"Whether you were a sportsman, civil servant, subaltern, or tea planter, you wanted a good rifle if you were headed out to the colonies. From the height of British imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through its demise in Asia, Africa, and beyond in the twentieth, John Rigby & Co., an elite cadre of gunmakers working at the heart of Britain's empire, crafted some of the finest sporting rifles and guns ever made." Thus begins this fascinating story of John Rigby & Co., which details the legendary exploits of famous Rigby owners Jim Corbett, W.D.M. Bell, Field Marshall Mannerheim, and others. Rigby's story is the story of colonial adventure, of the world's most famous big-game hunters and their rifles. In Rigby: A Grand Tradition, authors Calabi, Helsley, and Sanger bring Rigby owners Jim Corbett, W.D.M. Bell, Field Marshal Mannerheim, the Maharana of Udaipur, and others to life in rich detail. Extensively illustrated and including a thorough treatment of the development of the technology behind Rigby rifles and ammunition, this book provides substantial insight into the people, adventures, and rifles behind big game hunting in the early 20th century.

The power of music to influence mood, create scenes, routines and occasions is widely recognised and this is reflected in a strand of social theory from Plato to Adorno that portrays music as an influence on character, social structure and action. There have, however, been few attempts to specify this power empirically and to provide theoretically grounded accounts of music's structuring properties in everyday experience. Music in Everyday Life uses a series of ethnographic studies - an aerobics class, karaoke evenings, music therapy sessions and the use of background music in the retail sector - as well as in-depth interviews to show how music is a constitutive feature of human agency. Drawing together concepts from psychology, sociology and socio-linguistics it develops a theory of music's active role in the construction of personal and social life and highlights the aesthetic dimension of social order and organisation in late modern societies.

Nineteen-ninety-nine looms near and yet the stars are still far away . . . but this anthology brings them closer with more than a dozen of the best SF adventure stories ever written. Among the gems collected here are "The New Prime," by Jack Vance, " Fritz Leiber's "Moon Duel," and "The Sky People," by Poul Anderson, along with masterpieces by less-familiar names such as Murray Leinster and James H. Schmitz. With more than a dozen stories (written between 1940 and 1970) from greats such as Brian W. Aldiss, Leigh Brackett, L. Sprague de Camp, and A. E. van Vogt, this anthology ranges throughout our galaxy and into the stars. Whether you're revisiting past adventures or discovering these stories for the first time, you're sure to thrill to these wonderful adventures across the vast expanse of space.

An unflinching look at nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies. In an accessible, conversational format, Cornel West, with distinguished scholar Christa Buschendorf, provides a fresh perspective on six revolutionary African American leaders: Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Malcolm X, and Ida B. Wells. In dialogue with Buschendorf, West examines the impact of these men and women on their own eras and across the decades. He not only rediscovers the integrity and commitment within these passionate advocates but also their fault lines. West, in these illuminating conversations with the German scholar and thinker Christa Buschendorf, describes Douglass as a complex man who is both “the towering Black freedom fighter of the nineteenth century” and a product of his time who lost sight of the fight for civil rights after the emancipation. He calls Du Bois “undeniably the most important Black intellectual of the twentieth century” and explores the more radical aspects of his thinking in order to understand his uncompromising critique of the United States, which has been omitted from the American collective memory. West argues that our selective memory has sanitized and even “Santaclausified” Martin Luther King Jr., rendering him less radical, and has marginalized Ella Baker, who embodies the grassroots organizing of the civil rights movement. The controversial Malcolm X, who is often seen as a proponent of reverse racism, hatred, and violence, has been demonized in a false opposition with King, while the appeal of his rhetoric and sincerity to students has been sidelined. Ida B. Wells, West argues, shares Malcolm X’s radical spirit and fearless speech, but has “often become the victim of public amnesia.” By providing new insights that humanize all of these well-known figures, in the engrossing dialogue with Buschendorf, and in his insightful introduction and powerful closing essay, Cornel West takes an important step in rekindling the Black prophetic fire.

