For educators of all disciplines, this third edition of a bestseller provides K–12 examples of how Web tools such as blogs, wikis, Facebook, and... Twitter allow students to learn more, create more, and communicate better.

Blog Theory offers a critical theory of contemporary media. Furthering her account of communicative capitalism, Jodi Dean explores the ways new media... practices like blogging and texting capture their users in intensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance. Her wide-ranging and theoretically rich analysis extends from her personal experiences as a blogger, through media histories, to newly emerging social network platforms and applications.Set against the background of the economic crisis wrought by neoliberalism, the book engages with recent work in contemporary media theory as well as with thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj ?i?ek. Through these engagements, Dean defends the provocative thesis that reflexivity in complex networks is best understood via the psychoanalytic notion of the drives. She contends, moreover, that reading networks in terms of the drives enables us to grasp their real, human dimension, that is, the feelings and affects that embed us in the system.In remarkably clear and lucid prose, Dean links seemingly trivial and transitory updates from the new mass culture of the internet to more fundamental changes in subjectivity and politics. Everyday communicative exchangesÑfrom blog posts to text messagesÑhave widespread effects, effects that not only undermine capacities for democracy but also entrap us in circuits of domination.

"Blog" is short for "Web log"―an online site with time-dated postings, maintained by one or more posters, that features links and commentary. That's... the most basic definition, but it is like saying a car is a means of transportation featuring four wheels. In Blog, syndicated radio talk show host and best-selling author Hugh Hewitt helps you catch up with and get ahead of this phenomenon. "Millions of people are changing their habits when it comes to information acquisition," writes Hewitt. "This has happened many times before―with the appearance of the printing press, then the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television, and Internet. Now the blogosphere has appeared, and it has come so suddenly as to surprise even the most sophisticated of analysts." If you doubt the influence blogs have in society, think again. Better yet, just ask Senator Trent Lott regarding his comments at Strom Thurmond's birtuday celebration. Ask New York Times editor-in-chief Howell Raines about reporter Jayson Blair's fabricated stories. Ask Dan Rather and CBS about President Bush's National Guard documents faxed from a Texas Kinko's. Or ask John Kerry about his battle with Swift Boat veterans. All of these major stories were fully covered by the mainstream media only after their exposure in the blogosphere. "Hugh Hewitt [is] the unofficial historian of the blogging movement." ―The Wall Street Journal

Easy Rawlins comes home from work, and finds more trouble on his doorstep in a day than most men encounter in a lifetime.A friend has left his daughter... at Easy's house without so much as a note. Clearly this friend, Christmas Black, a veteran of Vietnam, fears for his life and his daughter's.Easy's closest friend, the man known as Mouse, has disappeared too--and his wife tells Easy that he is wanted for murder. Mouse has been a thorn in the police's side for so long that Easy is convinced that this time they will kill him as soon as they find him. Worst of all, Easy's longtime lover tells him that she plans to marry another man. In a world of hurt, Easy strikes out on his own to try to find one friend, save another, and save himself from the pain that is driving him out of his mind. On his path he meets drug dealers, corrupt officials, every manner of criminal and con--and a woman named Faith who may hold the key to more than one life. In his tenth Easy Rawlins novel, Walter Mosley writes with a grace and insight that few writers ever achieve. It is the clearest proof yet that Walter Mosley is "one of this nation's finest writers" (Boston Globe).

In the spring, the bear returns to the forest, the glacier returns to its source, and the salmon returns to the fresh water where it was spawned.... Drawing on the special relationship that the Native people of southeastern Alaska have always had with nature, Blonde Indian is a story about returning. Told in eloquent layers that blend Native stories and metaphor with social and spiritual journeys, this enchanting memoir traces the author’s life from her difficult childhood growing up in the Tlingit community, through her adulthood, during which she lived for some time in Seattle and San Francisco, and eventually to her return home. Neither fully Native American nor Euro-American, Hayes encounters a unique sense of alienation from both her Native community and the dominant culture. We witness her struggles alongside other Tlingit men and women—many of whom never left their Native community but wrestle with their own challenges, including unemployment, prejudice, alcoholism, and poverty. The author’s personal journey, the symbolic stories of contemporary Natives, and the tales and legends that have circulated among the Tlingit people for centuries are all woven together, making Blonde Indian much more than the story of one woman’s life. Filled with anecdotes, descriptions, and histories that are unique to the Tlingit community, this book is a document of cultural heritage, a tribute to the Alaskan landscape, and a moving testament to how going back—in nature and in life—allows movement forward.

