This collection of readings provides the reader with a basic introduction to the topic and concepts of cultural diversity as it has come to characterize the culture of the United States. Particular attention is given to the practice of racial, ethnic, and special interest group characterizations. No other book is as complete in its coverage of the diverse cultural groupings that make up the American culture. This unique work serves as a first step in beginning the quest for greater understanding and appreciation of diversity.

Gabria is just the neglected daughter of a once-great chieftain, but she must go on a dangerous quest to save her people and herself from an evil warlord. With the help of a friendly porcupine and a truly terrible hunter, can this unfortunate teenager change the world?

When video killed the radio star, Sharon Oreck was calling the shots. Video Slut takes an irreverent look behind the scenes of the music-video industry during its eighties heyday. Oreck, one of the top producers of all time, bluffed her way into the business with no experience whatsoever and went on to produce more than six hundred video shoots with Madonna, Sting, Mick Jagger, Prince, and several members of the increasingly unstable Jackson family—not to mention a cadre of delinquent caterers, deranged interns, self-absorbed record executives, and malfeasant animal trainers. Oreck also shares the at turns hilarious, biting, and poignant story of her origins as a single teen mother, disowned by her middle-class parents, and of her journey from welfare to kung fu movie sets to film school. She approaches her own delinquency and that of the superstars she encountered with humor and candor. The result is an acerbic but sympathetic account of the outrageous effects of fame, power, and money on people in the entertainment business. No one is spared, especially herself.

A billionaire sets out to teach his grandchildren some life lessons in this sharply funny novel by “a brilliant, original writer” (Ann Beattie, author of The Accomplished Guest). Bewildered by the odious liberal tendencies of his son-in-law, Chip, Leon Tuggs, self-made arch-capitalist billionaire, inventor of the ubiquitous and environmentally hazardous Thingie, and author of the influential General Theory of Industrial Sex, decides to rescue his grandchildren from a life of guilt, indecision, and existential anxiety, by educating them in the way the world actually works and telling them, for their own good, the things no teacher or parent in our politically correct and morally relative world could ever venture to say . . . Petroleum Man is a hilariously scathing satire that takes on both sides of some of the raging debates of our times between Democrats and Republicans, haves and have-nots, trickle-down conservatives and bleeding-heart liberals, environmentalists and industrialists—a comic classic from the author of Gascoyne and Some Instructions.

Trish accidentally time travels to Lieutenant-Colonel Custer’s army camp during its final preparations for the 1873 Yellowstone Expedition. Luckily for her, she has her old-style flip cell phone with her, along with a ballpoint pen and plastic reading glasses. Even luckier, she is befriended by the regiment’s surgeon, who is officially in charge of her. He soon believes her story that she is from the future, and quickly realizes he can profitably take advantage of her knowledge of modern medicine – and future inventions, from automobiles to X-rays. But his female assistant is not as enamored with Trish as he is, finding her to be a real pain to deal with. Trish’s 21st century idioms and crudely blunt language make her a misfit in the crowd of 19th century Army officers and young soldiers– although they certainly enjoy being around her! Trish also discovers how time machines work.

DEEP SPACE, DEEP TROUBLE. The man they call Diego was a tough hombre looking to escape a jam. But the time machine he found took him out of the frying pan and into the future. Now he's gone from the wide-open spaces to outer space--in the 26th century, as the starship Angus goes to war… Before you can say, "Beam me up, Scotty," Diego's risking his neck against a female terrorist known as the Space Avenger--and the weirdest life-forms he's ever seen outside a bottle of bad whiskey. But then again, they've never seen anything like the man they call Diego!

Modern web applications deserve modern tools. Harness the JVM's rich infrastructure while taking advantage of the expressive power and brisk performance of a modern functional language. Exploit Clojure's unique advantages for web development. Step by step, apply the fundamentals of programming in Clojure to build real-world, professional web applications. This edition features new libraries, tools, and best practices, and focuses on developing modern single-page applications. Stop developing web apps with yesterday's tools. Today, developers are increasingly adopting Clojure as a web-development platform. See for yourself what makes Clojure so desirable, as you create a series of web apps of growing complexity, exhibiting the full process of web development using a modern functional language. Journey through all the steps in developing a rich Picture Gallery web application--from conception to packaging and deployment. You'll work hands-on with Clojure and build real-world, professional web apps. This fully updated second edition reveals the changes in the rapidly evolving Clojure ecosystem. Get up to speed on the many new libraries, tools, and best practices. Gain expertise in the popular Ring/Compojure stack using the Luminus framework. Learn how Clojure works with databases and speeds development of RESTful services. See why ClojureScript is rapidly becoming a popular front-end platform, and use ClojureScript with the popular Reagent library to build single-page applications. This book is for you, whether you're already familiar with Clojure or if you're completely new to the language. What You Need: The latest JVM, Clojure 1.6+, and the Leiningen build tool, as well as an editor such as Emacs, IntelliJ, Eclipse, Light Table, or VI.

TO THE WORLD OF ANCIENT MAYA, AND FAR BEYOND… In the Courts of the Sun introduced Maya descendent Jed De Landa, a math prodigy with rare knowledge of an ancient divination tool called the Sacrifice Game. But now there are two Jeds—one existing at the height of the ancient Maya civilization in AD 664, and another in the present who—for an unusual but compelling reason—is about to bring about the destruction of humanity. And only one self can win the game… With illustrations by the author

Teenage talk is fascinating, though so far teenage language has not been given the attention in linguistic research that it merits. The dearth of investigations into teenage language is due in part to under representation in language corpora. With the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT) a large corpus of teenage language has become available for research. The first part of Trends in Teenage Talk gives a description how the COLT corpus was collected and processed; the speakers are presented with special emphasis on the recruits and their various backgrounds; ending with a description what the COLT teenagers talk about and how they do it. The second part of the book is devoted to the most prominent features of the teenagers' talk: 'slanguage'; how reported speech is manifested; a survey of non-standard grammatical features; the use of intensifiers; tags; and interactional behaviour in terms of conflict talk.