When a six-year-old boy of the Turrbal tribe suffers a mysterious illness at the bunya nut festival, his uncle initially thinks it is poison. But the true horror is revealed when they realise that a gundir (Aboriginal sorcerer) has pointed the bone at him.Bunji's unexpected survival astounds the region's tribes. Years later, during his kippa (manhood) trials, a second shadow appears to follow him. Then, eerie dreams and whispers from the south come to him. Nothing makes sense until one day, Bunji receives an ominous invitation to the nearby island of Yarun.Three ghosts have apparently returned from the dead?In 1768, James Cook, newly promoted to Lieutenant, replaces the highly esteemed Alexander Dalrymple as Commander of HMB Endeavour. Upon completion of his overt scientific mission in Otaheite, Cook follows secret Admiralty orders to search for the Unknown Southern Land. Encountering Australia, he charts its eastern coastline but misses Turrbal country and its river. Faithfully following Lord Morton's advice, Cook does not take possession of the land when he leaves Australia.But on the streets of Batavia, he learns of a dreadful turn of events and is forced to change the course of Australia's fate forever.This meticulously researched novel reveals a fascinating society and a startling turn of events in Australia's history that few know about.

Kamilaroi: the language of the aborigines of the Namoi, Barwan, Bundarra and Balonne Rivers, and of Liverpool Plains and the Upper Hunter.

This book is a full reference grammar of Qiang, one of the minority languages of southwest China, spoken by about 70,000 Qiang and Tibetan people in Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture in northern Sichuan Province. It belongs to the Qiangic branch of Tibeto-Burman (one of the two major branches of Sino-Tibetan). The dialect presented in the book is the Northern Qiang variety spoken in Ronghong Village, Yadu Township, Chibusu District, Mao County. This book, the first book-length description of the Qiang language in English, is the result of many years of work on the language, and is as typologically comprehensive as possible. It includes not only the reference grammar, but also an ethnological overview, several fully analyzed texts (mostly traditional stories), and an annotated glossary. The language is verb final, agglutinative (prefixing and suffixing), and has both head-marking and dependent marking morphology. The phonology of Qiang is quite complex, with 39 consonants at seven points of articulation, plus complex consonant clusters, both in initial and final position, as well as vowel harmony, vowel length distinctions, and a set of retroflexed vowels. The grammar also is complex, with a paradigm of eight direction marking verbal prefixes, and two paradigms for person marking, one for actor, one for non-actor, and a variety of other verbal prefixes and suffixes, as well as definite and number marking on nouns. Noun phrases take classifiers and relational pospositions as well.

In many senses, viewers have cut their teeth on the violence in American cinema: from Anthony Perkins slashing Janet Leigh in the most infamous of shower scenes; to the 1970s masterpieces of Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah and Francis Ford Coppola; to our present-day undertakings in imagining global annihilations through terrorism, war, and alien grudges. Transfigurations brings our cultural obsession with film violence into a renewed dialogue with contemporary theory. Grønstad argues that the use of violence in Hollywood films should be understood semiotically rather than viewed realistically; Tranfigurations thus alters both our methodology of reading violence in films and the meanings we assign to them, depicting violence not as a self-contained incident, but as a convoluted network of our own cultural ideologies and beliefs.

You can start game programming in a flash Here's how to create five different cool games - no experience necessary! Ever think you could come up with a better computer game? Then this book is for you! No boring programming theory here, just the stuff you need to know to actually make something happen, and all in plain English. Build a brain-teasing math game, go classic with Pong, create monsters and mayhem, and much more. Discover how to * Build and control basic movie clips * Make text appear and change * Generate random numbers * Add sound effects * Create cars and space vehicles that move realistically * Blow up stuff onscreen

There are lots of books on how to do direct mail. We didn't want to write one of those (even though we could). Instead, we thought we would focus on the little - and not so little - things it takes to successfully establish and beat control mailings over time. Over the last 20 years, we've participated in billions of mailings, to mailboxes around the globe. Through this experience, we've seen both the path to direct mail success and how an effort can fall short.This book will provide the tools and tactics you can implement right now to improve your direct mail program. Let's beat the control!Table of contents:- Getting Started- Testing- Targeting & Data- Creative- Offers- Production- Analysis

From antiquity to the eve of the modern era, rulers of Western empires inspired hero worship by proclaiming their divine origins. In this fascinating original study, Marie Tanner presents the history of the emperor's mythic image and its continuing influence on Western political thought. She shows that these pretensions to divinity were based on the Trojan legend and the myth of Rome as developed in Vergil's Aeneid and that later Christian emperors expanded these claims by tracing their lineage not only to the pagan gods but also to the priest-kings of the Old Testament. Through this amalgam of heritages each successive Holy Roman emperor proclaimed that he was the last descendant of Aeneas, destined to yield the terrestrial rule of Rome to Christ and thereby inaugurate millennial peace. By examining a wide range of literary, artistic, and historical sources plus a corpus of new illustrations, Tanner discovers remarkable chains of evidence for this process, one that culminates with the Renaissance Hapsburgs who imbued the holiest symbols of the faith with dynastic meaning as they attempted to consolidate all priestly and secular powers in their grip. On these foundations Philip II of Spain, son of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and the first monarch to rule the four known continents, created a new concept of absolute monarchy that shaped the principles of modern statecraft and determined the dominant form of government in Europe for the next two centuries.

The first science fiction course in the American academy was held in the early 1950s. In the sixty years since, science fiction has become a recognized and established literary genre with a significant and growing body of scholarship. The Cambridge History of Science Fiction is a landmark volume as the first authoritative history of the genre. Over forty contributors with diverse and complementary specialties present a history of science fiction across national and genre boundaries, and trace its intellectual and creative roots in the philosophical and fantastic narratives of the ancient past. Science fiction as a literary genre is the central focus of the volume, but fundamental to its story is its non-literary cultural manifestations and influence. Coverage thus includes transmedia manifestations as an integral part of the genre's history, including not only short stories and novels, but also film, art, architecture, music, comics, and interactive media.

Offers a behind-the-scenes view of the ways in which special-interest groups influence the content of textbooks used in public and private schools throughout America. This book describes six cases resulting from attempts to suppress information on evolution, gun control and pacifism.