The most provocative debut novel of the year, "a dizzying satire" (The New Yorker) that "boldly turns history on its head" (Elle). What if the history... of the transatlantic slave trade had been reversed and Africans had enslaved Europeans? How would that have changed the ways that people justified their inhuman behavior? How would it inform our cultural attitudes and the insidious racism that still lingers today? We see this tragicomic world turned upside down through the eyes of Doris, an Englishwoman enslaved and taken to the New World, movingly recounting experiences of tremendous hardship and the dreams of the people she has left behind, all while journeying toward an escape into freedom. A poignant and dramatic story grounded in provocative ideas, Blonde Roots is a genuinely original, profoundly imaginative novel.

The true story of a Jewish reporter who became an intimate witness to the rise of Nazism in Germany. Fromm wrote a social column for a liberal Berlin... newspaper. Attending luncheons, teas & dinners during the 1930s, she met everybody of importance, including von Hindenberg, Franz von Papen, Goebbels, Goering, Himmler, Leni Riefenstahl, & other political & social figures. In this secret journal, smuggled out piecemeal before she left Germany, Fromm describes her experiences & conversations with this cast of characters that would soon play shocking roles in Hitler's Third Reich. Her diary is a classic social & historical testament.

PEN/West Award Finalist"        Told with energy, perception and great charm. . . . For anyone who wants     to . . . gain insight into the... great cultural and political richness of Iran, past, present and future, this book is a marvelous introduction."        --Fred Halliday, Los Angeles TimesIran was the first country in the Middle East to develop an oil industry, and oil has been central to its tumultuous twentieth-century history. A finalist for the PEN/West Award, Blood and Oil tells the epic inside story of the battle for Iranian oil. A prominent member of one of Iran's most powerful aristocratic families--so feared by Khomeini that the entire clan was blacklisted--Prince Manucher Farmanfarmaian was raised in a harem at the heart of Iran's imperial court. With wit and provocative detail, he describes the days when he served as the Shah's oil adviser and pioneered the partnership that resulted in OPEC. Beautifully written and epic in its scope, this scintillating memoir provides a fascinating history of modern Iran."        Distinguished by its political acumen, historical sense, and vividness of description and anecdote. It is also notable for a wry sense of humour. . . . Amid the euphoria about the development of the oilfields of Central Asia and the Transcaucasus, [its] lesson should be kept in mind."                                           --Anatol Lieven, Financial Times"A book of stunning beauty . . . One of the best accounts of the cultural and political life of modern Iran, it is exquisite and intimate, rendered with art-istry and detail."                                                                     --Fouad Ajami

In July 1995, approximately 7000 Muslim men, women and children died at Serbian hands in and around the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. It was the largest... mass execution in Europe since the Nazi era; a stunning failure for the United Nations and the Western powers; and the grim watershed that led to Nato air strikes and the current fragile peace. The author asks how this shocking and still imperfectly understood act of genocide was allowed to take place in the first place. This work puts a human face on the grim statistics and tangled politics of this event. Through the odyssey of the Celiks, a Muslim family, journalist Chuck Sudetic tells the story a people and a nation. His narrative folds reaches as far back as the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, and unfolds towards the Celiks' rendezvous with history in the so-called "safe area" of Srebrenica.

