A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship.The star of Roberto Bolaño's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto... Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime. The narrator, unable to stop himself, tries to track Ruiz-Tagle down, and sees signs of his activity over and over again. A corrosive, mocking humor sparkles within Bolaño's darkest visions of Chile under Pinochet. In Bolaño's world there's a big graveyard and there's a big graveyard laugh. (He once described his novel By Night in Chile as "a tale of terror, a situation comedy, and a combination pastoral-gothic novel.") Many Chilean authors have written about the "bloody events of the early Pinochet years, the abductions and murders," Richard Eder commented in the The New York Times: "None has done it in so dark and glittering a fashion as Roberto Bolaño."

Images of starving children, bombed villages and mass graves brought to us by television in the comfort of our homes implicitly call on us to act. What... can we do when the suffering we see is so distant and we feel powerless compared with the forces behind the suffering? Luc Boltanski examines the ways in which, since the end of the eighteenth century, spectators have tried to respond acceptably to what they have seen, and discusses whether there remains a place for pity in modern politics.

More convincingly than any other woman writing in Arabic today, Alifa Rifaat, an Egyptian, lifts the veil on what it means to be a woman living within a... traditional Muslim society. Her writing articulates a subtle revolt against, and a sympathetic insight into, the place of women in the essentially male-dominated Islamic environment. Change, development, and understanding are called for but the invocation is couched in specifically Arab terms; her inspiration lies not in the Women's Movement of the West but remains within a strictly religious, even Orthodox Qur'anic framework.

From the author of REINCARNATION, another historical, supernatural romance, this time focusing on five sisters whose lives are intertwined with the... sinking of the Titanic.Science, spiritualism, history, and romance intertwine in Suzanne Weyn's newest novel. Four sisters and their mother make their way from a spiritualist town in New York to London, becoming acquainted with journalist W. T. Stead, scientist Nikola Tesla, and industrialist John Jacob Astor. When they all find themselves on the Titanic, one of Tesla's inventions dooms them...and one could save them.

A timely treatment of distillationcombining steady-state designand dynamic controllabilityAs the world continues to seek new sources of energy, the... distillation process remains one of the most important separation methods in the chemical, petroleum, and energy industries. And as new renewable sources of energy and chemical feedstocks become more universally utilized, the issues of distillation design and control will remain vital to a future sustainable lifestyle.Distillation Design and Control Using Aspen Simulation introduces the current status and future implications of this vital technology from the dual perspectives of steady-state design and dynamics. Where traditional design texts have focused mainly on the steady-state economic aspects of distillation design, William Luyben also addresses such issues as dynamic performance in the face of disturbances.Utilizing the commercial simulators Aspen Plus and Aspen Dynamics, the text guides future and practicing chemical engineers first in the development of optimal steady-state designs of distillation systems, and then in the development of effective control structures.Unique features of the text include:* In-depth coverage of the dynamics of column design to help develop effective control structures for distillation columns* Development of rigorous simulations of single distillation columns and sequences of columns* Coverage of design and control of petroleum fractionatorsEncompassing nearly four decades of research and practical developments in this dynamic field, the text represents an important reference for both students and experienced engineers faced with distillation problems.

Alchemy can't be science--common sense tells us as much. But perhaps common sense is not the best measure of what science is, or was. In this book,... Bruce Moran looks past contemporary assumptions and prejudices to determine what alchemists were actually doing in the context of early modern science. Examining the ways alchemy and chemistry were studied and practiced between 1400 and 1700, he shows how these approaches influenced their respective practitioners' ideas about nature and shaped their inquiries into the workings of the natural world. His work sets up a dialogue between what historians have usually presented as separate spheres; here we see how alchemists and early chemists exchanged ideas and methods and in fact shared a territory between their two disciplines. Distilling Knowledge suggests that scientific revolution may wear a different appearance in different cultural contexts. The metaphor of the Scientific Revolution, Moran argues, can be expanded to make sense of alchemy and other so-called pseudo-sciences--by including a new framework in which "process can count as an object, in which making leads to learning, and in which the messiness of conflict leads to discernment." Seen on its own terms, alchemy can stand within the bounds of demonstrative science.

