Often overlooked by ragtime historians, John William "Blind" Boone had a remarkably successful and influential music career that endured for almost... fifty years. Blind Boone: Missouri's Ragtime Pioneer provides the first full account of the Missouri-born musician's amazing story of overcoming the odds.Boone's background and his approach to music contributed to his ability to bridge gaps--gaps between blacks and whites and gaps between popular and classical music. Boone's thousands of performances from 1879 to 1927 brought blacks and whites into the same concert halls as he played a mixture of popular and classical tunes. A pioneer of ragtime music, Boone was the first performer to give the musical style legitimacy by bringing it to the concert stage.The mulatto child of a former slave and a Union soldier, Boone was born in Miami, Missouri, in 1864 amid the chaos of the Civil War. At six months he was diagnosed with "brain fever." Doctors, believing they were performing a lifesaving procedure, removed Boone's eyes and sewed his eyelids shut.Despite blindness and poverty, Boone was a fun-loving, cheerful child. Growing up in Warrensburg, Missouri, he played freely with both black and white children, undaunted by racial differences or his own disabilities. He exhibited a keen ear and musical promise early in life; at only five years of age he recruited older boys and formed a band.Recognizing Boone's talent, the town's prominent citizens sent him to the St. Louis School for the Blind. There he excelled at music and amazed his instructors. However, Boone became increasingly unhappy with the school's treatment of him and he frequently ran away to the tenderloin district of the city, where he first experienced ragtime. As a result of his forays, he was expelled after only two and a half years.After some harrowing experiences, Boone met John Lange Jr., a benevolent black contractor and philanthropist in Columbia, Missouri. Boone and Lange began a lifelong friendship, which developed from their partnership in the Blind Boone Concert Company. Although the two experienced hardships and racism, fires and train wrecks, Lange's guidance and Boone's talent secured 8,650 concerts in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.Blind Boone: Missouri's Ragtime Pioneer offers an engaging and readable account of the personal and professional life of Blind Boone. This book will appeal to the general reader as well as anyone interested in African American studies or music history.

In 2004, two great scientist-explorers attempted to find the bottom of the world. American Bill Stone took on the vast, deadly Cheve Cave in southern... Mexico. Ukrainian Alexander Klimchouk targeted Krubera, a freezing nightmare of a supercave in the war-torn former Soviet republic of Georgia. Both men spent months almost two vertical miles deep, contending with thousand-foot drops, raging whitewater rivers, monstrous waterfalls, mile-long belly crawls, and the psychological horrors produced by weeks in absolute darkness, beyond all hope of rescue. Based on his unprecedented access to logs and journals as well as hours of personal interviews, James Tabor has crafted a thrilling exploration of man’s timeless urge to discover—and of two extraordinary men whose pursuit of greatness led them to the heights of triumph and the depths of tragedy. Blind Descent is an unforgettable addition to the classic literature of true-life adventure, and a testament to human survival and endurance.Includes a 16-pg black and white insert

Award-winning poet Nick Flynn takes readers into the dangerous and irresistible center of the hiveI sit in a body & think of a body, I... pictureBurnens' hands, my wordsmake them move. I say, plunge them into the hive,& his hands go in.—from "Blind Huber"Blindness does not deter François Huber—the eighteenth-century beekeeper—in his quest to learn about bees through their behavior. Through an odd, but productive arrangement, Huber's assistant Burnens becomes his eyes, his narrator as he goes about his work. In Nick Flynn's extraordinary new collection, Huber and Burnens speak and so do the bees. The strongest virgin waits silently to kill the other virgins; drones are "made of waiting"; the swarm attempts to protect the queen. It is a cruel existence. Everyone sacrifices for the sweet honey, except the human hand that harvests it all in a single afternoon. Blind Huber is about the body, love, and devotion and also about the limits of what can be known and what will forever be unknown. Nick Flynn's bees and keepers—sometimes in a state of magnificent pollen-drunk dizziness—view the world from a striking and daring perspective.

New York is sweltering in the summer heat, and Harlem is dose to the boiling point. To Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, at times it seems as if... the whole world has gone mad. Trying, as always, to keep some kind of peace-their legendary nickel-plated Colts very much in evidence-Coffin Ed and Grave Digger find themselves pursuing two completely different cases through a maze of knifings, beatings, and riots that threaten to tear Harlem apart."The word is out on the street, and the hopheads and whores and flimflam artists are running scared: Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones are back in print."-- Newsweek

In Blind Men and Elephants, Arthur Asa Berger uses case histories to show how scholars from different disciplines and scholarly domains have tried to... describe and understand humor. He reveals not only the many approaches that are available to study humor, but also the many perspectives toward humor that characterize each discipline. Each case history sheds light on a particular aspect of humor, making the combination of approaches of considerable value in the study of social research. Among the various disciplines that Berger discusses in relation to humor are: communication theory, philosophy, semiotics, literary analysis, sociology, political science, and psychology. Berger deals with these particular disciplines and perspectives because they tend to be most commonly found in the scholarly literature about humor as well as being those that have the most to offer. Blind Men and Elephants covers a wide range of humor, from simple jokes to the uses of literary devices in films. Berger observes how humor often employs considerable ridicule directed at diverse groups of people: women, men, animals, politicians, African Americans, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, gay people, straight people, and so forth. The book also explains the risk factor in ridicule as a humorous device. Blind Men and Elephants depicts how one entity or one situation can be viewed in as many different ways as the number of people studying it. Berger also shows how those multiple perspectives, the Rashomon Effect, can be used together to create a clearer understanding of humor. Blind Men and Elephants is a valuable companion to Berger's recent effort about humor, An Anatomy of Humor, and will be enjoyed by communication and information studies scholars, sociologists, literary studies specialists, philosophers, and psychologists.

