This is a revolutionary work in the study of Yiddish literature and post-colonial theory, offering a new methodology for comparative research, a new definition of literary modernism, and an unprecedented juxtaposition of Jewish Studies with African literature.

In this book, Marc Caplan argues that the literatures of ostensibly marginal modern cultures are key to understanding modernism. Caplan undertakes an unprecedented comparison of nineteenth-century Yiddish literature and twentieth-century Anglophone and Francophone African literature and reveals unexpected similarities between them. These literatures were created under imperial regimes that brought with them processes of modernization that were already well advanced elsewhere. Yiddish and African writers reacted to the liberating potential of modernity and the burdens of imperial authority by choosing similar narrative genres, typically reminiscent of early-modern European literatures: the picaresque, the pseudo-autobiography, satire, and the Bildungsroman. Both display analogous anxieties toward language, caught as they were between imperial, "global" languages and stigmatized native vernaculars, and between traditions of writing and orality. Through comparative readings of narratives by Reb Nakhman of Breslov, Amos Tutuola, Yisroel Aksenfeld, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Isaac Meyer Dik, Camara Laye, Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Wole Soyinka, Y. Y. Linetski, and Ahmadou Karouma, Caplan demonstrates that these literatures' "belated" relationship to modernization suggests their potential to anticipate subsequent crises in the modernity and post-modernity of metropolitan cultures. This, in turn, leads him to propose a new theoretical model, peripheral modernism, which incorporates both a new understanding of "periphery" and "center" in modernity and a new methodology for comparative literary criticism and theory.

To achieve sustained competitive advantage, you must create and deliver something that’s valuable, rare, and hard to imitate–and you can’t do that with a run-of-the-mill workforce. Your workforce needs to be strikingly different, obsessively focused on delivering on your unique value proposition. Compared with everyone else’s workforce, your people need to be downright strange! This book is about everything it takes to build a workforce that’s strange and extraordinary enough to execute your most powerful strategies and your unique value proposition. It’s about understanding exactly how your workforce needs to be different...creating an end-to-end Strange Workforce Value Chain...implementing workforce systems that support your unique goals...establishing detailed metrics based on what makes you unique...using those metrics to drive clarity throughout your entire organization, and steer it toward success. If you’re tasked with executing strategy through people, and “balanced scorecards” and “strategy maps” just haven’t been enough, take your next and greatest leap forward: make the Change to Strange. · Why “normal” workforces just won’t cut it anymore Everyone says their people make the difference. Most everyone’s wrong. · Create your strange workforce in four steps Imagine, pinpoint your gaps, prioritize, and act. · What your customers must notice for you to win Link your real performance drivers to specific workforce deliverables. · Rearchitect your workforce to break from the pack Organize to get strategic results from the right people. · Leverage the magic of measurement Implement metrics that work–and keep them working.

Collects ten humorous comic strips starring Archie and the rest of the crew from Riverdale High.

“A plethora of insights about nature and ourselves, revealed by one man’s journey as he comes to terms with human exploitation of our planet.” —Dr. James Hansen, climate scientist and former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies Life on one-tenth the fossil fuels turns out to be awesome. We all want to be happy. Yet as we consume ever more in a frantic bid for happiness, global warming worsens. Alarmed by drastic changes now occurring in the Earth’s climate systems, Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist and suburban father of two, embarked on a journey to change his life and the world. He began by bicycling, growing food, meditating, and making other simple, fulfilling changes. Ultimately, he slashed his climate impact to under a tenth of the US average and became happier in the process. Being the Change explores the connections between our individual daily actions and our collective predicament. It merges science, spirituality, and practical action to develop a satisfying and appropriate response to global warming. Part one exposes our interconnected predicament: overpopulation, global warming, industrial agriculture, growth-addicted economics, a sold-out political system, and a mindset of separation from nature. It also includes a readable but authoritative overview of climate science. Part two offers a response at once obvious and unprecedented: mindfully opting out of this broken system and aligning our daily lives with the biosphere. The core message is deeply optimistic: living without fossil fuels is not only possible, it can be better. “In this timely and provocative book, Peter Kalmus points out that changing the world has to start with changing our own lives. It’s a crucial message that needs to be heard.” —John Michael Greer, author of After Progress and The Retro Future

