Inspired and led by sporting magnate Albert Goodwill Spalding, two teams of baseball players circled the globe for six months in 1888-1889 competing in... such far away destinations as Australia, Sri Lanka and Egypt. These players, however, represented much more than mere pleasure-seekers. In this lively narrative, Zeiler explores the ways in which the Spalding World Baseball Tour drew on elements of cultural diplomacy to inject American values and power into the international arena.Through his chronicle of baseball history, games, and experiences, Zeiler explores expressions of imperial dreams through globalization's instruments of free enterprise, webs of modern communication and transport, cultural ordering of races and societies, and a strident nationalism that galvanized notions of American uniqueness. Spalding linked baseball to a U.S. presence overseas, viewing the world as a market ripe for the infusion of American ideas, products and energy. Through globalization during the Gilded Age, he and other Americans penetrated the globe and laid the foundation for an empire formally acquired just a decade after their tour.

Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-1792) war ein deutscher Schriftsteller des Sturm und Drang. Von 1768-1770 studierte er Theologie. Seine erste... eigenständige Buchveröffentlichung, das Langgedicht Die Landplagen, erschien 1769. 1771 brach Lenz sein Studium in Königsberg ab und ging als Bediensteter der beiden kurländischen Barone und Offiziersanwärter Friedrich Georg und Ernst Nikolaus von Kleist nach Straßburg. 1774 gab er seinen Dienst bei den Brüdern Kleist auf, lebte als freier Schriftsteller und verdiente seinen Lebensunterhalt mit privater Lehrtätigkeit. Lenz ging 1781 nach Moskau, wo er als Hauslehrer arbeitete, in Kreisen russischer Freimaurer und Schriftsteller verkehrte, mit an der Ausarbeitung verschiedener reformerischer Pläne arbeitete und Bücher zur russischen Geschichte ins Deutsche übersetzte. Im Jahr 1783 wurde Lenz in der Freimaurerloge Sphinx in Moskau aufgenommen und später in der Loge Drei Fahnen angenommen. Er half den Logenbeamten, die Arbeiten auf Deutsch durchzuführen, und war einige Zeit ab 1784 Logenbeamter. Weitere Werke des Autors sind: Der Hofmeister; oder, Vortheile der Privaterziehung (1774), Die Soldaten (1776), Die Freunde Machen den Philosophen (1776) und Der Landprediger (1777).

Essie is smart. She can read hard library books and make cocoa. Amber is brave. She isn't afraid of the rat in the wall or of climbing up in high... places. Amber and Essie are sisters and best friends. Together, they can do anything. Ages 7+

How do you find your way in an age of information overload? How can you filter streams of complex information to pull out only what you want? Why does... it matter how information is structured when Google seems to magically bring up the right answer to your questions? What does it mean to be "findable" in this day and age? This eye-opening new book examines the convergence of information and connectivity. Written by Peter Morville, author of the groundbreaking Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, the book defines our current age as a state of unlimited findability. In other words, anyone can find anything at any time. Complete navigability. Morville discusses the Internet, GIS, and other network technologies that are coming together to make unlimited findability possible. He explores how the melding of these innovations impacts society, since Web access is now a standard requirement for successful people and businesses. But before he does that, Morville looks back at the history of wayfinding and human evolution, suggesting that our fear of being lost has driven us to create maps, charts, and now, the mobile Internet. The book's central thesis is that information literacy, information architecture, and usability are all critical components of this new world order. Hand in hand with that is the contention that only by planning and designing the best possible software, devices, and Internet, will we be able to maintain this connectivity in the future. Morville's book is highlighted with full color illustrations and rich examples that bring his prose to life. Ambient Findability doesn't preach or pretend to know all the answers. Instead, it presents research, stories, and examples in support of its novel ideas. Are we truly at a critical point in our evolution where the quality of our digital networks will dictate how we behave as a species? Is findability indeed the primary key to a successful global marketplace in the 21st century and beyond. Peter Morville takes you on a thought-provoking tour of these memes and more -- ideas that will not only fascinate but will stir your creativity in practical ways that you can apply to your work immediately. ""A lively, enjoyable and informative tour of a topic that's only going to become more important."" --David Weinberger, Author, "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" and "The Cluetrain Manifesto" ""I envy the young scholar who finds this inventive book, by whatever strange means are necessary. The future isn't just unwritten--it's unsearched."" --Bruce Sterling, Writer, Futurist, and Co-Founder, The Electronic Frontier Foundation ""Search engine marketing is the hottest thing in Internet business, and deservedly so. Ambient Findability puts SEM into a broader context and provides deeper insights into human behavior. This book will help you grow your online business in a world where being found is not at all certain."" --Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., Author, "Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity" ""Information that's hard to find will remain information that's hardly found--from one of the fathers of the discipline of information architecture, and one of its most experienced practitioners, come penetrating observations on why findability is elusive and how the act of seeking changes us."" --Steve Papa, Founder and Chairman, Endeca ""Whether it's a fact or a figure, a person or a place, Peter Morville knows how to make it findable. Morville explores the possibilities of a world where everything can always be found--and the challenges in getting there--in this wide-ranging, thought-provoking book."" --Jesse James Garrett, Author, "The Elements of User Experience" ""It is easy to assume that current searching of the World Wide Web is the last word in finding and using information. Peter Morville shows us that search engines are just the beginning. Skillfully weaving together information science research with his own extensive experience, he develops for the reader a feeling for the near future when information is truly findable all around us. There are immense implications, and Morville's lively and humorous writing brings them home."" --Marcia J. Bates, Ph.D., University of California Los Angeles ""I've always known that Peter Morville was smart. After reading Ambient Findability, I now know he's (as we say in Boston) wicked smart. This is a timely book that will have lasting effects on how we create our future." --Jared Spool, Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering ""In Ambient Findability, Peter Morville has put his mind and keyboard on the pulse of the electronic noosphere. With tangible examples and lively writing, he lays out the challenges and wonders of finding our way in cyberspace, and explains the mutually dependent evolution of our changing world and selves. This is a must read for everyone and a practical guide for designers."" --Gary Marchionini, Ph.D., University of North Carolina ""Find this book! Anyone interested in makinginformation easier to find, or understanding how finding and being found is changing, will find this thoroughly researched, engagingly written, literate, insightful and very, very cool book well worth their time. Myriad examples from rich and varied domains and a valuable idea on nearly every page. Fun to read, too!" --Joseph Janes, Ph.D., Founder, Internet Public Library

