The twentieth century bequeathed us a fabulous gift: thirty more years of life on average. Supersized life spans are going to radically alter society,... and present an unprecedented opportunity to change our approach not only to old age but to all of life’s stages. The ramifications are just beginning to dawn on us.... yet in the meantime, we keep thinking about, and planning for, life as it used to be lived. In A Long Bright Future, longevity and aging expert Laura Carstensen guides us into the new possibilities offered by a longer life. She debunks the myths and misconceptions about aging that stop us from adequately preparing for the future both as individuals and as a society: that growing older is associated with loneliness and unhappiness, and that only the genetically blessed live well and long. She then focuses on other important components of a long life, including finances, health, social relationships, Medicare and Social Security, challenging our preconceived notions of “old age” every step of the way.

"I'd gladly sell my soul to Satan for a year of freedom," cries impetuous Rosamond Vivian to her callous grandfather. Then, one stormy night, a... brooding stranger appears in her remote island home, ready to take Rosamond to her word. Spellbound by the mysterious Philip Tempest, Rosamond is seduced with promises of love and freedom, then spirited away on Tempest's sumptuous yacht. But she soon finds herself trapped in a web of intrigue, cruelty, and deceit. Desperate to escape, she flees to Italy, France, and Germany, from Parisian garret to mental asylum, from convent to chateau, as Tempest stalks every step of the fiery beauty who has become his obsession.A story of dark love and passionate obsession that was considered "too sensational" to be published in the authors lifetime, A Long Fatal Love Chase was written for magazine serialization in 1866, two years before the publication of Little Women. Buried among Louisa May Alcott's papers for more than a century, its publication is a literary landmark—a novel that is bold, timeless, and mesmerizing."

David Cecelski chronicles one of the most sustained and successful protests of the civil rights movement—the 1968-69 school boycott in Hyde County,... North Carolina. For an entire year, the county's black citizens refused to send their children to school in protest of a desegregation plan that required closing two historically black schools in their remote coastal community. Parents and students held nonviolent protests daily for five months, marched twice on the state capitol in Raleigh, and drove the Ku Klux Klan out of the county in a massive gunfight.The threatened closing of Hyde County's black schools collided with a rich and vibrant educational heritage that had helped to sustain the black community since Reconstruction. As other southern school boards routinely closed black schools and displaced their educational leaders, Hyde County blacks began to fear that school desegregation was undermining—rather than enhancing—this legacy. This book, then, is the story of one county's extraordinary struggle for civil rights, but at the same time it explores the fight for civil rights in all of eastern North Carolina and the dismantling of black education throughout the South.

The conflict in Afghanistan looms large in the collective consciousness of Americans. What has the United States achieved, and how will it withdraw... without sacrificing those gains? The Soviet Union confronted these same questions in the 1980s, and Artemy Kalinovsky’s history of the USSR’s nine-year struggle to extricate itself from Afghanistan and bring its troops home provides a sobering perspective on exit options in the region.What makes Kalinovsky’s intense account both timely and important is its focus not on motives for initiating the conflict but on the factors that prevented the Soviet leadership from ending a demoralizing war. Why did the USSR linger for so long, given that key elites recognized the blunder of the mission shortly after the initial deployment?Newly available archival material, supplemented by interviews with major actors, allows Kalinovsky to reconstruct the fierce debates among Soviet diplomats, KGB officials, the Red Army, and top Politburo figures. The fear that withdrawal would diminish the USSR’s status as leader of the Third World is palpable in these disagreements, as are the competing interests of Afghan factions and the Soviet Union’s superpower rival in the West. This book challenges many widely held views about the actual costs of the conflict to the Soviet leadership, and its findings illuminate the Cold War context of a military engagement that went very wrong, for much too long.

In his introduction to the new edition, Henry K. Miller presents A Long Hard Look at Psycho as the culmination of Durgnat's decades-long campaign to... correct what he called film studies' 'Grand Error', tracing the path of a project that began at the time of the film's release, and which drew on Durgnat's sense of kinship with its director, a fellow north-east Londoner. In the course of expounding Durgnat's root-and-branch challenge to our inherited shibboleths about Hollywood cinema in general and Hitchcock in particular – concepts like illusionism, character identification, scopophilia, and classical narrative – Miller also describes the eclectic intellectual tradition to which Durgnat claimed allegiance. This offbeat band of collaborators and 'amis inconnus', among them William Empson, Edgar Morin, and Manny Farber, had at its head Durgnat's mentor Thorold Dickinson. The book's story begins on the day in March 1962 when Dickinson took his cinephile seminar through Hitchcock's film shot-by-shot on an editing machine – the first long hard look of many.

Praised as a “master storyteller” (The Wall Street Journal) and hailed for his “flawless use of language” (Boston Herald), Irish author and... playwright Sebastian Barry has created a powerful new novel about divided loyalties and the realities of war. In 1914, Willie Dunne, barely eighteen years old, leaves behind Dublin, his family, and the girl he plans to marry in order to enlist in the Allied forces and face the Germans on the Western Front. Once there, he encounters a horror of violence and gore he could not have imagined and sustains his spirit with only the words on the pages from home and the camaraderie of the mud-covered Irish boys who fight and die by his side.  Dimly aware of the political tensions that have grown in Ireland in his absence, Willie returns on leave to find a world split and ravaged by forces closer to home. Despite the comfort he finds with his family, he knows he must rejoin his regiment and fight until the end. With grace and power, Sebastian Barry vividly renders Willie’s personal struggle as well as the overwhelming consequences of war.

