In Touching Raw Nerves, Paul R. Dunn offers readers a collection of 75 of his newspaper columns that were published in The Pilot newspaper of Southern Pines, North Carolina during the stormy presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Each is introduced by a timely commentary that places the column in a contemporary context

The turbulent 14th century story of Eve de Clavering, married three times, no legitimate children but mother to James Audley hero of Bannockburn and Crecy, founder member of the Garter Knights. She lived through baronial rebellion, Scottish conflicts, the beginning of the Hundred Years War, The Black Death, intrigue and plots, fighting like a lioness to protect her family.

This spirited history of public television offers an insider's account of its topsy-turvy forty-year odyssey. James Day, a founder of San Francisco's KQED and a past president of New York's WNET, provides a vivid and often amusing behind-the-screens history. Day tells how a program producer, desperate to locate a family willing to live with television cameras for seven months, borrowed a dime—and a suggestion—from a blind date and telephoned the Louds of Santa Barbara. The result was the mesmerizing twelve-hour documentary An American Family. Day relates how Big Bird and his friends were created to spice up Sesame Street when test runs showed a flagging interest in the program's "live-action" segments. And he describes how Frieda Hennock, the first woman appointed to the FCC, overpowered the resistance of her male colleagues to lay the foundation for public television. Day identifies the particular forces that have shaped public television and produced a Byzantine bureaucracy kept on a leash by an untrusting Congress, with a fragmented leadership that lacks a clearly defined mission in today's multimedia environment. Day calls for a bold rethinking of public television's mission, advocating a system that is adequately funded, independent of government, and capable of countering commercial television's "lowest-common-denominator" approach with a full range of substantive programs, comedy as well as culture, entertainment as well as information. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.

The Sword and the Scales is the first in-depth and comprehensive study of attitudes and behaviors of the United States toward major international courts and tribunals, including the International Courts of Justice, WTO, and NAFTA dispute settlement systems; the Inter-American Court of Human Rights; and all international criminal courts. Thirteen essays by American legal scholars map and analyze current and past patterns of promotion or opposition, use or neglect, of international judicial bodies by various branches of the United States government, suggesting a complex and deeply ambivalent relationship. The United States has been, and continues to be, not only a promoter of the various international courts and tribunals but also an active participant of the judicial system. It appears before some of the international judicial bodies frequently and supports more, both politically and financially. At the same time, it is less engaged than it could be, particularly given its strong rule of law foundations and its historical tradition of commitment to international law and its institutions.

The WWII memoir of a young German conscript who survived the Eastern Front and the sinking of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff. Born in Munich in 1926, Hans Fackler was conscripted into the Wehrmacht at the age of seventeen. He became an infantryman on the brutal frontlines of the war in Russia. But after suffering a grievous injury from a grenade explosion, he could no longer fight. Hans was given morphine onboard the controversial Wilhelm Gustloff, an armed military ship which operated under the guise of transporting civilians. When the ship was sunk by Russian torpedoes, drowning more than 9,000 passengers, Hans was among the lucky few rescued by a German freighter. Hans recuperated in a military hospital near Erfurt in the Harz, which subsequently fell into the Russian zone. He escaped and undertook the arduous task of walking almost 200 miles back home to Bavaria. Screams of the Drowning is Hans’s extraordinary first-person account of his wartime experiences, as told to Klaus Willmann.

