Adrienne is an Irish artist who has come to live in Venice after the breakup of her marriage. She meetsGiorgio, a water-taxi driver who happens to be a former Irish Republican sniper. His death was faked during the "Troubles" to take the heat off him and he was given a new identity. He is now an embarrassment to former colleagues in government in Northern Ireland, as well as being a target for a drugs gang whose leader he had 'taken out' in his sniping days.

When one is fated for death from the moment of birth, it can make life... difficult. Karmakat is a black lion, a death sentence in itself, because it means there is a demon sharing his soul. A monk passing through rescues the infant and magically seals the demon. Spending their lives training together, the young lion follows in his master's footsteps - until the master's death at the hands of a vicious demon. Striking out on his own, following what he believes to be his destiny, he fights the demons alone. Protecting others as his master protected him. One day he rescues a model - a playboy wolf named Lukwos - who befriends the lone fighter. Teaming up, the pair travel a dangerous road as the demons they fight become more vicious and abundant every day. Lukwos encourages Karmakat to find a life beyond demon fighting, beyond the solitary existence he has known since the master's death. Can he bring himself to put another life in danger, fighting the darkness and what lurks behind it?

Just when things couldn't get any better... Karmakat has settled into a life with his mate and adopted family, wanting for nothing more than a normal life. As normal as it can be for someone in his situation, anyways. Then something changes. Can the hope of a new future mend a soul torn apart by its past? The story of our group continues as they face new trials, encounter new situations and uncover revelations about old enemies and their own legacies.

Publisher Fact Sheet Wheeler provides insight into what a caregiver's day is like, as he shares his most intimate thoughts with us. The book provides a window into the author's personal life as he seeks to confront his own ineptitude & the occasional despair he feels as he deals daily with Alzheimer's.

Middle Eastern immigration to Mexico is one of the intriguing, untold stories in the history of both regions. In So Far from Allah, So Close to Mexico, Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp presents the fascinating findings of her extensive fieldwork in Mexico as well as in Lebanon and Syria, which included comprehensive data collection from more than 8,000 original immigration cards as well as studies of decades of legal publications and the collection of historiographies from descendents of Middle Eastern immigrants living in Mexico today. Adding an important chapter to studies of the Arab diaspora, Alfaro-Velcamp's study shows that political instability in both Mexico and the Middle East kept many from fulfilling their dreams of returning to their countries of origin after realizing wealth in Mexico, in a few cases drawing on an imagined Phoenician past to create a class of economically powerful Lebanese Mexicans. She also explores the repercussions of xenophobia in Mexico, the effect of religious differences, and the impact of key events such as the Mexican Revolution. Challenging the post-revolutionary definitions of mexicanidad and exposing new aspects of the often contradictory attitudes of Mexicans toward foreigners, So Far from Allah, So Close to Mexico should spark timely dialogues regarding race and ethnicity, and the essence of Mexican citizenship.

Nicholas Nixon is known for the ease and intimacy of his large format photography. He has photographed porch life in the rural South, the changing Boston cityscape, sick and dying people, the intimacy of couples, and an ongoing annual portrait of his wife Bebe and her three sisters, beginning in 1975. Included in the seminal 1975 exhibition "New Topographics", Nixon is major figure in American photography of the latter half of the twentieth century. In Close Far, Nixon presents a dichotomous group of photos made with his signature large-format view camera, in this case one with an 11x14 inch negative. The first half of the book contains self-portraits, comprising in Nixon's words "sketches of an old man". Filled with anxiety, longing and contentedness, these images chronicle the shapes, slopes and pores of Nixon's face. The second half of the book shows views of buildings in the densest part of Boston. Made from high within the buildings and with the same camera, these images without horizons do not gaze down upon but rather "through" the city. With the lens in the same orientation as his self-portrait photos, Nixon's results are remarkable for their richness of detail and complexity of form.

This book is a condensation of a large body of work concerning human learning carried out over a period of more than five years by Dr. Sun and his collaborators. In a nutshell, this work is concerned with a broad framework for studying human cognition based on a new approach that is characterized by its focus on the dichotomy of, and the interaction between, explicit and implicit cognition and a computational model that implements this framework. In this work, a broad, generic computational model was developed that instantiates Dr. Sun's framework and enables the testing of his theoretical approach in a variety of ways. With this model, simulation results were matched with data of human cognition in a variety of different domains. Formal (mathematical and computational) analyses were also carried out to further explore the model and its numerous implementational details. Furthermore, this book addresses some of the most significant theoretical issues, such as symbol grounding, intentionality, social cognition, consciousness, and other theoretical issues in relation to the framework. The general framework and the model developed generate interesting insights into these theoretical issues.

Maps poised at the intersection of art, architecture, activism, and geography trace a profound shift in our understanding and experience of space. The maps in this book are drawn with satellites, assembled with pixels radioed from outer space, and constructed from statistics; they record situations of intense conflict and express fundamental transformations in our ways of seeing and of experiencing space. These maps are built with Global Positioning Systems (GPS), remote sensing satellites, or Geographic Information Systems (GIS): digital spatial hardware and software designed for such military and governmental uses as reconnaissance, secrecy, monitoring, ballistics, the census, and national security. Rather than shying away from the politics and complexities of their intended uses, in Close Up at a Distance Laura Kurgan attempts to illuminate them. Poised at the intersection of art, architecture, activism, and geography, her analysis uncovers the implicit biases of the new views, the means of recording information they present, and the new spaces they have opened up. Her presentation of these maps reclaims, repurposes, and discovers new and even inadvertent uses for them, including documentary, memorial, preservation, interpretation, political, or simply aesthetic. GPS has been available to both civilians and the military since 1991; the World Wide Web democratized the distribution of data in 1992; Google Earth has captured global bird's-eye views since 2005. Technology has brought about a revolutionary shift in our ability to navigate, inhabit, and define the spatial realm. The traces of interactions, both physical and virtual, charted by the maps in Close Up at a Distance define this shift.