As a society, we are no less obsessed with the immediate than when Eugene Peterson first wrote this Christian classic. If anything, email and the... Internet may have intensified our quest for the quick fix. But Peterson's time-tested prescription for discipleship remains the same--a long obedience in the same direction. Tucked away in the Hebrew Psalter, Peterson discovered "an old dog-eared songbook," the Songs of Ascents that were sung by pilgrims on their way up to worship in Jerusalem. In these songs (Psalms 120-134) Peterson finds encouragement for modern pilgrims as we learn to grow in worship, service, joy, work, happiness, humility, community and blessing. This 20th anniversary edition of features these Psalms in Peterson's widely acclaimed paraphrase, He also includes an epilogue in which he reflects on the themes of this book and his ministry during the twenty years since its original publication.

Clark's autobiography of his astonishing primitive river bank childhood in Catlettsburg, Kentucky at the junction of the Big Sandy and Ohio Rivers.... Clark was a member of a sprawling, ragged family. His father was an intelligent, fiddle-playing shoemaker with little formal education. His mother often took in washing to help provide food for the family. The boy grew up in a derelict house, "The Leaning Tower," on the banks of the Ohio River. Always hungry, often dirty, and without sufficient clothing, he led an adventurous life on the two rivers, swimming, fishing and salvaging flotsam from the frequent floods. Billy was the only one of his family to seek an education, and through his traps, his river salvage, and odd jobs, he earned money to put himself through school. His final chapter ends with a powerful account of his parent's pride at his graduation.

In the aftermath of suicide, friends and family face a long road of grief and reflection. With a sympathetic eye and a firm hand, Harold Ivan Smith... searches for the place of the spirit in the wake of suicide. He asks how one may live a spiritual life as a survivor, and he addresses the way faith is permanently altered by “the residue of stigma” that attaches to suicide.

Along the shore are fishing boats and lighthouses, wharves and piers, resorts and shipwrecks - picturesque vistas that are visited and photographed but... have never before been scrutinized from a historical or cultural perspective. In this enchanting book, John R. Stilgoe takes us on a tour of the seacoast, evoking its sights, sounds, and textures, and showing how it illuminates issues of landscape and of American culture. Drawing on sources as diverse as Thoreau and Kate Chopin, agricultural newspapers and the Hardy Boys, and always emphasizing his own hikes and small-boat passages along the coast, Stilgoe provides a guidebook for anyone intrigued by the seacoast, "the last place in which adult Americans walk barefoot." He describes guzzles (configurations of sand), gunkholes (unfrequented harbors), and loomings (optical phenomena on the horizon). He explains why watchtowers stand guard all along the Atlantic coast; why wharves are perennially decaying; the different ways that pirates have been perceived through the centuries; and why local women of the shore towns wear bikinis. Like the sea itself, Stilgoe's Alongshore invigorates and exhilarates, drawing us back to its pleasures again and again.

Along the Archival Grain offers a unique methodological and analytic opening to the affective registers of imperial governance and the political content... of archival forms. In a series of nuanced mediations on the nature of colonial documents from the nineteenth-century Netherlands Indies, Ann Laura Stoler identifies the social epistemologies that guided perception and practice, revealing the problematic racial ontologies of that confused epistemic space. Navigating familiar and extraordinary paths through the lettered lives of those who ruled, she seizes on moments when common sense failed and prevailing categories no longer seemed to work. She asks not what colonial agents knew, but what happened when what they thought they knew they found they did not. Rejecting the notion that archival labor be approached as an extractive enterprise, Stoler sets her sights on archival production as a consequential act of governance, as a field of force with violent effect, and not least as a vivid space to do ethnography.

In Along These Lines, authors John Sheridan Biays and Carol Wershoven prepare students for the writing expectations of future courses by providing... thorough, step-by-step instruction for key topics: the writing process, grammar, and research.  The authors’ conversational tone and variety of writing activities, such as peer review and collaborative exercises, make Along These Lines upbeat and interesting for students as they hone their writing skills.

In Along These Lines, authors John Sheridan Biays and Carol Wershoven prepare students for the writing expectations of future courses by providing... thorough, step-by-step instruction for key topics: the writing process, grammar, and research.  The authors’ conversational tone and variety of writing activities, such as peer review and collaborative exercises, make Along These Lines upbeat and interesting for students as they hone their writing skills.

In Along These Lines, authors John Sheridan Biays and Carol Wershoven prepare students for the writing expectations of future courses by providing... thorough, step-by-step instruction for key topics: the writing process, grammar, and research.  The authors’ conversational tone and variety of writing activities, such as peer review and collaborative exercises, make Along These Lines upbeat and interesting for students as they hone their writing skills.