Ralph Waldo Emerson never tried to reinvent the institution of marriage, but his close friend, the writer Margaret Fuller, was freer to follow the dictates of self-reliance, and choose how she would make her commitments Born in 1810, Fuller received a boy's first-class education, and by the time she was in her twenties, she was so well-read that she had given up any hope of a normal woman's role, in marriage or in society. Still unmarried at thirty, Fuller pressed Emerson for an intimacy deeper than their friendship. Emerson would not betray his marriage, but in their journals, both writers questioned the value of monogamous marriage for men and women of genius. When she realized that Emerson was not as radical as his writing suggested, Fuller went to Europe, where she married an Italian Count. Giovanni Ossoli was barely literate, but Fuller thought that she could still fulfill other sides of herself in other relationships. Fuller never got to live out her experiment in marriage: she and her husband died in a shipwreck on returning to America in 1850. But the questions Fuller's life had raised-about how to reconcile marriage and self-reliance-are still echoing now, in our discomfort with marriage-and with any of the alternatives. An enlightening and emotionally charged narrative, The Dangers of Passion recounts the passionate friendship in which Emerson and Fuller: First learned to trust themselves and their hearts before any other authority; Discovered the delightful freedom of shared intellectual passion; Worked together to advance a philosophy of Transcendental self-reliance; Quarreled over Emerson's inability to give Fuller deeper fulfillment; Questioned the value of marriage for men and women of genius; Consoled themselves in marriages that lacked the intellectual and philosophical passion of their friendship.

The Treasure of the Word: Commentary on Biblical Readings for Sundays, Feast Days, and Solemnities, Cycle A presents concise and incisive reflections on the treasures one may excavate from the rich veins embedded in the lectionarys readings from the Word of God. Rev. Fr Isidore Okwudili Igwegbe, drawing upon his own prayerful reflection, his encounters with the readings in the company of parishioners, and his extensive ministerial experience, offers these writings to encourage individuals prayerful encounters with the Scriptures. Following the tradition and practices of the Catholic Church, The Treasure of the Word groups the commentaries into three sections: Sundays, feast days, and solemnities. In addition, the work reflects upon the lectionarys readings for the occasions of weddings and funerals. The Treasure of the Word intends to foster a life-changing encounter with the God to whose work the Scriptures give witness. As the Most Rev. Dr Gregory O. Ochiagha notes in his foreword, These reflections are really a challenge to authentic living in Christ. Whether your vocation is to the priesthood, religious life, or as a member of the laity, The Treasure of the Word will offer you prayerful, inspired, and wise guidance for digging into the Scriptures and discovering its wealth of support for living faithfully.

Painting the City Red illuminates the dynamic relationship between the visual media, particularly film and theater, and the planning and development of cities in China and Taiwan, from the emergence of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the staging of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Yomi Braester argues that the transformation of Chinese cities in recent decades is a result not only of China’s abandonment of Maoist economic planning in favor of capitalist globalization but also of a shift in visual practices. Rather than simply reflect urban culture, movies and stage dramas have facilitated the development of new perceptions of space and time, representing the future city variously as an ideal socialist city, a metropolis integrated into the global economy, and a site for preserving cultural heritage. Drawing on extensive archival research, interviews with leading filmmakers and urban planners, and close readings of scripts and images, Braester describes how films and stage plays have promoted and opposed official urban plans and policies as they have addressed issues such as demolition-and-relocation plans, the preservation of vernacular architecture, and the global real estate market. He shows how the cinematic rewriting of historical narratives has accompanied the spatial reorganization of specific urban sites, including Nanjing Road in Shanghai; veterans’ villages in Taipei; and Tiananmen Square, centuries-old courtyards, and postmodern architectural landmarks in Beijing. In Painting the City Red, Braester reveals the role that film and theater have played in mediating state power, cultural norms, and the struggle for civil society in Chinese cities.

In the sixth title in the successful Woods Cop Mystery series, another suspenseful who-done-it finds Grady Service with an unexpectedly complex, truly rotten, and important case on his hands. This time tainted eggs are showing up in caviar and Service must expose a ring of corruption in state government and perhaps within his own beloved DNR, one that could lead him all the way to the top. Making enemies at every level of the state, Service rousts out the people on the take. Can he get to the source of the contaminated eggs and prove it? Pitting corporate greed against the health of the general public isn't something Service takes lightly. He doesn't rest until there has been full exposure in a case that takes him from the wilds of the Upper Peninsula to the jungles of the state capital, into the maw of the Ukrainian mafia in New York City and onto distant beaches of Central America. For more on Joseph Heywood and the Woods Cop Mysteries, visit the author's website, www.josephheywood.com.