An itinerant French mercenary stumbles into the Valley of the Kings; driven by thirst and crazed by the eastern sun, he crawls through a crevice in an ancient wall... The papyrus roll he found contained weird hieroglyphics, an owl, a bolted door, an eagle, an axe and, strangest of all, Xerefu and Akeru - the lions of Yesterday and Today. The scroll found its way to Paris. The year was 1798. The Terror was born. Behind the welter of blood that was revolution, older, darker, more sinister forces were at work. The Revolution was only a means to an end... only a symptom of a deadlier peril, a terror behind the Terror. Ancient Egyptian power was stronger than the guillotine...

A warm, witty memoir of a young family’s rugged adventure living in the newly established Big Bend National Park in the 1940s. A woman who went West with her husband in the 1840s must have expected hardships and privation, but during the 1940s, when Etta Koch stopped off in Big Bend with her young family and a twenty-three-foot travel trailer in tow—which they named Porky, the Road Hog—she anticipated a brief, civilized camping trip between her old home in Ohio and a new one in Arizona. It was only when she found herself moving into an old rock house without plumbing or electricity in the new Big Bend National Park that Etta realized she’d left her sheltered life behind for an experience in frontier living. In this book based on her journals and letters, Etta Koch and her daughter June Cooper Price chronicle their family’s first years—1944–1946—in the Big Bend. Etta describes how her photographer husband Peter Koch became captivated by the region as a place for natural history filmmaking—and how she and their three young daughters slowly adapted to a pioneer lifestyle during his months-long absences on the photo-lecture circuit. In vivid, often humorous anecdotes, she describes making the rock house into a home, getting to know the Park Service personnel and other neighbors, coping with the local wildlife, and, most of all, learning to love the rugged landscape and the hardy individuals who call it home.

These five families along with their adult friends seem unique in their love for God and for their Bible study teacher, Mrs. Ruth, but all of them, including the teacher, are introduced to someone who calls himself Obadiah and seems very strange indeed! However, in the course of time, everyone seems to fall in love with this man so deeply they're saddened and devastated when he suddenly, one evening, leaves them in quite an unusual and most unsuspected way. Who was this man, where did he come from, and why did he come to them?

Man has ever striven to lift the black, mysterious veil that hangs between mortality and immortality. Instinctively or intuitively he realizes that earth-life, his first conscious existence in his upward career in the great cycle of necessity, is only a preparation for some higher, infinitely grander plane of life and he cannot, will not, stifle his longings to learn of that higher plane. As this knowledge is not "forbidden fruit," provided he comply with the conditions necessary to obtain it, it sometimes happens that some spirit that has "climbed far up the heights of life" in the spirit world returns. Such a spirit was Ahrinziman, whose life is told by himself in this book. Its hero was a Persian prince and, for a brief period, ruler of his nation. Then, 2,300 years ago, he fell by the swords of the soldiers of another claimant of the throne. From his father, Artaxerxes Longimanus, he had inherited the kingly stature, the imperious, powerful will and, alas, the royal vices and passions. From his mother, a Greek slave, he inherited rare spiritual gifts, especially clairvoyance and the power of leaving his body and journeying into the astral world. From her he also inherited a germ of true nobility of character the sprang into life, blossomed and bore rich fruit centuries after he awoke to life on the astral plane. His life, as he recounts its chapters, shows as vividly as words can show, how we live not for time but eternity. How if our deeds have been evil, if we have lived only for selfish purposes, if we have strove only for uur own happiness regardless of others, if we have wrecked the lives and happiness of others in order to bring a few brief moments of imagined jov to our own, we have but accumulated a debt that we must pay to the uttermost farthing before one gleam of sunshine can reach us in the life beyond.