By turns subtle and intense, disturbing and elusive, the stories in this collection are ultimately connected by themes of memory and loss, reality and... fabrication, and by a richless of language that rests lightly on its carefully foundation.

Comedy Characters: 3 male, 3 female, flexible castingChained to his desk in the basement of customer service hell, Segis suddenly finds himself set free... in the CEO's penthouse-but is it a dream? This raucous reinvention of Pedro Calderón de la Barca's Life is a Dream gleefully skewers corporate America with razor-sharp wit "Enjoyably stylish [with an] antic pace and witty aesthetic" - Washington Post"Ambitious, often uproarious." - City Paper "A pizzazz-filled concoction that skewers corporatism with a generous supply side of laughs. [Callaghan] is without doubt the purveyor of top-shelf American wit." - Metro Weekly "[Callaghan has] a keen eye for the outlandish. Exudes the kind of infectious zaniness that occasionally attracts cult followings." - Variety "I can't remember the last time a play made me laugh so hard. Between the chuckles and belly laughs, the dialog is surprisingly layered, and gives the audience plenty to think about. Fever/Dream is about as funny as the sharpest Hollywood comedy, and far more rewarding." -BrightestYoungThings.com

The influenza epidemic of 1918 killed more people in one year than the Great War killed in four, sickening at least one quarter of the world's... population. In Fever of War, Carol R. Byerly uncovers the startling impact of the 1918 influenza epidemic on the American army, its medical officers, and their profession, a story which has long been silenced. Through medical officers' memoirs and diaries, official reports, scientific articles, and other original sources, Byerly tells a grave tale about the limits of modern medicine and warfare.The tragedy begins with overly confident medical officers who, armed with new knowledge and technologies of modern medicine, had an inflated sense of their ability to control disease. The conditions of trench warfare on the Western Front soon outflanked medical knowledge by creating an environment where the influenza virus could mutate to a lethal strain. This new flu virus soon left medical officers’ confidence in tatters as thousands of soldiers and trainees died under their care. They also were unable to convince the War Department to reduce the crowding of troops aboard ships and in barracks which were providing ideal environments for the epidemic to thrive. After the war, and given their helplessness to control influenza, many medical officers and military leaders began to downplay the epidemic as a significant event for the U. S. army, in effect erasing this dramatic story from the American historical memory.

Nick Hornby has been a soccer fan since the moment he was conceived. Fever Pitch is his tribute to a lifelong obsession. Part autobiography, part... comedy, part incisive analysis of insanity, Hornby's award-winning memoir captures the fever pitch of fandom—its agony and ecstasy, its community, its defining role in thousands of young men's coming of age stories. Fever Pitch is one for the home team. But above all, it is one for everyone who knows what it really means to have a losing season.

Few Are Chosen tells the story of a campaign for the U.S. Senate with insight and self-deprecating good humor. It's sometimes serious, sometimes... hilarious, and always true to life. People say they want honesty in a politician. Honest answers to questions about American politics great and small are part of the story-the straight scoop on what a candidate really experiences and thinks. A few samples What don t people know about politicians? What do sitting U.S. Senators and aspiring candidates talk about in unguarded moments? What is life like on the campaign trail? Is driving through pitch black midnight with a temperature of 25 zero to the Icebox of the Nation as much fun as it sounds? What does a stall warning on a small plane sound like?

Never before have birth and fertility rates fallen so far, so fast, so low, for so long, in so many places, so surprisingly. In Fewer, Ben Wattenberg... shows how and why this has occurred, and explains what it means for the future. These stark demographic changes will affect commerce, the environment, public financing, and geo-politics. In Wattenberg's world of The New Demography readers get a look at a topic often chattered about, but rarely understood.

Kenneth McLeish's definitive translations of the most successful French dramatist of the Belle EpoqueGeorges Feydau (1862-1921) was the most successful... French dramatist of the belle epoque and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest of farce-writers. His series of dazzling hits matched high-speed action and dialogue with ingenious plotting. Reaching the heights of farcical lunacy, his plays nevertheless contain touches of barbed social comment and allowed him to mention subjects which would have provoked outrage in the hands of more serious dramatists.This volume of new, sparkling translations by Kenneth McLeish contains three plays from the peak of his career, The Girl from Maxim 's, She's All Yours (La Main Passe) and A Flea in her Ear (La Puce à L'Oreille), together with an early work, Jailbird (Gibier de potence).

When, in 1984–86, Richard P. Feynman gave his famous course on computation at the California Institute of Technology, he asked Tony Hey to adapt his... lecture notes into a book. Although led by Feynman, the course also featured, as occasional guest speakers, some of the most brilliant men in science at that time, including Marvin Minsky, Charles Bennett, and John Hopfield. Although the lectures are now thirteen years old, most of the material is timeless and presents a “Feynmanesque” overview of many standard and some not-so-standard topics in computer science such as reversible logic gates and quantum computers.

Self-determination, imported into the Middle East on the heels of World War I, held out the promise of democratic governance to the former territories... of the Ottoman Empire. The new states that European Great Powers carved out of the multilingual, multiethnic, and multireligious empire were expected to adhere to new forms of affiliation that emphasized previously unimportant differences.In 1936, the new Republic of Turkey lay claim to Antioch and the Sanjak (province) of Alexandretta, which the French had ruled since 1920 as part of its mandate over Syria. Turkey's ambassador made a passionate argument that Alexandretta was a homeland of the Turks, a place that was essentially Turkish. With France and Turkey unable to reach agreement, the League of Nations was called in to broker a compromise consistent with the spirit of the new democratic impulse, one of many disputes that it had to adjudicate as self-determination became a rallying cry for peoples who wanted to form new nations around their collective identities. Over the next four years, Turkey struggled for recognition of its claims to the territory, while Turkish authorities competed to win hearts and minds in Alexandretta province. In this nuanced narrative, Sarah D. Shields illuminates how the people of this region-about a quarter of a million Arabs, Armenians, Circassians, Kurds, and Turks-were forced to choose between Turkish and Arab identities. In the end, Shields shows, national identities played no role in the outcome of the dispute. What happened on the ground in this contested region was determined by Great Power diplomacy amidst the crisis of European democracy in the late 1930s, a story skillfully interwoven with the violent struggles that took place on the streets of the province. In the end, a new kind of identity politics was unleashed that redefined belonging, transformed nationalism, and set in motion the process of dysfunctional democracy that continues to plague the Middle East.