A rollicking exposé of modern life, Pamela Lu's Ambient Parking Lot is about the unspoken, with aims to represent the voice of an emerging... counterculture. The book chronicles the artistic whims and serious-minded endeavors of a band of musicians who record the sounds of parking lots, as they wander the overdeveloped landscape of a city and its exurbs, collaborate with a dance troupe to protest a war, and stumble into the sought-after yet volatile public and academic arenas. Crafted with language that alternates between the poetic, witty, outrageous, and tender, Lu's work of fiction moves swiftly from the droll to the compelling, narrated by a "we" that relates not just the story of a band but of a country--its continuing dependency on the automobile and the consequences to the natural world: "We zoomed toward the outlands, where drooping electrical wires traced patterns of drift and escape. We hurtled into the hinterlands, where underground silos housed long-range ballistic missiles. Smog was a steady artifact, a low-lying smear across a canvas of middling air." Reminiscent of the ecological plot of a Hayao Miyazaki film, the band grapples with their contemporary environment and amplifies the parking lots' white noise for their audiences, while a consciousness grows in them of what they are really hearing and in the reader of where Lu is taking us. The band's transformation in the end takes place with the help of two momentous characters, a pirate radio station master and a performance artist (each narrated by an "I" in a separate chapter that interrupts the main storyline), who reveal their own paths to transformation.

In Syria, the image of President Hafiz al-Asad is everywhere. In newspapers, on television, and during orchestrated spectacles Asad is praised as the... "father," the "gallant knight," even the country's "premier pharmacist." Yet most Syrians, including those who create the official rhetoric, do not believe its claims. Why would a regime spend scarce resources on a cult whose content is patently spurious?Wedeen concludes that Asad's cult acts as a disciplinary device, generating a politics of public dissimulation in which citizens act as if they revered their leader. By inundating daily life with tired symbolism, the regime exercises a subtle, yet effective form of power. The cult works to enforce obedience, induce complicity, isolate Syrians from one another, and set guidelines for public speech and behavior. Wedeen's ethnographic research demonstrates how Syrians recognize the disciplinary aspects of the cult and seek to undermine them. Provocative and original, Ambiguities of Domination is a significant contribution to comparative politics, political theory, and cultural studies.

"Get it up!" demands the narrator of Frederick Mark Kramer's new novel, Ambiguity, of himself as he lies down to rest, as if his sexual energy could... save him. However, for Kramer's narrator, Darko, sexual energy alone, although it abounds in Darko's memory, cannot save him. This is a novel about breath, or, as Darko calls it, "the pneuma." Darko says that "the pneuma can mean the breath of life or the destruction of life," and in between is where this novel takes place. Clearly Darko uses his entire life as his inspiration here, "inspiration" meaning "breathing in." Then Darko recounts this life in ten paragraphs that are gymnastic and acrobatic and celebrate corporeal existence. This is the "perspiration," or the "breathing through" life that Darko has exercised. His ten paragraphs, though, are ten breaths, ten exhalations, leading to a final "breathing out," or "expiration," as he takes to his bed, exhausted, demanding of himself a new beginning, not just the release of orgasm, but the orgasmic seeding of new life, a creative re-fertilization of the world and the rebirth of oneself. As always, Kramer is both resolutely readable and profoundly resonant in his work. Those familiar with his masterful novel Apostrophe/Parenthesis will find in Ambiguity that Kramer has produced another masterpiece that rivals the best works of anyone.---Eckhard Gerdes

Sambo Diallo finds his situation is ambiguous; while he has become estranged from the simple Muslim faith of his people in Senegal, he is unable to... identify with the soulless material civilization he finds in France where he is sent to learn the secrets of white man's power.

