"This book makes us understand an historical event of world importance, the liberation of Zimbabwe, from the point of view of ordinary people...It is not only a specific study of great brilliance but also a model which shows how anthropology can contribute to politics and history."—Maurice Bloch, Professor of Anthropology, London School of Economics, in his preface to this book

In the 1990s, the New Orleans murder rate exploded. In 1996, 350 people were killed—the highest number in the city’s history, and the highest rate in the nation. In response to this crisis, gallery owner and artist Jonathan Ferrara and artist Brian Borrello, launched a powerful project: Guns in the Hands of Artists. Over sixty artists, including painters, glass artists, sculptors, photographers, and poets, used decommissioned guns taken off the city streets via a gun buyback program to express a thought, make a statement, open a discussion, and to stimulate thinking about guns and gun violence in America. As gun violence continues to devastate the nation on a daily basis, Guns in the Hands of Artists reemerged in 2012 as a community-based social activist art project that has since traveled to six cities across the US. Using art as a mirror for life and interweaving the works of thirty diverse artists with the voices of seventeen national thought leaders, this book is an important outgrowth of the exhibition and an extension of its efforts to employ art as a vehicle for dialogue, as a call to action, and—ultimately—as an agent of change. Essays by: Walter Isaacson, Senator Tim Kaine, Lupe Fiasco, Richard Ford, Joe Nocera, Trymaine Lee, Lolis Eric Elie, John M. Barry, Dan Cameron, Lucia McBath, Harry Shearer, Jonathan Ferrara, Brian Borrello, Maria Cuomo Cole, Michael Waldman, E. Ethelbert Miller, Mayor Mitchell J. Landrieu, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and Captain Mark Kelly.

A STORM IS COMING When she first moved to Japan, American Katie Greene had no idea she would get caught in a battle between the Japanese Mafia and the supernatural forces that have governed Japan for most of its history. Despite the danger, Katie is determined to stay put. Tomohiro, the guy's she fallen in love with, is struggling—his connection to the ancient gods of Japan and his power to bring drawings to life have begun to spiral out of control. When Tomo decides to stop drawing, the ink finds other ways to seep into his life—blackouts, threatening messages and the appearance of unexplained sketches. In order to save themselves, Katie and Tomohiro must unravel the truth about Tomo's dark ancestry and confront one of the darkest gods in Japanese legend.

With an introduction by W. Axl Rose Del James unleashes an extraordinary collection of snapshots from hell—our hell. Here are spine-chilling stories of everyday people, all caught up in terrible urges—sex and obsession, addiction and violence—all sharing the universal language of fear. . . . A heavy-metal dreamer locked in a savage war with his television set. An artist seduced by a vampire. Two boys trapped by an urban legend come to life—or a drug-induced nightmare. A modern-day gladiator engaged in a brutal death match. A rock-and-roll star who years to be with the one good woman he has ever known—and so ignites a blaze of mad destruction. Praise for The Language of Fear “The Language of Fear is spoken in tunes of rock'n'roll, of barking dogs and net-trapped fish, of acid-sizzled flesh and tattoo needles, and after these few lessons, you'll speak it too.”—Cemetery Dance “Pissed-off, heartbroken rock'n'roll horror: surprisingly tender, garage-band crude, savage as a shotgun blast and audacious as an exit wound.”—John Skipp “After a hard day in Hell, James writes down what he saw. Good reading.”—John Shirley “Best described as an updated Night Shift, the contemporary tales [are] short and nasty.”—Cindy Baum, Scream Magazine

A Tokyo college student’s discovery and eventual obsession with a stolen handgun awakens something dark inside him. On a nighttime walk along a Tokyo riverbank, a young man named Nishikawa stumbles on a dead body, beside which lies a gun. From the moment Nishikawa decides to take the gun, the world around him blurs. Knowing he possesses the weapon brings an intoxicating sense of purpose to his dull university life. But soon Nishikawa’s personal entanglements become unexpectedly complicated: he finds himself romantically involved with two women while his biological father, whom he’s never met, lies dying in a hospital. Through it all, he can’t stop thinking about the gun—and the four bullets loaded in its chamber. As he spirals into obsession, his focus is consumed by one idea: that possessing the gun is no longer enough—he must fire it.

Guns N' Roses fans know the Use Your Illusion tour went on nonstop from 1991 to 1993. They know that concerts sold out in minutes all over the world so fans could hear chart-topping singles Welcome to the Jungle, Sweet Child of Mine, Paradise City, and November Rain live. They know the Use Your Illusion tour was the last for the band with Slash and Duff. But they've only heard rumors of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans. Fortunately for fans, Craig Duswalt hasn't just heard rumors—he knows what went on backstage on one of the longest and most popular music events because he lived it. As Axl Rose's personal assistant during the ridiculously long world tour, Duswalt experienced things that would make most people run the other way and never look back. And in Welcome to My Jungle, he shares the sometimes hilarious, sometimes just plain reckless, and always insane actual happenings on the tour. A true must-read for Guns N' Roses fans, Welcome to My Jungle delights readers with hilarious and entertaining exclusive firsthand stories like: •The day Axl Rose, Kurt Cobain, and Courtney Love got into a “huge war" backstage at the MTV Awards •Why Guns N' Roses are forever linked to Charles Manson •The night Liz Taylor walked in on a very nude Slash—and stayed a while Featuring little-known facts for the ultimate GN'R fan, Welcome To My Jungle gives an inside look at what it's really like to live and work with a hugely popular band, from the middle of a rock and roll hurricane.