In America in the late 1950s and early 60s, the world—and life itself—became a legitimate artist’s tool, aligning with Zen Buddhism’s emphasis... on “enlightenment at any moment” and living in the now. Simultaneously and independently, parallel movements were occurring in Japan, as artists there, too, strove to break down artistic boundaries.   Nothing and Everything brings these heady times into focus. Author Ellen Pearlman meticulously traces the spread of Buddhist ideas into the art world through the classes of legendary scholar D. T. Suzuki as well as those of his most famous student, composer and teacher John Cage, from whose teachings sprouted the art movement Fluxus and the “happenings” of the 1960s. Pearlman details the interaction of these American artists with the Japanese Hi Red Center and the multi-installation group Gutai. Back in New York, abstract-expressionist artists founded The Club, which held lectures on Zen and featured Japan’s first abstract painter, Saburo Hasegawa. And in the literary world, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg were using Buddhism in their search for new forms and visions of their own. These multiple journeys led to startling breakthroughs in artistic and literary style—and influenced an entire generation. Filled with rare photographs and groundbreaking primary source material, Nothing and Everything is the definitive history of this pivotal time for the American arts.About the Imprint: EVOLVER EDITIONS promotes a new counterculture that recognizes humanity's visionary potential and takes tangible, pragmatic steps to realize it. EVOLVER EDITIONS explores the dynamics of personal, collective, and global change from a wide range of perspectives. EVOLVER EDITIONS is an imprint of North Atlantic Books and is produced in collaboration with Evolver, LLC.

Coming from The Penguin Press in February 2009, Thomas E. Ricks's The GambleThomas E. Ricks 's #1 New York Times bestseller, Fiasco, transformed the... political dialogue on the war in Iraq. Now Ricks has picked up where Fiasco left off-Iraq, late 2005. With more newsbreaking information, including hundreds of hours of interviews with top U.S. officials who were on the ground during the surge and beyond, The Gamble is the natural companion piece to Fiasco, and the two are sure to become the definitive examinations of what ultimately went wrong in Iraq.

FIASCO is the shocking story of one man's education in the jungles of Wall Street. As a young derivatives salesman at Morgan Stanley, Frank Partnoy... learned to buy and sell billions of dollars worth of securities that were so complex many traders themselves didn't understand them. In his behind-the-scenes look at the trading floor and the offices of one of the world's top investment firms, Partnoy recounts the macho attitudes and fiercely competitive ploys of his office mates. And he takes us to the annual drunken skeet-shooting competition, FIASCO, where he and his colleagues sharpen the killer instincts they are encouraged to use against their competitiors, their clients, and each other. FIASCO is the first book to take on the derivatves trading industry?the most highly charged and risky sector of the stock market. More importantly, it is a blistering indictment of the largely unregulated market in derivatives and serves as a warning to unwary investors about real fiascos, which have cost billions of dollars.

Revised and updated with the latest composite materials technology. A guide to fiber reinforced plastic materials, including fiberglass, Kevlar, and... carbon fiber. It also includes sections on mold making, plugs, materials, structures, gel coats, advanced building techniques, tools and equipment.

This new and fully revised Fifth Edition of Fiber Optic Communications incorporates coverage of significant advances made in the fiber industry in... recent years to present a comprehensive and in-depth introduction to the basics of communicating with optical fiber transmission lines. Readers will learn system design as well as operating principles, characteristics, and application of the components that comprise fiber-optic systems. New and expanded topics include Raman amplifier, erbium-doped waveguide amplifier, the arrayed waveguide grating, electroabsorption modulator, optical micro-electro-mechanical (MEMs) components, dispersion compensation, tunable light sources, tunable filters, optical time-division multiplexing, dense and course wavelength-division multiplexing, increased utilization of the optical spectrum, and emphasis on external modulation. Other topics include fiber lasers and optical amplifiers, vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser diodes, dense wavelength-division multiplexing, fiber Bragg grating technology, new component descriptions (fiber attenuator, circulator, and polarization controller), new phenomena descriptions (polarization mode dispersion, mode-partition noise), and power penalty. Expanded discussions of additional topics include polarization effects in fiber systems, integrated optic components, practical fiber connectors and how to minimize reflections. For practicing design engineers concerned with the selection and application of components and with the design of applications systems. For professionals involved with fiber optics, including high-level engineering decision makers, project managers, technicians, marketing and sales personnel, and teachers.

The Institute of Optics, University of Rochester* ".readers searching for a wide ranging and up-date view of fibre optic communication systems would do... well to purchase this book."-International Journal of Electrical Engineering Education (on the Second Edition)* This comprehensive, up-to-date account of fiber-optic communication focuses on the physics and technology behind fiber-optic communication systems while covering both the systems and components aspects* Provides extensive details on the WDM technology and system design issues that have developed since the last edition* An Instructor's Manual presenting detailed solutions to all the problems in the book is available from the Wiley editorial department.