What happens when an advanced civilization from another world choose an ordinary, expendable human being and give him total control of a powerful and potentially deadly craft, purely for their entertainment and curiosity? Will their prejudices be confirmed? Will he use it for pleasure, greed, and gain? Or will he surprise them with good deeds and intentions? They watch and they wait. However, their project backfires, and in a twist of fate, he becomes their salvation.

Borderlands: they stretch across national boundaries, and they create a unique space that extends beyond the international boundary. They extend north and south of what we think of as the actual “border,” encompassing even the urban areas of San Antonio, Texas, and Monterrey, Nueva León, Mexico, affirming shared identities and a sense of belonging far away from the geographical boundary.In Bridging Cultures: Reflections on the Heritage Identity of the Texas-Mexico Borderlands

This extract from the Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible provides Schmitt, Rogerson, Daviers, and Salvesen's introduction to and concise commentary on Baruch, Additions to Daniel, Manasseh, and Psalm 151. The Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible presents, in nontechnical language, the best of modern scholarship on each book of the Bible, including the Apocrypha. Reader-friendly commentary complements succinct summaries of each section of the text and will be valuable to scholar...

Written to honour the life and work of the late Peter N. Oliver, the distinguished historian and editor-in-chief of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History from 1979-2006, this collection assembles the finest legal scholars to reflect on the issues in and development of the field of legal history in Canada.Covering a broad range of topics, this volume examines developments over the last two hundred years in the legal profession and the judiciary, nineteenth-century prison hi...

You didn't ask for it. You didn't choose it. But microplastics are inside you right now — circulating in your blood, lodged in your lung tissue, embedded in your heart muscle, and present in organs never designed to filter plastic. Scientists have detected them in newborn babies and umbilical cord blood. In remote Arctic ice. In the deepest ocean trenches. And in the carotid plaque of cardiovascular patients, where their presence was associated with dramatically higher rates of heart attac...

Song & Social Change in Latin America offers seven essays from a diverse group of scholars on the topic of music as a reflection of the many social-political upheavals throughout Latin America from the 20th century to the present. Topics covered include: the Tropicália movement in Brazil, the Nueva Canción in Central America, Rock in Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Peru, the Vallenato in Colombia, Trova in Cuba, and urban music of Puerto Rico in the mid-20th century. The collection also inclu...

Bringing together 34 flash fiction stories from 14 authors, SPARK offers a host of stories to thrill, move, and challenge fans of short-short fiction. A woman physically at war with her mother's legacy inside her own body, a young girl given a vision of a utopic past at the end of the world, a man psychically bonded to the living weapon for which he is the failsafe, a harem of "female" androids newly capable of questioning their subservient status—these are a few of the characters you'll m...

Augustine of Hippo was a philosopher as well as theologian, bishop and saint. He aimed to practice philosophy not simply as an academic discipline but as a love for divine wisdom pervading everything in his life and work. To inquire into Augustine and philosophy is thus to get to the heart of his concerns as a Christian writer and uncover some of the reasons for his vast influence on Western thought. This volume, containing essays by leading Augustine scholars, includes a variety of inquir...

What are the implications of philosophical pragmatism for international relations theory and foreign policy practice? According to John Ryder, “a foreign policy built on pragmatist principles is neither naïve nor dangerous. In fact, it is very much what both the U.S. and the world are currently in need of.” Close observers of Barack Obama’s foreign policy statements have also raised the possibility of a distinctly pragmatist approach to international relations. Absent from the three domina...

Religion mattered to the prehistoric Southwestern people, just as it matters to their descendents today. Examining the role of religion can help to explain architecture, pottery, agriculture, even commerce. But archaeologists have only recently developed the theoretical and methodological tools with which to study this topic. Religion in the Prehispanic Southwest marks the first book-length study of prehistoric religion in the region. Drawing on a rich array of empirical approaches, the co...

Social, Mobile, and Emerging Media around the World: Communication Case Studies is an edited collection of cutting edge research on the practical applications of diverse types of emerging media technologies in a variety of industries and in many different regions of the world. In recent years, emergent social media have initiated a revolution comparable in impact to the industrial revolution or the invention of the Internet. Today, social media’s usage statistics are mind-boggling: almost ...

This is a ground-breaking volume on the role of religion as a major force of cohesion across the Indian Ocean region.A diverse range of experts present a case for conceptualizing religion as an enabler of not only shared religious identities throughout the Indian Ocean world, but multiple shared identities mediated through religion, particularly as religion intersects with other manifestations of human society in this part of the world. This theme is explored throu...