Crime is rampant; the City cries in pain. The call is made for a protector, a heroare you that hero? Do you feel the burning urge to fight evilbut maybe youre not quite sure where to start? Do I need a stickhow about a mask? Must I develop 6-pack abs before heading off into the night? What will the neighbours think? Well, youve had your entire life to be normal, and what did that get you? Probably not muchor maybe it has; good for you! Its time to get positive, its time to get crazy; its time to impose your glorious, indomitable will upon the world at large. So dont plod through another day at your boring, lame-ass job, surrounded by coworkers that you hate, with a boss you want to shove face-first into a filthy toilet bowl. Put on your ski mask and grab the old baseball batits time to go bash some scum! Justice! Brutality! Ultra-violence! Heed the call!!! {Disclaimer: Dont actually heed the call, or youll end up dead or imprisoned. Reality checksorry.}

_____________ Ross Kemp has encountered conflict and warfare the world over, broadcasting from some of the most volatile military hot-zones. From meeting the world's deadliest gangsters, to perhaps his hardest assignment of all; embedded with the British Army in Afghanistan's Helmand province, where he witnessed some of the fiercest fighting of the conflict and was trained in the tactics they use to stay alive. Stationed with British forces for his award-winning television documentaries, Ross Kemp has not only experienced the terror and exhilaration of life on the frontline, but also the courage and leadership of today's servicemen and women. The plight of our Armed Forces is one especially close to his heart, and here for the first time Kemp tells the breathtaking stories of commandos, medics, submariners, fighter pilots, infantrymen, sailors and engineers in daring raids, stirring last stands and acts of extreme valour. British Fighting Heroes is Ross Kemp's personal tribute to some of the most remarkable men and women to have served in the British Armed Forces during the two World Wars, many of them unsung or forgotten. From Sgt Major Stan Hollis, D-Day's only VC winner, to Freddie Spencer Chapman the reluctant war hero who spent three years behind enemy lines in Burma fighting guerrilla warfare against troops, each account is an extraordinary tale of courage, adventure and patriotic sacrifice.

Sometimes, life deals you a brutal hand... When a wealthy business owner is found dead in a Mumbai parking lot, the police are flummoxed. Alok Dalal was a family man, with a wife and a teenage daughter, and no apparent enemies. Who could want him dead? And the only clue is a note with the word 'Sorry' on it-what could it mean? As Inspector Abhay Rastogi investigates the baffling crime, the police find another body with a similar note. Is this a copycat crime, or are the two murders related? Will there be more bodies? Inspector Rastogi must race against time to catch an alarmingly elusive killer. Packed with twists and turns, and non-stop action, A Brutal Hand will keep readers guessing until the very end.

Hun, the universal appellation for terror, was earned with brutality and blood. Legend has it that Mahira, a Hun dynasty King of the early 6th century, was the most cruel man of all time. Sagala, the capital of his vast but dying empire, that extended from the Central Steppes, over the Hindu Kush, into what is modern-day Pakistan and north-western India, to the borders of the Gupta Empire, was a place where unrivalled beauty and extreme bestiality existed in uneasy alliance. Like his predecessors, Mahira too, had visions that made him both feared as well as invincible. Obsessed with the desire to rule the world, he set off into the grasslands of Central Asia, on a journey to unite every kingdom known to man, under his savage rule. But the Gods scoffed at his hubris and visited him with nightmarish visions and excruciating pain. A prisoner of intense suffering, Mahira grew ever more erratic, ever more brutal. His heinous murder of the King of Lanka, lives on in folklore to this day. On taking the kingdom of Kashmir, he ordered the massacre of the entire Buddhist population. On a whim, he slaughtered a hundred of his own elephants. But, as this victim of malady escapes execution, hatred, betrayal, conflict and war, all he truly desires is the love of his Queen. Centuries have passed since King Mahira lived and ruled, but his infamy and deeds live on in legend and folklore. And echoes of his aggression, quest for power, world domination and subjugation of people, resound 1400 years later, with dangerous portent, in a world given increasingly to violence and terror.

How artists created an aesthetic of “positive barbarism” in a world devastated by World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb In Brutal Aesthetics, leading art historian Hal Foster explores how postwar artists and writers searched for a new foundation of culture after the massive devastation of World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb. Inspired by the notion that modernist art can teach us how to survive a civilization become barbaric, Foster examines the various ways that key figures from the early 1940s to the early 1960s sought to develop a “brutal aesthetics” adequate to the destruction around them. With a focus on the philosopher Georges Bataille, the painters Jean Dubuffet and Asger Jorn, and the sculptors Eduardo Paolozzi and Claes Oldenburg, Foster investigates a manifold move to strip art down, or to reveal it as already bare, in order to begin again. What does Bataille seek in the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux? How does Dubuffet imagine an art brut, an art unscathed by culture? Why does Jorn populate his paintings with “human animals”? What does Paolozzi see in his monstrous figures assembled from industrial debris? And why does Oldenburg remake everyday products from urban scrap? A study of artistic practices made desperate by a world in crisis, Brutal Aesthetics is an intriguing account of a difficult era in twentieth-century culture, one that has important implications for our own. Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Please note: All images in this ebook are presented in black and white and have been reduced in size.