During the 21st century a new pandemic explodes out of the Siberian mountains. Unstoppable, the virus breaks every containment line, defies every treatment. The infected do not die. They change. The zombie apocalypse has arrived. The vampires of the world, shadow-brokers who had been amassing power and wealth for centuries, acted to preserve their food-supply; us. Millions flocked to the promised refuges, never stopping to ask what the price would be. Generations later, humans and vampires alike struggle under the weight of corporate rule. For the covert operative Ling, Sydney is a chance to recuperate after an operation in Europe goes terribly wrong. The perfect location to avoid unwanted attention. For Marie, it used to be the ideal place to pursue her research. After decades of watching her discoveries abused, sometimes with disastrous consequences, she hides her most important breakthrough: a cure to the virus. When the company discovers her secret, they’ll stop at nothing to control it. Together, the two may have a chance to change the world. All they need to do is the impossible.

About the Book: a blueprint for national E-conomy. 5 STAR rating by Pacific Book Review. MICHAEL MOORE tells us his new movie will change America. OUR BOOK WILL TELL YOU HOW MY BOOK TRAILER CAPITALLESSISM proposes : a strong free-enterprise-based democratic national E-conomy model when no capital is available, either because of a crisis or by speculations. ..scientific solutions for a capital-less public cooperative banking system. .economic engineering to create a commodity-based virtual-capital, .a national public bank, .a nationalized artificial capital creation process called fractional-reserve-banking rights, licensed back to banks (in return for sharing the created public-E-capital with the government), and various processes to activate its E-capital circulation, This is not Socialism, nor Communism. It is COMMUNITY-ISM based on human and spiritual values where inequalities will still exist resulting from individual efforts, but everybody has a fair financial starting chance for free enterprise. Some of our controversial ideas are not politically right. Austerity is outdated. The nature of national debts may be reexamined. It is inspired by Roosevelts second bill of rights and Edisons visions of a commodity-based currency. Our MACRO-MODEL is inspired by our efficient blood circulatory system, which provides oxygen to trillions of cells. We copy this for an efficient E-capital circulation model to assure survival and to sustain everyones productivity. www.capitallessism.com Excerpts Pacific Book Review www.pacificbookreview.com: .CAPITALlessISM, interestingly compares our economic system to a biological circulatory system. . the prototype for economic engineesring. . is a mindset of a macro-model for redesigning our inefficient national economy. . that remedies a lack of capitalThe human factor and spiritual God element are fundamental. . a decrease of inequalities among people and an emphasis on democracy, .Benefit ..includes the cancellation of most national debts Excerpts the U.S. review of Books http://www.theusreview.com/: innovative and thought-provoking book, .. a new economic model, one that can function where no capital is available and that embraces the concept of "community-ism.". his synthesis of various models is unique..

WOLA-Duke Book Award Finalist In Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia, Jasmin Hristov examines the complexities, dynamics, and contradictions of present-day armed conflict in Colombia. She conducts an in-depth inquiry into the restructuring of the state’s coercive apparatus and the phenomenon of paramilitarism by looking at its military, political, and legal dimensions. Hristov demonstrates how various interrelated forms of violence by state forces, paramilitary groups, and organized crime are instrumental to the processes of capital accumulation by the local elite as well as the exercise of political power by foreign enterprises. Issues of forced displacement, proletarianization of peasants, concentration of landownership, growth in urban and rural poverty, and human rights violations are viewed in relation to the use of legal means and extralegal armed force by local dominant groups and foreign companies to advance their economic interests. After documenting the penetration of major state institutions by right-wing armed groups and the persistence of human rights violations against social movements and sectors of the low-income population, Blood and Capital raises crucial questions about the promised dismantling of paramilitarism and the validity of the so-called demobilization of paramilitary groups, both of which have been widely considered by North American and some European governments as proof of current Colombian president Álvaro Uribe’s advances in the wars on terror and drugs.