Africa is playing a more important role in world affairs than ever before. Yet the most common images of Africa in the American mind are ones of poverty, starvation, and violent conflict. But while these problems are real, that does not mean that Africa is a lost cause. Instead, as Stephen Ellis explains in Season of Rains, we need to rethink Africa’s place in time if we are to understand it in all its complexity—it is a region where growth and prosperity coexist with failed states. This engaging, accessible book by one of the world’s foremost researchers on Africa captures the broad spectrum of political, economic, and social foundations that make Africa what it is today. Ellis is careful not to position himself in the futile debate between Afro-optimists and Afro-pessimists. The forty-nine diverse nations that make up sub-Saharan Africa are neither doomed to fail nor destined to succeed. As he assesses the challenges of African sovereignties, Ellis is not under the illusion that governments will suddenly become more benevolent and less corrupt. Yet, he sees great dynamism in recent technological and economic developments. The proliferation of mobile phones alone has helped to overcome previous gaps in infrastructure, African retail markets are becoming integrated, and banking is expanding. Businesses from China and emerging powers from the West are investing more than ever before in the still land-rich region, and globalization is offering possibilities of enormous economic change for the growing population of one billion Africans, actively engaged in charting the future of their continent. This highly readable survey of the continent today offers an indispensable guide to how money, power, and development are shaping Africa’s future.

2014 Button Poetry Prize Winner "These harrowing poems make montage, make mirrors, make elegiac biopic, make 'a dope ass trailer with a hundred black children / smiling into the camera & the last shot is the wide mouth of a pistol.' That's no spoiler alert, but rather, Smith's way–saying & laying it beautifully bare. A way of desensitizing the reader from his own defenses each time this long, black movie repeats."–Marcus Wicker "Danez Smith's BLACK MOVIE is a cinematic tour-de-force that lets poetry vie with film for the honor of which medium can most effectively articulate the experience of Black America."–Rain Taxi

Enigmatic for many years, cosmic rays are now known to be not rays at all, but particles, the nuclei of atoms, raining down continually on the earth, where they can be detected throughout the atmosphere and sometimes even thousands of feet underground. This book tells the long-running detective story behind the discovery and study of cosmic rays, a story that stretches from the early days of subatomic particle physics in the 1890s to the frontiers of high-energy astrophysics today. Writing for the amateur scientist and the educated general reader, Michael Friedlander, a cosmic ray researcher, relates the history of cosmic ray science from its accidental discovery to its present status. He explains how cosmic rays are identified and how their energies are measured, then surveys current knowledge and theories of thin cosmic rain. The most thorough, up-to-date, and readable account of these intriguing phenomena, his book makes us party to the search into the nature, behavior, and origins of cosmic rays—and into the sources of their enormous energy, sometimes hundreds of millions times greater than the energy achievable in the most powerful earthbound particle accelerators. As this search led unexpectedly to the discovery of new particles such as the muon, pion, kaon, and hyperon, and as it reveals scenes of awesome violence in the cosmos and offers clues about black holes, supernovas, neutron stars, quasars, and neutrinos, we see clearly why cosmic rays remain central to an astonishingly diverse range of research studies on scales infinitesimally small and large. Attractively illustrated, engagingly written, this is a fascinating inside look at a science at the center of our understanding of our universe.

RAIN & RUIN Book 2 Theresa Shaver, bestselling Amazon author of the Stranded Series brings you the second book in the Endless Winter Series set in a wrecked world. A hailstorm of bombs has blasted the world into a nuclear winter. The survivors have now spent seven long years in the snow and ash scratching out a lonely, hard existence. Although comfortable in her safe and supplied bunker, Skylar Ross longed for more of a life than what she has. She thought she found it when she rescued Rex but the evil that followed him inside her home threatened the one person she holds most dear. Can she put aside her mistrust of others and give him and his people a second chance? Rex Larson fell hard for Skylar and was excited about his group joining her in the safety of her bunker until he was betrayed by one of his own. Exiled back out into the cold, he prays that Skylar will change her mind. Forced to flee the town when a deadly gang moves in, the survivors huddle in the cold hoping the gang won't find them and for Skylar to change her mind. When the weather turns for the first time in seven years, they don't know if it means the earth is starting to heal or if it's just more ruin. Find out in Book 2 RAIN & RUIN