A rare espionage thriller set in the Civil War. Rabe Canon leaves his family's Alabama plantation at the start of the war, befriending Major Thomas Jackson of the Virginia Military Institute--later the esteemed Stonewall Jackson. Canon's military prowess quickly raises him to leader of the famed Black Horse Cavalry and brings him into the confidences of major figures in the upper echelons of the Confederacy. When Jackson suffers a mortal wound at the Battle of Chancellorsville, Canon suspects foul play. He's enlisted to undertake a cross-country journey both to secure a fortune for the Confederacy and to discover the truth behind Jackson's death. Canon's journey entangles him with a beautiful Yankee spy as they both try to avoid capture in gold-rich California.

“Fascinating . . . memorable . . . revealing . . . perhaps the best of Carl Sagan’s books.”—The Washington Post Book World (front page review) In Cosmos, the late astronomer Carl Sagan cast his gaze over the magnificent mystery of the Universe and made it accessible to millions of people around the world. Now in this stunning sequel, Carl Sagan completes his revolutionary journey through space and time. Future generations will look back on our epoch as the time when the human race finally broke into a radically new frontier—space. In Pale Blue Dot, Sagan traces the spellbinding history of our launch into the cosmos and assesses the future that looms before us as we move out into our own solar system and on to distant galaxies beyond. The exploration and eventual settlement of other worlds is neither a fantasy nor luxury, insists Sagan, but rather a necessary condition for the survival of the human race. “Takes readers far beyond Cosmos . . . Sagan sees humanity’s future in the stars.”—Chicago Tribune

This story is about a long suppressed love triangle between Leonidas Tachezy, a high-level Austrian career bureaucrat, his younger, trophy wife Amelie, and a Jewish woman from his past, Vera Wormser, with whom he'd fallen in love when she was fourteen. After his marriage, Leonidas encounters Vera in a German university town where she is studying philosophy. He makes a promise that implies marriage, but drops out of her life entirely to return to a comfortable existence until one day when a letter arrives, addressed with Vera's unmistakable handwriting in pale blue ink. Like Humbert Humbert in Lolita, Leonidas explains his "crime" against Vera to an imaginary courtroom in a way that anticipates Nabokov.

Blue Light of the Screen is a memoir about the author's obsession with horror and the supernatural. Blue Light of the Screen is about what it means to be afraid -- about immersion, superstition, delusion, and the things that keep us up at night. A creative-critical memoir of the author's obsession with the horror genre, Blue Light of the Screen embeds its criticism of horror within a larger personal story of growing up in a devoutly Catholic family, overcoming suicidal depression, uncovering intergenerational trauma, and encountering real and imagined ghosts. As Cronin writes, she positions herself as a protagonist who is haunted by what she watches and reads, like an antiquarian in an M.R. James ghost story whose sense of reality unravels through her study of arcane texts and cursed archives. In this way, Blue Light of the Screen tells the story of the author's conversion from skepticism to faith in the supernatural. Part memoir, part ghost story, and part critical theory, Blue Light of the Screen is not just a book about horror, but a work of horror itself.

This two-volume set LNCS 3760/3761 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the three confederated conferences CoopIS 2005, DOA 2005, and ODBASE 2005 held as OTM 2005 in Agia Napa, Cyprus in October/November 2005. The 89 revised full and 7 short papers presented together with 3 keynote speeches were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 360 submissions. Corresponding with the three OTM 2005 main conferences CoopIS, DOA, and ODBASE, the papers are organized in topical sections on workflow, workflow and business processes, mining and filtering, petri nets and processs management, information access and integrity, heterogeneity, semantics, querying and content delivery, Web services, agents, security, integrity and consistency, chain and collaboration mangement, Web services and service-oriented architectures, multicast and fault tolerance, communication services, techniques for application hosting, mobility, security and data persistence, component middleware, java environments, peer-to-peer computing architectures, aspect oriented middleware, information integration and modeling, query processing, ontology construction, metadata, information retrieval and classification, system verification and evaluation, and active rules and Web services.