitalized the capitalists. And, in a new epilogue, Mann revisits and updates the events which constituted the main issues of the first edition.Elegantly written, brilliantly reported, Beijing Jeep is a cautionary tale about the West’s age-old quest to do business in the Middle Kingdom.

Beijing Record, the result of ten years of research on the urban transformation of Beijing in the last fifty years, brings to an extended Western... audience the inside story on the key decisions that led to Beijing's present urban fragmentation and its loss of memory and history in the form of bulldozing its architectural heritage. Wang's publication presents a survey of the main developments and government-level (both central and municipal) decisions, devoting a lot of attention to the 1950s and 1960s, when Beijing experienced a critical wave of transformative events. Shortly after its original Chinese bestseller edition was published by SDX joint Publishing Company House in October 2003, it ignited a firestorm of debate and discussion in a country where public interaction over such a sensitive subject rarely surfaces. The Chinese edition is in its 11th print run and was translated into Japanese in 2008. This newly-translated English version has the latest update on the author's findings in the area. As the only edition printed in full color with nearly 300 illustrations, the English version powerfully showcases the stunning architecture, culture, and history of China's Dynamic Capital, Beijing. Home to more than 15 million people, this ancient capital city - not surprisingly - has a controversial, complicated history of planning and politics, development and demolition. The publication raises a number of unsettling questions: Why have a valuable historical architectural heritage such as city ramparts, gateways, old temples, memorial archways and the urban fabric of hutongs (traditional alleyways) and siheyuan (courtyard houses) been visibly disappearing for decades? Why are so many houses being demolished at a time of economic growth? Is no one prepared to stand up for the preservation of the city? For his research, Wang went through innumerable archives, read diaries and collected an unprecedented quantity of data, accessing firsthand materials and unearthing photographs that clearly document the city's relentless, unprecedented physical makeover. In addition, he conducted more than 50 in-person interviews with officials, planners, scholars and other experts. Many illustrations are published here for the first time, compiled in the 1990s when archival public access was reformulated.

For centuries, Beijing was closed off to the world, turned inward and literally built around the imperial Forbidden City, the emblem of all that was... unknowable about China. But now the capital is reinventing itself to reflect China’s global influence, progress, and prosperity. When Tom Scocca arrived—an American eager to see another culture—Beijing was looking toward welcoming the world to its Olympics, and preparations were in full swing to renew itself.Scocca discovered a city of contradictions—modern and ancient, friendly yet wary, bold and insecure. He talked to scientists tasked with changing the weather, and interviewed architects; checked out the campaign to stop public spitting; documented the planting of trees, the rerouting of traffic, the demolition of the old city, and the designs of a new metropolis, all the while finding the city more daunting, and more intimate. Beijing Welcomes You is a glimpse into the future and an encounter with an urban place we do not yet fully comprehend, and a superpower it is essential we get to know better.

What is madness? asks the narrator of Ahmed Alaidy's jittery, funny, and angry novel. Assuring readers that they are about to find out, the narrator... takes us on a journey through the insanity of present-day Cairo - in and out of minibuses, malls, and crash pads, navigating the city's pinball machine of social life with tolerable efficiency. But lurking under the rocks in his grouchy, chain-smoking, pharmaceutically-oriented, twenty-something life are characters like his elusive psychiatrist uncle with a disturbing interest in phobias. And then there's Abbas, the narrator's best friend who surfaces at critical moments to drive our hero into uncontrollably multiplying difficulties. For instance, there's the ticklish situation with the simultaneous blind-dates Abbas has set up for him on different levels of a coffee-shop in a Cairo mall with two girls both called Hind. With friends like Abbas, what paranoiac needs enemies?

Over the last 100 years, perhaps no segment of the American population has been more analyzed than black males. The subject of myriad studies and... dozens of government boards and commissions, black men have been variously depicted as the progenitors of pop culture and the menaces of society, their individuality often obscured by the narrow images that linger in the public mind. Ten years after the Million Man March, the largest gathering of black men in the nation's history, Washington Post staffers began meeting to discuss what had become of black men in the ensuing decade. How could their progress and failures be measured? Their questions resulted in a Post series which generated enormous public interest and inspired a succession of dynamic public meetings. It included the findings of an ambitious nationwide poll and offered an eye-opening window into questions of race and black male identity—questions gaining increasing attention with the emergence of Senator Barack Obama as a serious presidential contender. At the end of the day, the project revealed that black men are deeply divided over how they view each other and their country. Now collected in one volume with several new essays as well as an introduction by Pulitzer Prizewinning novelist Edward P. Jones, these poignant and provocative articles let us see and hear black men like they've never been seen and heard before.

Human beings are conscious selves, with constantly developing personal identities, intrinsically related to, acted upon, and affected by others in... dynamic social, political, and religious spheres. Michele Saracino shows with exquisite sensitivity how these relationships are most tellingly revealed in human affectivity and emotions. Human existence entails ceaseless negotiation on all levels and requires reflective affectivity to succeed. In this interdisciplinary work, that includes theology, ethics, politics and psychology, Saracino penetrates to the core of the human in a highly original way and sheds brilliant light on our being in today s world. All will learn from this book.