The Kurds, who number some 28 million people in the Middle East, have no country they can call their own. Long ignored by the West, Kurds are now highly... visible actors on the world's political stage. More than half live in Turkey, where the Kurdish struggle has gained new strength and attention since the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq.Essential to understanding modern-day Kurds—and their continuing demands for an independent state—is understanding the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. A guerilla force that was founded in 1978 by a small group of ex-Turkish university students, the PKK radicalized the Kurdish national movement in Turkey, becoming a tightly organized, well-armed fighting force of some 15,000, with a 50,000-member civilian militia in Turkey and tens of thousands of active backers in Europe. Under the leadership of Abdullah Ocalan, the war the PKK waged in Turkey through 1999 left nearly 40,000 people dead and drew in the neighboring states of Iran, Iraq, and Syria, all of whom sought to use the PKK for their own purposes. Since 2004, emboldened by the Iraqi Kurds, who now have established an autonomous Kurdish state in the northernmost reaches of Iraq, the PKK has again turned to violence to meet its objectives.Blood and Belief combines reportage and scholarship to give the first in-depth account of the PKK. Aliza Marcus, one of the first Western reporters to meet with PKK rebels, wrote about their war for many years for a variety of prominent publications before being put on trial in Turkey for her reporting. Based on her interviews with PKK rebels and their supporters and opponents throughout the world—including the Palestinians who trained them, the intelligence services that tracked them, and the dissidents who tried to break them up—Marcus provides an in-depth account of this influential radical group.

Until the end of the Cold War, the politics of national identity was confined to isolated incidents of ethnics strife and civil war in distant... countries. Now, with the collapse of Communist regimes across Europe and the loosening pf the Cold War'd clamp on East-West relations, a surge of nationalism has swept the world stage. In Blood and Belonging, Ignatieff makes a thorough examination of why blood ties--inplaces as diverse as Yugoslavia, Kurdistan, Northern Ireland, Quebec, Germany, and the former Soviet republics--may be the definitive factor in international relation today. He asks how ethnic pride turned into ethnic cleansing, whether modern citizens can lay the ghosts of a warring past, why--and whether--a people need a state of their own, and why armed struggle might be justified. Blood and Belonging is a profound and searching look at one of the most complex issues of our time.

Blood and Bone: Poems by Physicians explores the profound connections between medicine and poetry through the eyes of contemporary physician-poets.... These one hundred poems record instances of pain and recovery, joy and grief, humor and irony within the restricted society of caregivers and their patients.

Over the past decade, immigration and globalization have significantly altered Europe’s cultural and ethnic landscape, foregrounding questions of... national belonging. In Blood and Culture, Cynthia Miller-Idriss provides a rich ethnographic analysis of how patterns of national identity are constructed and transformed across generations. Drawing on research she conducted at German vocational schools between 1999 and 2004, Miller-Idriss examines how the working-class students and their middle-class, college-educated teachers wrestle with their different views about citizenship and national pride. The cultural and demographic trends in Germany are broadly indicative of those underway throughout Europe, yet the country’s role in the Second World War and the Holocaust makes national identity, and particularly national pride, a difficult issue for Germans. Because the vocational-school teachers are mostly members of a generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s and hold their parents’ generation responsible for National Socialism, many see national pride as symptomatic of fascist thinking. Their students, on the other hand, want to take pride in being German.Miller-Idriss describes a new understanding of national belonging emerging among young Germans—one in which cultural assimilation takes precedence over blood or ethnic heritage. Moreover, she argues that teachers’ well-intentioned, state-sanctioned efforts to counter nationalist pride often create a backlash, making radical right-wing groups more appealing to their students. Miller-Idriss argues that the state’s efforts to shape national identity are always tempered and potentially transformed as each generation reacts to the official conception of what the nation “ought” to be.

Today, astonishing surgical breakthroughs are making limb transplants, face transplants, and a host of other previously un dreamed of operations... possible. But getting here has not been a simple story of medical progress. In Blood and Guts, veteran science writer Richard Hollingham weaves a compelling narrative from the key moments in surgical history. We have a ringside seat in the operating theater of University College Hospital in London as world-renowned Victorian surgeon Robert Liston performs a remarkable amputation in thirty seconds—from first cut to final stitch. Innovations such as Joseph Lister’s antiseptic technique, the first open-heart surgery, and Walter Freeman’s lobotomy operations, among other breakthroughs, are brought to life in these pages in vivid detail. This is popular science writing at it’s best.