The Catholic Church has in recent decades been associated with political efforts to eliminate the death penalty. It was not always so. This timely work reviews and explains the Catholic Tradition regarding the death penalty, demonstrating that it is not inherently evil and that it can be reserved as a just form of punishment in certain cases. Drawing upon a wealth of philosophical, scriptural, theological, and social scientific arguments, the authors explain the perennial teaching of the Church that capital punishment can in principle be legitimate—not only to protect society from immediate physical danger, but also to administer retributive justice and to deter capital crimes. The authors also show how some recent statements of Church leaders in opposition to the death penalty are prudential judgments rather than dogma. They reaffirm that Catholics may, in good conscience, disagree about the application of the death penalty. Some arguments against the death penalty falsely suggest that there has been a rupture in the Church's traditional teaching and thereby inadvertently cast doubt on the reliability of the Magisterium. Yet, as the authors demonstrate, the Church's traditional teaching is a safeguard to society, because the just use of the death penalty can be used to protect the lives of the innocent, inculcate a horror of murder, and affirm the dignity of human beings as free and rational creatures who must be held responsible for their actions. By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed challenges contemporary Catholics to engage with Scripture, Tradition, natural law, and the actual social scientific evidence in order to undertake a thoughtful analysis of the current debate about the death penalty.

Set in the 1980s against a backdrop of the AIDS crisis, deindustrialization and the Reagan era, this book tells the story of one individual's defiant struggle against his community--the city of Kokomo, Indiana. At the same time as teenage AIDS patient Ryan White bravely fought against the intolerance of his hometown to attend public school, one of Kokomo's largest employers, Continental Steel, filed for bankruptcy, significantly raising the stakes of the fight for the city's livelihood and national image. This book tells the story of a fearful time in our recent history, as people in the heartland endured massive layoffs, coped with a lethal new disease and discovered a legacy of toxic waste. Now, some 30 years after Ryan White's death, this book offers a fuller accounting of the challenges that one city reckoned with during this tumultuous period.

One of the most confounding aspects of American society—the one that perhaps most frequently perplexes observers both domestic and foreign—is the vast contradiction between what anthropologists might term the “hot” and “cold” elements in the culture. The hot encompasses the dynamic and progressive aspects of a society dedicated to growth and productivity, marked by mobility, innovation, and optimism. In contrast, the cold embodies rigid social forms and archaic beliefs, fundamentalisms of all kinds, racism and xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, cultural atavism, and ignorance—in short, the primitive. For cultural critic Paul Smith, the tension between progressive and primitive is a constitutive condition of American history and culture. In Primitive America, Smith contemplates this primary contradiction as it has played out in the years since 9/11. Indeed, he writes, much of what has happened since—events that have seemed to many to be novel and egregious—can be explained by this foundational dialectic. More radically still, Primitive America attests that this underlying stress is driven by America's unquestioned devotion to the elemental propositions and processes of capitalism. This devotion, Smith argues, has become America's quintessential characteristic, and he begins this book by elaborating on the idea of the primitive in America—its specific history of capital accumulation, commodity fetishism, and cultural narcissism. Smith goes on to track the symptoms of the primitive that have arisen in the aftermath of 9/11 and the commencement of the “Long War” against “violent extremists”: the nature of American imperialism, the status of the U.S. Constitution, the militarization of America's economy and culture, and the Bush administration's disregard for human rights. An urgent and important engagement with current American policies and practices, Primitive America is, at the same time, an incisive critique of the ideology that fuels the ethos of America's capitalist culture. Paul Smith is professor of cultural studies at George Mason University and the author of numerous books, including Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production (Minnesota, 1993).

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time From the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by Truman Capote—also available are Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Other Voices, Other Rooms (in one volume), Portraits and Observations, and The Complete Stories Truman Capote’s masterpiece, In Cold Blood, created a sensation when it was first published, serially, in The New Yorker in 1965. The intensively researched, atmospheric narrative of the lives of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, and of the two men, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, who brutally killed them on the night of November 15, 1959, is the seminal work of the “new journalism.” Perry Smith is one of the great dark characters of American literature, full of contradictory emotions. “I thought he was a very nice gentleman,” he says of Herb Clutter. “Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.” Told in chapters that alternate between the Clutter household and the approach of Smith and Hickock in their black Chevrolet, then between the investigation of the case and the killers’ flight, Capote’s account is so detailed that the reader comes to feel almost like a participant in the events.