Epstein shows the extent to which AIDS research has been a social and political phenomenon and how the AIDS movement has transformed biomedical research practices through its capacity to garner credibility by novel strategies.

Summary: It is crucial to understand that our progression through the twentieth century towards our contemporary global Crystal Palace (Peter Sloterdijk) of purity and transparency has been constantly accompanied by an almost physical desire for the pure, not just Mondrian's crystalline structures, but also the addictive taste of white sugar and white bread. This book investigates this urge for the pure, but also advocates a much deeper need for the impure, not to reinstate a new organicism, one more back-to-nature movement, but to trace that progression to a point where all modernist values reverse, where technology becomes an agent for the impure and the imperfect. Technology, long an agent for homogeneity and purity, is now turning into one for heterogeneity and global contingency.

Colette herself considered The Pure and the Impure her best book, "the nearest I shall ever come to writing an autobiography." This guided tour of the erotic netherworld with which Colette was so intimately acquainted begins in the darkness and languor of a fashionable opium den. It continues as a series of unforgettable encounters with men and, especially, women whose lives have been improbably and yet permanently transfigured by the strange power of desire. Lucid and lyrical, The Pure and the Impure stands out as one of modern literature's subtlest reckonings not only with the varieties of sexual experience, but with the always unlikely nature of love.

How are the worlds of university biology and commerce blurring? Many university leaders see the amalgamation of academic and commercial cultures as crucial to the future vitality of higher education in the United States. In Impure Cultures, Daniel Lee Kleinman questions the effect of this blending on the character of academic science. Using data he gathered as an ethnographic observer in a plant pathology lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Kleinman examines the infinite and inescapable influence of the commercial world on biology in academia today. Contrary to much of the existing literature and common policy practices, he argues that the direct and explicit relations between university scientists and industrial concerns are not the gravest threat to academic research. Rather, Kleinman points to the less direct, but more deeply-rooted effects of commercial factors on the practice of university biology. He shows that to truly understand research done at universities today, it is first necessary to explore the systematic, pervasive, and indirect effects of the commercial world on contemporary academic practice.

When the small North Carolina mountain town of Eli was flooded in the early 1940s to make way for a TVA dam and lake, the homes and businesses were buried beneath the water—but buildings weren’t the only things buried. There are hushed stories of a spirit that lingers beneath the murky waters, hiding a dark secret. Judy and her husband Craig journey to the area to care for her ailing adopted grandfather. The elderly man reveals some interesting anecdotes about his own life in Eli, but the sharing of this information is more than mere storytelling. Judy and Craig are now entangled in a sinister plot, set in motion seventy-five years earlier by an evil presence and complicit town residents. Seeking truth, Judy and Craig begin investigating, but their poking around does not go unnoticed. Their lives are in danger as Judy uncovers past nefarious plots while moving closer and closer to the answers she seeks. This is a battle of good versus evil, influenced by both Appalachian and Cherokee myth, as four time periods coalesce to reveal a terrible truth.

The book opens with unknown crusade solder praying to God to punish him for his sins after massacre in Marat city during first crusade. After that we go almost hundred years forward and fallow life of Baldwin IV from his birth, till his death at the age of 23. There are two narratives in book, one given by archbishop William, that gives chronicles of events that took place during Baldwin IV reign, and monologues and stories said by Baldwin in a form of letters. That way I wonted to explore psychology of a person who is at a same time a king and a lonely cripple.