The 2008 election is over, and librarian Meg McLean is thrilled that the library levy passed. Despite an economy in free fall, Meg’s personal and professional lives are thriving. Tribal Chief Madeline Thomas of the Klalos offers an inherited farmhouse for a branch library-but Meg’s rival and vengeful enemy plans to contest the will. Disasters begin to strike-the farmhouse is vandalized; the chief’s home is firebombed; and when her rival falls to her death, Meg becomes a murder suspect. Meg and her romantic interest, Undersheriff Rob Neill, must confront religious zealotry, bullying, and troubled mother-daughter relationships to penetrate the morass of bad karma and maze of crimes. “In Simonson’s taut third Latouche County library mystery librarian Margaret “Meg” McLean has her hands full . . . . Simonson’s ambitious plot casts a wide net-from treating themes of racism and religious intolerance to thwarted love and good old-fashioned greed-but she pulls it off with a sure hand.” -Publishers Weekly

"What if at night at the theaters in Elizabethan England more closely resembled attending a rugby match than sitting in a dark, silent audience, passively witnessing the action on the stage, or closer to going to a rock concert than sitting in front of a large or small screen, quietly and distantly absorbing a film or television drama? In this book, West proposes a new account of what happened in the playhouses of Shakespeare's time, and the kind of participatory entertainment expected by both the actors and the audience. Combining the precision of a philologist and the imagination of a philosopher, West performs careful readings of premodern figures of speech--including understanding, confusion, occupation, eating, and fighting--still in use today, but whose meanings for Elizabethan players, playgoers, and writers have diverged in subtle ways in our era. Playing itself was not restricted to the confines of the actors on the stage but pertained just as much to the audience in a collaborative rather than individualized theater experience, more corporeal, tactile, and active, rather than purely receptive and visual. Thrown apples, smashed bottles of beer, and lumbering bears--these and more contributed to both the verbal and physical interactions between players and playgoers, creating circuits of exchange, production, and consumption,all within the confines of the playhouse. West's account of the experience of the playhouse shows more affinity--and continuity--with more raucous, unruly medieval drama than previous literary critics have allowed. It will be of interest to a wide audience, actors, directors, and scholars included"

In The Progressive Poetics of Confusion in the French Enlightenment, John C. O'Neal draws largely on the etymological meaning of the word confusion as the action of mixing or blending in order to trace the development of this project which, he claims, aimed to reject dogmatic thinking in all of its forms and recognized the need to embrace complexity. Eighteenth-century thinkers used the notion of confusion in a progressive way to reorganize social classes, literary forms, metaphysical substances, scientific methods, and cultural categories such as taste and gender. In this new work, O'Neal explores some of the paradoxes of the Enlightenment's theories of knowledge. Each of the chapters in this book attempts to address the questions raised by the eighteenth century's particular approach to confusion as a paradoxical reorganizing principle for the period's progressive agenda. Perhaps the most paradoxical thinker of his times, Diderot occupies a central place in this study of confusion. Other authors include Marivaux, CrZbillon, Voltaire, and Pinel, among others. Rousseau and Sade serve as counterexamples to this kind of enlightenment but ultimately do not so much oppose the period's poetics of confusion as they complement it. The final chapter on Sade combines contemporary discussions of politics, society, culture, philosophy, and science in an encyclopedic way that at once reflects the entire period's tendencies and establishes important differences between Sade's thinking and that of the mainstream philosophes. Ultimately, confusion serves, O'Neal argues, as an overarching positive notion for the Enlightenment and its progressive ideals.

Confusion is more than just another daily inconvenience, though its impacts are often hidden in metrics such as market share, productivity, and ROI. This book shows how to identify and eliminate the Cost of Confusion in workplaces, marketplaces, and communities. Cutting that cost demands the ability to distill, integrate, and synthesize ever more complex information from a broad range of perspectives and disciplines. Any gaps in understanding can and do negatively impact performance. Based on Richard Layton’s 20 years of experience helping organizations to be heard and understood, this book offers a powerful universal lens to view the costly impacts of confusion, and provides a framework to identify and manage the risk of failure to communicate with a range of stakeholders and audiences – and save millions of dollars in the process. Decision-makers, practitioners, and students in marketing and advertising, organizational development, knowledge management, information technology, project management, and other fields will appreciate this unique set of insights and tools they can employ to great effect within their companies, organizations, and public institutions.

WANT TO LIVE LIFE BEYOND YOUR CONFUSION AND FEAR? Taylor suggests we are a society in mourning with few adult tools to grieve "The continual threat of terrorism and war coupled with current stresses of daily life leave us afraid and confused-triggering childhood wounds and adult doubts about our ability to cope. Many of us express this unresolved confusion, fear, grief and tension through compulsive and addictive behaviors. We may eat too much, drink, drug or smoke too much, love, shop, work, gamble or worry too much. But we begin to live out of fear rather than faith-compulsion rather than choice-isolation rather than unity as we long to anchor our safety into something predictable and secure" "Our stress," Taylor states, "if not resolved, gets expressed through mal-adaptive methods of coping which ultimately reveal themselves in physical ailments or injuries, psychological unrest, spiritual isolation or addictive and compulsive behaviors." Taylor's Six-Cycle Model offers a viable and creative way out. She takes addiction beyond the ordinary realm of twelve step meetings and abstinence-suggesting our addictive behaviors are actually gifts from our Soul. She invites readers to embrace what lies underneath their confusion and their fear as she guides them through a process which transforms abandonment to union; anger to empowerment; shame to compassion; loneliness to sacred solitude; betrayal to gratitude and fear to faith.

Against and Beyond: Subversion and Transgression in Mass Media, Popular Culture and Performance is a collection of fourteen essays by scholars representing a number of disciplines discussing transgression and subversion in film, television, music, theatre and digital media. Moving across major political and cultural movements of the 20th century, the book addresses a global need for transgression and subversion in our times. Applying theories of Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Foucault, Adorno and Horkheimer, Deleuze and Guattari, and Butler, the volume is an important contribution to understanding the mechanisms and functions of subversion and transgression in contemporary media and popular culture and provides essential reading for all those seeking to go against and beyond.