In 1952 on a highway in the small Northern California mountain village of Chester, a local businessman and four small children are carjacked, robbed and savagely bludgeoned. Three of the children are killed. A year earlier, a Folsom gold mine operator had been murdered in a home break-in robbery attempt and five months after the Chester murders, the quiet Southern California city of Burbank is rocked when, during another home break-in, an elderly widow is found bound, gagged and brutally murdered in her own home. Thus begins the terrifying chronicle of the Mountain Murder Mobs deadly rampage up, down and through the Golden Statefrom the gritty back alleyways of the Los Angeles suburbs to the forested foothills of the Northern Sierrasa gang of ruthless killers ply their murderous trade by preying on societys most vulnerable citizens. And behind the scenes, the victims young wife and mother copes with the grief of a life turned upside down after her heartbreaking loss. Struggling to build a new life for herself and for what now remains of her devastated family, she leans on her unwavering faith and a deep reservoir of inner strength. A Massacre of Innocents is the previously untold true story of the Mountain Murder Mobs horrific crimes and how they ultimately paid for those crimes.

Before contraception was generally available, and when abortion was fraught with danger, infanticide was a common solution to the problem of unwanted children. Massacre of the Innocents, first published in 1986, shows the causes and consequences of the high tide of infanticide in Victorian Britain. Lionel Rose describes the ways in which unwanted and ‘surplus’ infants were disposed of, and the economic and social pressures on women to rid themselves of their burdens by covert criminal and sub-criminal means. He discusses the activities of infanticidal and abortionist midwives, and shows how the practices of wet nursing and baby farming were closely related to infanticide. Unscrupulous insurance salesman even turned infanticide into a profitable business, in their reckless grab for commissions. Infanticide declined with the growing practice of contraception, the lessening of pressure of unmarried mothers, and as adoption was made easier. This is a hard-hitting, scrupulously documented piece of social history. This title will be of interest to students of history and criminology.

The publication of the King James version of the Bible, translated between 1603 and 1611, coincided with an extraordinary flowering of English literature and is universally acknowledged as the greatest influence on English-language literature in history. Now, world-class literary writers introduce the book of the King James Bible in a series of beautifully designed, small-format volumes. The introducers' passionate, provocative, and personal engagements with the spirituality and the language of the text make the Bible come alive as a stunning work of literature and remind us of its overwhelming contemporary relevance.

A harrowing 17th-century account in verse form of King Herod's campaign to murder the male infants of his kingdom A finely crafted epic and literary monstrosity from the seventeenth-century poet of the marvelous: the harrowing account, in four bloody cantos, of King Herod and his campaign to murder the male infants of his kingdom to prevent the loss of his throne to the prophesied King of the Jews. The book starts in the pits of Hell, where the Devil stokes the flames of Herod's paranoid bloodlust in his troubled sleep, and concludes in the heights of Heaven where the unarmed champions march on to eternal glory. In between is an account of physical and political brutality that unfortunately holds too clear a mirror to world events today. The Massacre of the Innocents describes unbelievable cruelty while championing the nobility of suffering, all brilliantly translated and presented in ottava rima. Italian poet and adventurer Giambattista Marino (1569-1625) was deemed the king of his age, and his very name came to define the style of an epoch: marinismo, a shorthand summation of the bizarre inventiveness and ornate excesses of Baroque poetry. In and out of jail, and escaping an assassination attempt by a rival, Marino spent a good part of his life in Northern Italy and France before returning to his birthplace of Naples. His most famous work, L'Adone (Adonis), stands as one of the longest Italian epics ever written, and for two centuries was deemed a monstrous epitome of Baroque bad taste.

The turmoil that we see in the Catholic Church today begins to unravel in an idyllic Polish Catholic Church in Detroit, Michigan in the 1950's. A priest's body found hanging in a church belfry appears to be an apparent suicide but evolves into an investigation of suicide, accident, or possibly murder. Father John Paziek, a battle-hardened World War II former chaplain is the assistant pastor at Saint Francis Church. As he assists the police into what happened, he seeks help from an unlikely source - Calvin Teasley, the operator of a blind pig in the black ghetto of Detroit. Father John is also solicited by the Detroit Archdiocesan Bishop to seek out other priestly problems in the Church. Conflict with the Bishop's goals to protect the Church clashes with Father John's goals of protecting any possible victims. A baroque painting in the Bishop's study takes on a symbol representing the story and the conflict in the Catholic Church.

Since cinema's earliest days, literary adaptation has provided the movies with stories; and so we use literary terms like metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche to describe visual things. But there is another way of looking at film, and that is through its relationship with the visual arts – mainly painting, the oldest of the art forms. Art History for Filmmakers is an inspiring guide to how images from art can be used by filmmakers to establish period detail, and to teach composition, color theory and lighting. The book looks at the key moments in the development of the Western painting, and how these became part of the Western visual culture from which cinema emerges, before exploring how paintings can be representative of different genres, such as horror, sex, violence, realism and fantasy, and how the images in these paintings connect with cinema. Insightful case studies explore the links between art and cinema through the work of seven high-profile filmmakers, including Peter Greenaway, Peter Webber, Jack Cardiff, Martin Scorsese, Guillermo del Toro, Quentin Tarantino and Stan Douglas. A range of practical exercises are included in the text, which can be carried out singly or in small teams. Featuring stunning full-color images, Art History for Filmmakers provides budding filmmakers with a practical guide to how images from art can help to develop their understanding of the visual language of film.