The celebrated classic by a groundbreaking figure in African literature addresses a critical contemporary issue—the collision of Islamic African... values and Western culture.Hailed by Chinua Achebe as one of the greatest African novels ever written, this long-unavailable classic tells the tale of young Samba Diallo, a devout pupil in a Koranic school in Senegal whose parents send him to Paris to study philosophy.But unknown to Samba, it is a desperate attempt by his parents to better understand the French colonial forces transforming their traditional way of life. Instead, for Samba, it seems an exciting adventure, and once in France he excels at his new studies and is delighted by his new "marvelous comprehension and total communion" with the Western world.Soon, though, he finds himself torn between the materialistic secularism and isolation of French civilization and the deeper spiritual influences of his homeland. As Samba puts it: "I have become the two."Written in an elegant, lyrical prose, Ambiguous Adventure is a masterful expression of the immigrant experience and the repercussions of colonialism, and a great work of literature about the uneasy relationship between Islamic Africa and the West—a relationship more important today than ever before.

The work narratives of women school superintendents. Their profession is dominated by men and so, these women tell stories of how they rose to... influential positions, developing confidence in their authority and ability, while confronting discrimination by gender and race.
The subjects are from a variety of backgrounds and races.

When a loved one dies we mourn our loss. We take comfort in the rituals that mark the passing, and we turn to those around us for support. But what... happens when there is no closure, when a family member or a friend who may be still alive is lost to us nonetheless? How, for example, does the mother whose soldier son is missing in action, or the family of an Alzheimer's patient who is suffering from severe dementia, deal with the uncertainty surrounding this kind of loss? In this sensitive and lucid account, Pauline Boss explains that, all too often, those confronted with such ambiguous loss fluctuate between hope and hopelessness. Suffered too long, these emotions can deaden feeling and make it impossible for people to move on with their lives. Yet the central message of this book is that they can move on. Drawing on her research and clinical experience, Boss suggests strategies that can cushion the pain and help families come to terms with their grief. Her work features the heartening narratives of those who cope with ambiguous loss and manage to leave their sadness behind, including those who have lost family members to divorce, immigration, adoption, chronic mental illness, and brain injury. With its message of hope, this eloquent book offers guidance and understanding to those struggling to regain their lives.

What do ordinary citizens really think about issues of gender equality and gender roles? Combining data from both telephone surveys and in-depth focus... groups, Ambition and Accommodation provides the most detailed portrait to date of how Americans, in particular American women, think they are faring in today's society.By juxtaposing the voices of women and men from all walks of life, Sigel finds that women's perceptions of gender relations are complex and often contradictory. Although most women see gender discrimination pervading nearly all social interactions—private as well as public—they do not invariably feel that they personally have been its victims. They want to see discrimination ended, but believe that men do not necessarily share this goal. Women are torn, according to Sigel, between the desire to improve their positions relative to men and the desire to avoid open conflict with them. Their desire not to jeopardize their relations with men, Sigel holds, helps explain women's willingness to accommodate a less-than-egalitarian situation by, for example, taking on the second shift at home or by working harder than men on the job. Sigel concludes that, although men and women agree on the principle of gender equality, definitions as well as practice differ by gender.This complex picture of how women, while not always content with the status quo, have chosen to accommodate to the world they must face every day is certain to provoke considerable debate.

In what is both a specific study of conversion in a corner of the Spanish Empire and a work with implications for the understanding of European... domination and native resistance throughout the colonial world, Inga Clendinnen explores the intensifying conflict between competing and increasingly divergent Spanish visions of Yucatan and its destructive outcomes. In Ambivalent Conquests Clendinnen penetrates the thinking and feeling of the Mayan Indians in a detailed reconstruction of their assessment of the intruders. This new edition contains a preface by the author where she reflects upon the book's contribution in the past fifteen years. Inga Clendinnen is Emeritus scholar, LaTrobe University, Australia. Her books include the acclaimed Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge, 1999), named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, and Aztec: An Interpretation (Cambridge, 1995), and Tiger's Eye: A Memoir (Scribner, 2001).

In what is both a specific study of conversion in a corner of the Spanish Empire and a work with implications for the understanding of European... domination and native resistance throughout the colonial world, Inga Clendinnen explores the intensifying conflict between competing and increasingly divergent Spanish visions of Yucatan and its destructive outcomes. In Ambivalent Conquests Clendinnen penetrates the thinking and feeling of the Mayan Indians in a detailed reconstruction of their assessment of the intruders. This new edition contains a preface by the author where she reflects upon the book's contribution in the past fifteen years. Inga Clendinnen is Emeritus scholar, LaTrobe University, Australia. Her books include the acclaimed Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge, 1999), named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, and Aztec: An Interpretation (Cambridge, 1995), and Tiger's Eye: A Memoir (Scribner, 2001).