The legacy of ancient Greece and Rome has been imitated, resisted, misunderstood, and reworked by every culture that followed. In this volume, some five hundred articles by a wide range of scholars investigate the afterlife of this rich heritage in the fields of literature, philosophy, art, architecture, history, politics, religion, and science.

Throwback science fiction stories that evoke the wild old pulp days from George R.R. Martin, Walter Jon Williams, Janet Kagan, John Varley, and others. Once the mainstay of science fiction, adventure stories fell out of favor during the 1960s and early 1970s. But in recent years, science fiction writers have spun out galaxy-spanning adventures as imaginative and wonderful as any of yesteryear’s tales. Renowned editor Gardner Dozois assembles seventeen such escapades here, with stories from today’s and tomorrow’s finest writers, including: Stephen Baxter, Tony Daniel, R. Garcia y Robertson, Peter F. Hamilton, Janet Kagan, George R. R. Martin, Paul J. McAuley, Maureen F. McHugh. G. David Nordley, Robert Reed, Mary Rosenblum, Bruce Sterling, Michael Swanwick, George Turner, John Varley, Vernor Vinge, Walter Jon Williams These stories brim with the exciting thrills our universe offers us—alien landscapes, unimagined realms, life unlike any we have known before, and that mysterious realm known as the human soul. The Good New Stuff shows that they really do still write ‘em like that! “Splendid yarns.” —Kirkus Reviews

In 1995, on the thirtieth anniversary of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s death, Adriana Boscaro organized an international conference in Venice that had an unusally lasting effect on the study of this major Japanese novelist. Thanks to Boscaro’s energetic commitment, Venice became a center for Tanizaki studies that produced two volumes of conference proceedings now considered foundational for all scholarly works on Tanizaki. In the years before and after the Venice Conference, Boscaro and her students published an abundance of works on Tanizaki and translations of his writings, contributing to his literary success in Italy and internationally. The Grand Old Man and the Great Tradition honors Boscaro’s work by collecting nine essays on Tanizaki’s position in relation to the “great tradition” of Japanese classical literature. To open the collection, Edward Seidensticker contributes a provocative essay on literary styles and the task of translating Genji into a modern language. Gaye Rowley and Ibuki Kazuko also consider Tanizaki’s Genji translations, from a completely different point of view, documenting the author’s three separate translation efforts. Aileen Gatten turns to the influence of Heian narrative methods on Tanizaki’s fiction, arguing that his classicism, far from being superficial, “reflects a deep sensitivity to Heian narrative.” Tzevetana Kristeva holds a different perspective on Tanizaki’s classicism, singling out specific aspects of Tanizaki’s eroticism as the basis of comparison. The next two essays emphasize Tanizaki’s experimental engagement with the classical literary genres—Amy V. Heinrich treats the understudied poetry, and Bonaventura Ruperti considers a 1933 essay on performance arts. Taking up cinema, Roberta Novelli focuses on the novel Manji, exploring how it was recast for the screen by Masumura Yasuzō. The volume concludes with two contributions interpreting Tanizaki’s works in the light of Western and Meiji literary traditions: Paul McCarthy considers Nabokovas a point of comparison, and Jacqueline Pigeot conducts a groundbreaking comparison with a novel by Natsume Sōseki.

Any court watcher knows that the Supreme Court of Canada delivers some of its major constitutional judgments in a “By the Court” format. The abandonment of the common law tradition of attributing decisions to individual judges in favour of an anonymous and unanimous approach is unique among Western democracies. By the Court is the first major study of these unanimous and anonymous decisions and features a complete inventory, chronology, and typology of these cases. Some significant examples include the Secession of Quebec reference and the Carter decision on assisted suicide. Peter McCormick and Marc Zanoni also ask where and why the idea emerged and whether it signals a genuinely collegial authorship or simply masks the dominance of the Chief Justice. Ultimately, By the Court explores the purposes and potential future of “By the Court,” framing this practice as the most dramatic form of a modern style that highlights the institution and downplays individual contributions.

For most of church history, hospitality was central to Christian identity. Yet our generation knows little about this rich, life-giving practice.