No judgement of taste is innocent. In a word, we are all snobs. Pierre Bourdieu brilliantly illuminates this situation of the middle class in the... modern world. France's leading sociologist focusses here on the French bourgeoisie, its tastes and preferences. Distinction is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind. In the course of everyday life people constantly choose between what they find aesthetically pleasing and what they consider tacky, merely trendy, or ugly. Bourdieu bases his study on surveys that took into account the multitude of social factors that play a part in a Frenchperson's choice of clothing, furniture, leisure activities, dinner menus for guests, and many other matters of taste. What emerges from his analysis is that social snobbery is everywhere in the bourgeois world. The different aesthetic choices people make are all distinctions-that is, choices made in opposition to those made by other classes. Taste is not pure. Bourdieu finds a world of social meaning in the decision to order bouillabaisse, in our contemporary cult of thinness, in the "California sports" such as jogging and cross-country skiing. The social world, he argues, functions simultaneously as a system of power relations and as a symbolic system in which minute distinctions of taste become the basis for social judgement. The topic of Bourdieu's book is a fascinating one: the strategies of social pretension are always curiously engaging. But the book is more than fascinating. It is a major contribution to current debates on the theory of culture and a challenge to the major theoretical schools in contemporary sociology.

This timely volume provides an in-depth look at why the field of communication is so central in initiatives for social impact around the world. In... Distinctive Qualities in Communication Research, editors Donal Carbaugh and Patrice M. Buzzanell bring together scholars with varied and productive approaches to communication to address the question of what distinguishes communication research from similar studies in other disciplines. Each contributor responds to the question: "What makes your research communication research? How does your program of inquiry treat communication not simply as data, but as its primary theoretical concern?" Their responses are the heart of this book. The questions addressed and answered herein define the qualities that set research in communication apart from work in related fields, such as social psychology, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. The book begins and ends by looking across these studies generally, bringing into view not only the specific possibilities in the study of communication today, but also what such study contributes generally to understanding human problems, social relations, and communities. This volume provides an invaluable resource for graduate students beginning their study in communication; academics needing to define the distinctive contributions that communication research makes; and administrators who want to understand the scope and breadth of work in communication. It provides an invaluable resource for defining the role of communication research in the academic community and the contributions it makes to the study of human interaction.

From George Washington Carver to Dr. Mae Jemison, African Americans have been making outstanding contributions in the field of science. This unique... resource goes beyond the headlines in chronicling not just the scientific achievements but also the lives of 100 remarkable men and women. Each biography provides an absorbing account of the scientist's struggles, which often included overcoming prejudice, as they pursued their educational and professional goals.

In recent years, stories of reckless lawyers and greedy citizens have given the legal system, and victims in general, a bad name. Many Americans have... come to believe that we live in the land of the litigious, where frivolous lawsuits and absurdly high settlements reign.Scholars have argued for years that this common view of the depraved ruin of our civil legal system is a myth, but their research and statistics rarely make the news. William Haltom and Michael McCann here persuasively show how popularized distorted understandings of tort litigation (or tort tales) have been perpetuated by the mass media and reform proponents. Distorting the Law lays bare how media coverage has sensationalized lawsuits and sympathetically portrayed corporate interests, supporting big business and reinforcing negative stereotypes of law practices.Based on extensive interviews, nearly two decades of newspaper coverage, and in-depth studies of the McDonald's coffee case and tobacco litigation, Distorting the Law offers a compelling analysis of the presumed litigation crisis, the campaign for tort law reform, and the crucial role the media play in this process.

