Round, curvy, pointy, or straight-shapes are all around us. With vibrant illustrations that highlight shapes in all their forms, this informative book reinforces the identification of circles, squares, crescents, diamonds, triangles, rectangles, trapezoids, and ovals while encouraging kids to pair shapes together to make new forms.

In the fifth book of this middle grade sci-fi series, a teen abducted by aliens becomes a shape shifter, unrecognizable to everyone, even himself. For nine months, Todd Aldridge was missing. Stories swirled about him throughout his hometown of Metier, Wisconsin. Was he kidnapped? Abducted by aliens? The kids at his junior high school were keen on the alien story. Metier is a UFO hotspot, after all. Until one day, Todd is found alive beside the town reservoir. Everyone wants to know where the thirteen-year-old has been. Only Todd doesn’t remember anything, except for the light that filled the sky moments before he disappeared . . . Now Todd is beginning to wonder what happened. Especially when some of his classmates claim that he is an alien now—like them. Todd isn’t ready to believe them. Until he feels the power surging in his body and his shape beginning to shift. He morphs into a creature that he can only call otherworldly, a creature who will have to fight to survive the danger surrounding him . . .

"Fourteen ninety-something, / something happened / and no one can pick it out of the lineup . . . " In words drawn from urban and Navajo perspectives, Sherwin Bitsui articulates the challenge a Native American person faces in reconciling his or her inherited history of lore and spirit with the coldness of postmodern civilization. Shapeshift is a collection of startling new poetry that explores the tensions between the worlds of nature and man. Through brief, imagistic poems interspersed with evocative longer narratives, it offers powerful perceptions of American culture and politics and their lack of spiritual grounding. Linking story, history, and voice, Shapeshift is laced with interweaving images—the gravitational pull of a fishbowl, the scent of burning hair, the trickle of motor oil from a harpooned log—that speak to the rich diversity of contemporary Diné writing. "Tonight, I draw a raven's wing inside a circle measured a half second before it expands into a hand. I wrap its worn grip over our feet As we thrash against pine needles inside the earthen pot." With complexities of tone that shift between disconnectedness and wholeness, irony and sincerity, Bitsui demonstrates a balance of excitement and intellect rarely found in a debut volume. As deft as it is daring, Shapeshift teases the mind and stirs the imagination.

What if you were told by angels that you had been chosen to go on a spiritual journey? A journey where you would lead and inspire others to do the same... What if you had no idea what you were doing but you trusted anyway? In this opening short story to the Shaman's Awakening Series we meet Tatien Gallegos, shaman and medicine healer of a small village. She has been chosen. Her Spirit Guides the angels, fairies, elves, and more will journey with her as she walks the path to her soul's awakening. She doesn't know what this means but with love in her heart, her companions Hoot the Owl and Wort the Gnome, and her own magic, she embarks on a journey to find out. Let her experiences assist you in opening to your own true Self and personal power.

Energy Psychology presents a comprehensive approach to healing that combines leading-edge Western bodymind psychological methods with a broad system of ancient, sacred traditions. Incorporating Dr. Mayer's integral approach called Bodymind Healing Psychotherapy, Energy Psychology draws on Chinese medicine approaches, including Qigong and acupressure self-touch; kabalistic processes; methods drawn from ancient traditions of meditation and postural initiation; and psycho-mythological storytelling techniques.Drawing on thirty years of training in Tai Chi and Qigong, Dr. Michael Mayer shows how integrating the essences of these traditions and methods can restore vitality and give the average person self-healing tools for physical and mental health. Unlike the quick-fix books on energy restoration, this book uses timetested, age-old practices from sacred traditions in combination with well-established clinical approaches. Dr. Mayer teaches readers bodymind healing methods to treat anxiety, chronic pain, addictions, hypertension, insomnia, trauma, and other prevalent conditions. Written in a clear, intelligible style, Energy Psychology includes real-life case studies that highlight the effectiveness of his techniques.