This edition features the exact same content as the traditional text in a convenient, three-hole- punched, loose-leaf version. Books a la Carte also... offer a great value—this format costs significantly less than a new textbook.   Statistics for the Life Sciences, Fourth Edition, is the perfect book for introductory statistics classes, covering the key concepts of statistics as applied to the life sciences, while incorporating the tools and themes of modern data analysis. This text uses an abundance of real data in the exercises and examples to minimize computation, so that students can focus on the statistical concepts and issues, not the mathematics. Basic algebra is assumed as a prerequisite.   This latest edition is also available as an enhanced Pearson eText. This exciting new version features an embedded version of StatCrunch, allowing students to analyze data sets while reading the book.  For graduate or undergraduate courses in biology, agronomy, medical and health sciences, nutrition, pharmacy, animal science, physical education, forestry, and other life sciences.

A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal... element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers-among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears-through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man's worst appetites and weaknesses-and man's ultimately exhilarating spirit. The stunningly powerful novel of man's will to survive against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature.

From Nobel Prize–winning author José Saramago, a magnificent, mesmerizing parable of loss   A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" that... spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and assaulting women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides her charges—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and their procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. As Blindness reclaims the age-old story of a plague, it evokes the vivid and trembling horrors of the twentieth century, leaving readers with a powerful vision of the human spirit that's bound both by weakness and exhilarating strength.

In this trenchant analysis, historian Bruce Kuklick examines the role of intellectuals in foreign policymaking. He recounts the history of the... development of ideas about strategy and foreign policy during a critical period in American history: the era of the nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. The book looks at how the country's foremost thinkers advanced their ideas during this time of United States expansionism, a period that culminated in the Vietnam War and détente with the Soviets. Beginning with George Kennan after World War II, and concluding with Henry Kissinger and the Vietnam War, Kuklick examines the role of both institutional policymakers such as those at The Rand Corporation and Harvard's Kennedy School, and individual thinkers including Paul Nitze, McGeorge Bundy, and Walt Rostow. Kuklick contends that the figures having the most influence on American strategy--Kissinger, for example--clearly understood the way politics and the exercise of power affects policymaking. Other brilliant thinkers, on the other hand, often played a minor role, providing, at best, a rationale for policies adopted for political reasons. At a time when the role of the neoconservatives' influence over American foreign policy is a subject of intense debate, this book offers important insight into the function of intellectuals in foreign policymaking.

As a young blind girl, Georgina Kleege repeatedly heard the refrain, “Why can’t you be more like Helen Keller?” Kleege’s resentment culminates in... her book Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller, an ingenious examination of the life of this renowned international figure using 21st-century sensibilities. Kleege’s absorption with Keller originated as an angry response to the ideal of a secular saint, which no real blind or deaf person could ever emulate. However, her investigation into the genuine person revealed that a much more complex set of characters and circumstances shaped Keller’s life.Blind Rage employs an adroit form of creative nonfiction to review the critical junctures in Keller’s life. The simple facts about Helen Keller are well-known: how Anne Sullivan taught her deaf-blind pupil to communicate and learn; her impressive career as a Radcliffe graduate and author; her countless public appearances in various venues, from cinema to vaudeville, to campaigns for the American Foundation for the Blind. But Kleege delves below the surface to question the perfection of this image. Through the device of her letters, she challenges Keller to reveal her actual emotions, the real nature of her long relationship with Sullivan, with Sullivan’s husband, and her brief engagement to Peter Fagan. Kleege’s imaginative dramatization, distinguished by her depiction of Keller’s command of abstract sensations, gradually shifts in perspective from anger to admiration. Blind Rage criticizes the Helen Keller myth for prolonging an unrealistic model for blind people, yet it appreciates the individual who found a practical way to live despite the restrictions of her myth.

An active pastor, husband, father, and triathlete, Bob Molsberry was nearly killed in 1997 in a hit and run accident on a rural highway. After a long... period of recovery and rehabilitation, he is a paraplegic who has remained active in family, ministry, and athletics. This book reflects on his experience of disability not as a medical condition in serach of a cure, nor as a tragedy to be pitied, but as a cross-cultural adventure similar to learning to live in a foreign country. Molsberry also offers biblical and theological reflection that confronts the Bible's perspectives on disability--that it is a matter of heroic suffering or miraculous cure, and often interpreted as a consequence of sin.

"This book will change the way you think about professional football--in much the same way that Bill James revolutionized the analysis of Major League... Baseball. The research is impeccable. The approach is irreverent. You will be 'blindsided' by what you think you know about the NFL, but don't. Warning to fantasy football lovers: You won't be able to put this book down."—Sal Paolantonio, ESPN reporter and author of The Paolantonio Report: The Most Overrated and Underrated Players, Teams, Coaches, and Moments in NFL History"KC Joyner's theories will completely revolutionize football, cure baldness, save the whales, and bring total peace and harmony to all nations. That's why you must read Blindsided!"—Gregg Easterbrook, ESPN's Tuesday Morning Quarterback"Too much of football literature is just tedious hagiography, but Blindsided is a book for those of us who enjoy the complex game on the field and football conversation that goes past 'my team rules.' "—Aaron Schatz, lead author and editor of Pro Football ProspectusPro football’s statistical iconoclast, K.C. Joyner, challenges conventional wisdom with fact-based and film-based responses in Blindsided: Why the Left Tackle is Overrated and Other Contrarian Football Thoughts. If you love sports statistics or find excitement in fantasy football, you will enjoy the detailed insights and carefully researched information in this book. Scrap the typical media hype and hoopla for the real, straight-from-the-fields-and-films scoop, including information on free agents, parity, NFL business practice, Hall of Fame standards, coaching practices, historical iconoclasm, and a thorough statistical review.