Bibliophobia is a book about material books, how they are cared for, and how they are damaged, throughout the 5000-year history of writing from Sumeria to the smartphone.Bibliophobia is a global history, covering six continents and seven religions, describing written examples from each of the last thirty centuries (and several earlier). It discusses topics such as the origins of different kinds of human script; the development of textual media suc...

The Book of Common Prayer is one of the most influential books in history. First published in the reign of Edward VI, in 1549, it was a product of the English Reformation following the break with Rome. For nearly five centuries, it has formed the order of worship for established Christianity in England. More listeners have heard these prayers, it is said, than the soliloquies of Shakespeare. As British imperial ambitions spread, the Book of Common Prayer became the primar...

Bibliophobia is a book about material books, how they are cared for, and how they are damaged, throughout the 5000-year history of writing from Sumeria to the smartphone. Its starting point is the contemporary idea of 'the death of the book' implied by the replacement of physical books by digital media, with accompanying twenty first-century experiences of paranoia and literary apocalypse. It traces a twin fear of omniscience and oblivion back to the origins of writing in ancient ...

Bringing together scholars from literature and the history of ideas, Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture explores new ways of negotiating the boundaries between cognitive and bodily models of emotion, and between different versions of the will as active or passive. In the process, it juxtaposes the historical formation of such ideas with contemporary philosophical debates. It frames a dialogue between rhetoric and medicine, politics and religion, in order to examine the relat...

The dramatic religious revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries involved a battle over social memory. On one side, the Reformation repudiated key aspects of medieval commemorative culture; on the other, traditional religion claimed that Protestantism was a religion without memory. This volume shows how religious memory was sometimes attacked and extinguished, while at other times rehabilitated in a modified guise. It investigates how new modes of memorialisation were embodied...

This stimulating volume explores how the memory of the Reformation has been remembered, forgotten, contested, and reinvented between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries.Remembering the Reformation traces how a complex, protracted, and unpredictable process came to be perceived, recorded, and commemorated as a transformative event. Exploring both local and global patterns of memory, the contributors examine the ways in which the Reformation embedded itself in the historical ima...

Trapped by a Blizzard, Bound by Desire.When a winter storm strands famous country singer Peter Lexington at Kristina Cartwright's remote horse farm, neither expects the heat that ignites between them. She thinks he's delusional about being a star. He's never met a woman immune to his charm.As the snow piles up outside, so does the tension within. For Kristina, horses have always been enough—they never lie, cheat, or leave like the men in her life. For Peter...

The collapse of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme led to the instant evaporation of $65 billion of wealth. The effects of Madoff's brazen fraud were felt most closely in New York and Palm Beach but the story was, and continues to be, front page news across the country.Now, a paperback version of the book is perfectly timed with the ABC drama starring Richard Dreyfuss. Brian Ross and his team of investigators shed an unyielding light onto Madoff's scheme—how he got started, how he succee...

The Devil Came on Horsebackis an intense, vivid autobiographical report from the heart of violent Darfur and a call to action by a former American marine who became a military observer for the African Union. The first extensive on-the-ground account of the genocide in Sudan, itleads us through the tragic impact of an Arab government bent on destroying its black African citizens and the frustrating complexity of international inaction. At the same time, it is a powerful memoir of o...

Superheroes and Masculinity: Unmasking the Gender Performance of Heroism explores how heteropatriarchal representations of gender are portrayed within superhero comics, film, and television. The contributors examine how hegemonic masculinity has been continually perpetuated and reinforced within the superhero genre and unpack concise critiques of specific superhero representations, the industry, and the fan base at large. However, Superheroes and Masculinity also argues that possibilities ...

In December 2008, the world watched as master financier Bernard L. Madoff was taken away from his posh Manhattan apartment in handcuffs, accused of swindling thousands of innocent victims-including friends and family-out of billions of dollars in the world's largest Ponzi scheme. Madoff went to jail; he will spend the rest of his life there. But what happened to his devoted wife and sons? The people closest to him, the public reasoned, must have known the truth behind his astounding succes...

An explosive, heartbreaking memoir from the widow of Mark Madoff and daughter-in-law of Bernard Madoff, the first genuine inside story from a family member who has lived through- and survived-both the public crisis and her own deeply personal tragedy.When the news of Bernard Madoff 's Ponzi scheme broke, Americans were shocked and outraged, perhaps none more so than the unsuspecting members of his own family. After learning that their father's legendarily successfu...