Throughout history, from at least as far back as the Epic of Gilgamesh, mankind has shown a fascination with physical transformation--especially that of humans into animals. Tales of such transformations appear in every culture across the course of history. They have been featured in the Western world in the work of such authors as Ovid, Petronius, Marie de France, Saint Augustine, Jack Williamson, Charles de Lint, Charaline Harris, Terry Pratchett, and J. K. Rowling. This book approaches werewolves as representations of a proposed shape-shifter archetype, examining, with reference to earlier sources, how and why the archetype has been employed in modern literature. Although the archetype is in a state of flux by its very definition, many common threads are linked throughout the literary landscape even as modern authors add, modify, and reinvent characteristics and meanings. This is especially true in the work of such authors examined in this book, many of whom have struck a chord with a wide range of readers and non-readers around the world. They seem to have tapped into something that affects their audiences on a subconscious level.

Through developing a decomposition analysis of the inequality measures and promoting their effective use in research, this book provides readers with a step-by-step understanding of the inequality measures that are currently used.

'Seldom is humanity shocked by a revelation so profound.' We are now in the twenty-first century and the runes are an enigma of the modern age. Amid an extensive body of work that has enveloped these ancient glyphs, none consider the importance of geometry; to analyse their shapes for consistencies that may reveal an underlying intelligence. In the eyes of science, runic geometry has little value. Science has conceptualised the rune without considering the significant function of geometry - a naive and erroneous approach. Runic symbols are predominantly linear (built up from a mixture of vertical and/or diagonal lines that coalesce to give the rune its characteristic shape). While science believes this peculiarity is consistent with the period of carving in wood or stone, it is thought their shapes encode an archaic wisdom, a knowledge that has been sought after for well over a thousand years, and attempts to unlock this illusive code continue today. In this ground-breaking text, I unlock this legendary code. I reveal how the runes have been misconstrued over the centuries to what we find today. Contained within them are the remnants of an ancient geometric cipher and a myriad of arcane information, the likes of which has not been seen for over two thousand years, and the implications are staggering.

Representation is integral to the functioning and legitimacy of modern government. Yet political theorists have often been reluctant to engage directly with questions of representation, and empirical political scientists have closed down such questions by making representation synonymous with congruence. Conceptually unproblematic and normatively inert for some, representation has been deemed impossible to pin down analytically and to defend normatively by others. But this is changing. Political theorists are now turning to political representation as a subject worthy of theoretical investigation in its own right. In their effort to rework the theory of political representation, they are also hoping to impact how representation is assessed and studied empirically. This volume gathers together chapters by key contributors to what amounts to a "representative turn" in political theory. Their approaches and emphases are diverse, but taken together they represent a compelling and original attempt at re-conceptualizing political representation and critically assessing the main theoretical and political implications following from this, namely for how we conceive and assess representative democracy. Each contributor is invited to look back and ahead on the transformations to democratic self-government introduced by the theory and practice of political representation. Representation and democracy: outright conflict, uneasy cohabitation, or reciprocal constitutiveness? For those who think democracy would be better without representation, this volume is a must-read: it will question their assumptions, while also exploring some of the reasons for their discomfort. Reclaiming Representation is essential reading for scholars and graduate researchers committed to staying on top of new developments in the field.

This book examines the extant fragments of the archaic Greek poem known in antiquity as Hesiod's Catalogue of Women. Kirk Ormand shows that the poem should be read intertextually with other hexameter poetry from the eighth to sixth century BCE, especially Homer, Hesiod, and the Cyclic epics. Through literary interaction with these poems, the Catalogue reflects political and social tensions in the archaic period regarding the production of elite status. In particular, Ormand argues that the Catalogue reacts against the 'middling ideology' that came to the fore during the archaic period in Greece, championing traditional aristocratic modes of status. Ormand maintains that the poem's presentation of the end of the heroic age is a reflection of a declining emphasis on nobility of birth in the structures of authority in the emerging sixth century polis.