The bestselling Journey to the West comic book by artist Chang Boon Kiat is now back in a brand new fully coloured edition. Journey to the West is one of the greatest classics in Chinese literature. It tells the epic tale of the monk Xuanzang who journeys to the West in search of the Buddhist sutras with his disciples, Sun Wukong, Sandy and Pigsy. Along the way, Xuanzang's life was threatened by the diabolical White Bone Spirit, the menacing Red Child and his fearsome parents and, a host of evil spirits who sought to devour Xuanzang's flesh to attain immortality. Bear witness to the formidable Sun Wukong's (Monkey God) prowess as he takes them on, using his Fiery Eyes, Golden Cudgel, Somersault Cloud, and quick wits! Be prepared for a galloping read that will leave you breathless!

Get ready to take an exciting cross-country trip across the United States--from the big cities of the Northeast to the deserts of the Southwest. Engaging text and thrilling images introduce you to the unique geography, history, and culture of our country's various regions.

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Sunday Times (UK) * The Guardian (UK) * The Washington Independent Review of Books * Sydney Morning Herald * The Los Angeles Public Library * The Irish Independent * Real Simple * Finalist for the Rathbones Folio Prize “Carys Davies is a deft, audacious visionary.” —Téa Obreht When widowed mule breeder Cy Bellman reads in the newspaper that colossal ancient bones have been discovered in the salty Kentucky mud, he sets out from his small Pennsylvania farm to see for himself if the rumors are true: that the giant monsters are still alive and roam the uncharted wilderness beyond the Mississippi River. Promising to write and to return in two years, he leaves behind his only daughter, Bess, to the tender mercies of his taciturn sister and heads west. With only a barnyard full of miserable animals and her dead mother’s gold ring to call her own, Bess, unprotected and approaching womanhood, fills lonely days tracing her father’s route on maps at the subscription library and waiting for his letters to arrive. Bellman, meanwhile, wanders farther and farther from home, across harsh and alien landscapes, in reckless pursuit of the unknown. From Frank O’Connor Award winner Carys Davies, West is a spellbinding and timeless epic-in-miniature, an eerie parable of the American frontier and an electric monument to possibility.

When American slaveholders looked west in the mid-nineteenth century, they saw an empire unfolding before them. They pursued that vision through diplomacy, migration, and armed conquest. By the late 1850s, slaveholders and their allies had transformed the southwestern quarter of the nation – California, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Utah – into a political client of the plantation states. Across this vast swath of the map, white southerners defended the institution of African American chattel slavery as well as systems of Native American bondage. This surprising history uncovers the Old South in unexpected places, far beyond the region's cotton fields and sugar plantations. Slaveholders' western ambitions culminated in a coast-to-coast crisis of the Union. By 1861, the rebellion in the South inspired a series of separatist movements in the Far West. Even after the collapse of the Confederacy, the threads connecting South and West held, undermining the radical promise of Reconstruction. Kevin Waite brings to light what contemporaries recognized but historians have described only in part: The struggle over slavery played out on a transcontinental stage.

Presents folklore and legends, heroes and villains, wars and important events in the history of the Old West. Includes also examples of Western art and music.

Two very different worlds for two very different lives.When tragedy strikes, her love story is anything but over.

Literature has not always been written in the same ways, nor has it been received or read in the same ways over the course of Western civilization. Cavallo (Greek palaeography, U. of Rome La Sapienza), Chartier (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris) and a number of other international contributors, address themes that highlight the transformation of reading methods and materials over the ages, such as the way texts in the Middle Ages were often written with the voice in mind, as they would have been read aloud, or even sung. Articles explore the innovations in the physical evolution of the book, as well as the growth and development of a broad-based reading public.

"This is science writing as wonder and as inspiration." —The Wall Street Journal Wall Street Journal From one of the most influential scientists of our time, a dazzling exploration of the hidden laws that govern the life cycle of everything from plants and animals to the cities we live in. Visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term “complexity” can be misleading, however, because what makes West’s discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities and our businesses. Fascinated by aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. The result was astonishing, and changed science: West found that despite the riotous diversity in mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. If you know the size of a mammal, you can use scaling laws to learn everything from how much food it eats per day, what its heart-rate is, how long it will take to mature, its lifespan, and so on. Furthermore, the efficiency of the mammal’s circulatory systems scales up precisely based on weight: if you compare a mouse, a human and an elephant on a logarithmic graph, you find with every doubling of average weight, a species gets 25% more efficient—and lives 25% longer. Fundamentally, he has proven, the issue has to do with the fractal geometry of the networks that supply energy and remove waste from the organism’s body. West’s work has been game-changing for biologists, but then he made the even bolder move of exploring his work’s applicability. Cities, too, are constellations of networks and laws of scalability relate with eerie precision to them. Recently, West has applied his revolutionary work to the business world. This investigation has led to powerful insights into why some companies thrive while others fail. The implications of these discoveries are far-reaching, and are just beginning to be explored. Scale is a thrilling scientific adventure story about the elemental natural laws that bind us together in simple but profound ways. Through the brilliant mind of Geoffrey West, we can envision how cities, companies and biological life alike are dancing to the same simple, powerful tune.

The West is on everyone's lips: it is defended, celebrated, hated. But how and why did it emerge? And whose idea is it? This book is about representations of the West. Drawing on sources from across the world - from Russia to Japan, Iran to Britain - it argues that the West is not merely a Western idea but something that many people around the world have long been creating and stereotyping. The Idea of the West looks at how the great political and ethnic forces of the last century defined themselves in relation to the West, addresses how Soviet communism, 'Asian spirituality', 'Asian values' and radical Islamism used and deployed images of the West. Both topical and wide-ranging, it offers an accessible but provocative portrait of a fascinating subject and it charts the complex relationship between whiteness and the West.

This vivid narrative history -- magnificently illustrated with more than 400 photographs, many of them never before published -- takes us on a gripping journey through the turbulent history of the region that has come to symbolize America around the world. Drawing on hundreds of letters, diaries, memoirs, and journals as well as the latest scholarship, The West presents a cast as rich and diverse as the western landscape itself: explorers and soldiers and Indian warriors, settlers and railroad builders and gaudy showmen. The book is filled with stories of heroism and hope, enterprise and adventure, as well as tragedy and disappointment. It explores the tensions between whites and the native peoples they sought to displace, but it also encompasses the Hispanic experience in the West. Gracefully written, handsomely designed, meticulously researched, The West is an unrivaled work of history that brilliantly captures all the drama and excitement, the sober realities and bright myths of the American West. Book jacket.