Highlights Our Country'S Rich biographical history. Fifty notable people have selected a person from the past whom they admire, but feel they have not received the infamy they deserve.

Invisible Giants is about leadership, choices in life and the potential in everyone to make a difference. Lindsay Levin, who founded the social enterprise Leaders' Quest, tells the stories of the remarkable people she has met, and their impact on the world. They are individuals who have overcome a lack of education and resources to re-energise their communities, and business leaders who strive to integrate purpose alongside profit. They are female activists in slums campaigning to end the exclusion of girls from school, and environmentalists tackling the effects of industrialisation on the world's ecosystem. They are the people we meet every day, who are revisiting their life choices. It's also the story of Lindsay's own quest to ask: "what really matters?" and to figure out where the answers can take her.

A comprehensive biography of the rise of the famous railroad barons who developed Shaker Heights, Ohio. Invisible Giants is the Horatio Alger-esque tale of a pair of reclusive Cleveland brothers, Oris Paxton and Mantis James Van Sweringen, who rose from poverty to become two of the most powerful men in America. They controlled the country’s largest railroad system—a network of track reaching from the Atlantic to Salt Lake City and from Ontario to the Gulf of Mexico. On the eve of the Great Depression they were close to controlling the country’s first coast-to-coast rail system—a goal that still eludes us. They created the model upper-class suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio, with its unique rapid transit access. They built Cleveland’s landmark Terminal Tower and its innovative “city within a city” complex. Indisputably, they created modern Cleveland. Yet beyond a small, closely knit circle, the bachelor Van Sweringen brothers were enigmas. Their actions were aggressive, creative, and bold, but their manner was modest, mild, and retiring. Dismissed by many as mere shoestring financial manipulators, they created enduring works, which remain strong today. The Van Sweringen story begins in early-twentieth-century Cleveland suburban real estate and reaches its zenith in the heady late 1920s, amid the turmoil of national transportation power politics and unprecedented empire-building. As the Great Depression destroyed many of their fellow financiers, the “Vans” survived through imaginative stubbornness—until tragedy ended their careers almost simultaneously. Invisible Giants is the first comprehensive biography of these two remarkable if mysterious men.

Invisible Giants is the Horatio Alger-esque tale of a pair of reclusive Cleveland brothers, Oris Paxton and Mantis James Van Sweringen, who rose from poverty to become two of the most powerful men in America. They controlled the country's largest railroad system—a network of track reaching from the Atlantic to Salt Lake City and from Ontario to the Gulf of Mexico. On the eve of the Great Depression they were close to controlling the country's first coast-to-coast rail system—a goal that still eludes us. They created the model upper-class suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio, with its unique rapid transit access. They built Cleveland's landmark Terminal Tower and its innovative "city within a city" complex. Indisputably, they created modern Cleveland. Yet beyond a small, closely knit circle, the bachelor Van Sweringen brothers were enigmas. Their actions were aggressive, creative, and bold, but their manner was modest, mild, and retiring. Dismissed by many as mere shoestring financial manipulators, they created enduring works, which remain strong today. The Van Sweringen story begins in early-20th-century Cleveland suburban real estate and reaches its zenith in the heady late 1920s, amid the turmoil of national transportation power politics and unprecedented empire-building. As the Great Depression destroyed many of their fellow financiers, the "Vans" survived through imaginative stubbornness—until tragedy ended their careers almost simultaneously. Invisible Giants is the first comprehensive biography of these two remarkable if mysterious men.

In Ghost Words and Invisible Giants, Lheisa Dustin engages psychoanalytic theory to describe the “language of suffering” of iconic modernist authors H.D. and Djuna Barnes, tracing disconnection, psychic splitting, and virulent thought patterns in creative works that have usually been read as intentionally enigmatic. Dustin imbricates Barnes and H.D.’s sense of tenuous psychic boundaries with others – parent figures, otherworldly and divine beings, and ambivalent or malignant love objects – in their creative brilliance, suggesting that the writers’ works stage – and also help manage – their psychic suffering in language in which signifier (the sound or image of the word) and signified (what it means) are radically disconnected. The cryptic and ineffable styles of these texts thus involve attempts to embody the meanings that cannot be expressed through language. Dustin reads two of H.D.’s later works as examples of language that does not differentiate words, thoughts, and people from one another, and instead tries to include everything in its formulations of meaning. However, H.D., she argues, also seeks an end to this mental proliferation– an end that she associates with the hallucinatory return of difference as such. In contrast, Dustin reads two novels by Barnes as invoking and denying childhood secrets through the use of fetishized words. To supplement her psychoanalytic readings, Dustin considers the authors’ familial and romantic histories and their broader social involvements or noninvolvement (for instance, H.D.’s Occultist practices and psychoanalytic sessions, Barnes’s fascination with spectacle and her later reclusion), rendering a detailed and compelling analysis of the forces at play beneath enigmatic, “difficult” modernist literary works. Read in this light, the spectral and otherworldly figures and strange patterns of expression appearing in H.D.’s and Barnes’s writing, and perhaps much or our writing, signal the traumatic content that it tries to negate.

How and why did a brilliant Spanish natural scientist meet his death in the Hindu Kush?

One of four extraordinary graphic novels celebrating the Big Apple, from the master of American comics art.

This is the story of over 4,000 years of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Women have been active scientists since the beginning of written history. Their stories enrich and enlighten us. Follow their trail from the very beginning until today. They provide a clear vision for our future when women and men working together solve the problems of society. This third edition contains stories of over 200 women as well as a special section on the history of women's rights in antiquity.

Three installments of the New York Times–bestselling series set in a land of enchantment filled with magic, surprises, adventure, and—best of all—puns! The world of Xanth is a wacky one full of offbeat heroes and surprising journeys. In these three volumes of this hilarious series, characters bumble their way through many misadventures to find their happy ending on the other side, aided and hindered by puns along the way. Board Stiff: Thanks to a mental typo and an ornery wishing well the once beautiful Irrelevant Kandy is now a board of wood—with mind control powers. And Ease wishes everything wasn’t so easy. Fortunately, Humfrey the Good Magician is there to provide them with a quest: saving the puns of Xanth. But who released a virus that could destroy Xanth’s essence, and will Kandy and Ease figure out how to stop it in time? Five Portraits: Astrid Basilisk is a sweet girl whose very glance is deadly. As she embarks on a selfless mission to save five difficult children from future Xanth, she must fight the pun virus that threatens to destroy the magical world. Isis Orb: Hapless has the ability to conjure any musical instrument he wants, but he can’t carry a tune in a bucket. All he wants is to learn to play an instrument and get a girlfriend. When the Good Magician hears about his desperate desire, he sends Hapless on a quest to find the elusive Isis Orb, a magical talisman that could fulfill his wish. But the mysterious Egyptian goddess guarding it isn’t going to let him simply take it.

What purpose does the news media serve in contemporary North American society? In this collection of essays, experts from both the United States and Canada investigate this question, exploring the effects of media concentration in democratic systems. Specifically, the scholars collected here consider, from a range of vantage points, how corporate and technological convergence in the news industry in the United States and Canada impacts journalism's expressed role as a medium of democratic communication. More generally, and by necessity, Converging Media, Diverging Politics speaks to larger questions about the role that the production and circulation of news and information does, can, and should serve. The editors have gathered an impressive array of critical essays, featuring interesting and well-documented case studies that will prove useful to both students and researchers of communications and media studies.