We have vast oceans of information at our disposal, yet increasingly we seek knowledge with brief glimpses at the Yahoo headlines while juggling other... tasks. We are networked as never before, but we tend to communicate even with our most intimate friends and family via instant messaging, email, and fleeting face-to-face moments that are rescheduled a dozen times, then punctuated when they do occur with pings and beeps and more multitasking. Welcome to the land of distraction. Despite our wondrous technologies and scientific advances, we are nurturing a culture of diffusion, fragmentation, and detachment. In this new world, something is amiss. And that something is - attention. Journey with Maggie Jackson as she explores the many ways in which we are eroding our capacity for deep, sustained attention - the building block of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress. In her sweeping quest to unravel the nature of attention and detail its erosion, she introduces us to scientists, cartographers, marketers, educators, wired teens, virtual lovers from the telegraph age, and roboticists building smart machines to comfort and care for us. She takes us from the nineteenth-century roots of our mobile, virtual multitasking ways into a darkening future of snippets, glimpses, skimming, McThinking, and mistrust. Taking us beyond 'Blink and Faster', Jackson makes it clear that if we continue down this road of scattered attention spans and widespread societal ADD, we will be in danger of squandering and devaluing the essence of humanity, and our technological age could ultimately slip into cultural decline. But we are just as capable of igniting a renaissance of attention by strengthening our varied powers of focus and perception, the keys to judgement, memory, morality, and happiness. She describes some of the exciting new scientific research that shows how these skills can be nurtured. "Distraction" is unique in being simultaneously an original expose of the multifaceted nature of attention, an engaging and often surprising portrait of post-modern life, and a compelling roadmap for cultivating sustained focus and nurturing a more enriched and literate society. Pull over, hit the pause button, silence the ringer, and prepare to encounter our land of distraction-this may be your first, and maybe your last, chance to really fathom it.

In Distributed Algorithms, Nancy Lynch provides a blueprint for designing, implementing, and analyzing distributed algorithms. She directs her book at... a wide audience, including students, programmers, system designers, and researchers.Distributed Algorithms contains the most significant algorithms and impossibility results in the area, all in a simple automata-theoretic setting. The algorithms are proved correct, and their complexity is analyzed according to precisely defined complexity measures. The problems covered include resource allocation, communication, consensus among distributed processes, data consistency, deadlock detection, leader election, global snapshots, and many others.The material is organized according to the system model-first by the timing model and then by the interprocess communication mechanism. The material on system models is isolated in separate chapters for easy reference.The presentation is completely rigorous, yet is intuitive enough for immediate comprehension. This book familiarizes readers with important problems, algorithms, and impossibility results in the area: readers can then recognize the problems when they arise in practice, apply the algorithms to solve them, and use the impossibility results to determine whether problems are unsolvable. The book also provides readers with the basic mathematical tools for designing new algorithms and proving new impossibility results. In addition, it teaches readers how to reason carefully about distributed algorithms-to model them formally, devise precise specifications for their required behavior, prove their correctness, and evaluate their performance with realistic measures.

From the leading minds in the field, Distributed and Cloud Computing is the first modern, up-to-date distributed systems textbook. Starting with an... overview of modern distributed models, the book exposes the design principles, systems architecture, and innovative applications of parallel, distributed, and cloud computing systems. It will teach you how to create high-performance, scalable, reliable systems, providing comprehensive coverage of distributed and cloud computing, including: Facilitating management, debugging, migration, and disaster recovery through virtualization Clustered systems for research or ecommerce applications Designing systems as web services Social networking systems using peer-to-peer computing Principles of cloud computing using examples from open-source and commercial applications Using examples from open-source and commercial vendors, the text describes cloud-based systems for research, e-commerce, social networking and more.Complete coverage of modern distributed computing technology including clusters, the grid, service-oriented architecture, massively parallel processors, peer-to-peer networking, and cloud computing Includes case studies from the leading distributed computing vendors: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and more Explains how to use virtualization to facilitate management, debugging, migration, and disaster recovey Designed for undergraduate or graduate students taking a distributed systems course--each chapter includes exercises and further reading, with lecture slides and more available online