This study will significantly further our interpretations of the unique autobiography of Margery Kempe, lay woman turned mystic and visionary. Following the manuscript from a Carthusian monastery through history, Chappell bridges the gaps in our understanding of the transmission of texts from the medieval past to the present.

This study will significantly further our interpretations of the unique autobiography of Margery Kempe, lay woman turned mystic and visionary. Following the manuscript from a Carthusian monastery through history, Chappell bridges the gaps in our understanding of the transmission of texts from the medieval past to the present.

In this innovative and ambitious global history, distinguished economic historian Amiya Kumar Bagchi traces the global history of human change and survival under the sway of capitalism since the voyages of Columbus. Writing with extraordinary range and depth, he offers a critical analysis of the history and human costs and consequences of development in Europe and North America, and in major regions such as India, China, Japan, and Africa. Bagchi critically characterizes the emergence and operation of capitalism as a system driven by wars over resources and markets rather than one that genuinely operates on the principle of free markets. His unflinching examination of the human toll--in the periphery as well in the core nations--includes not only economic processes and issues of inequality within and among nations, but also the intertwining of economics and war-making on a world scale. Bagchi's compelling vision will change the ways in which we think about many of the largest issues in the world history and development over the past 500 years.

In late October 1846, the last wagon train of that year's westward migration stopped overnight before resuming its arduous climb over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, unaware that a fearsome storm was gathering force. After months of grueling travel, the 81 men, women and children would be trapped for a brutal winter with little food and only primitive shelter. The conclusion is known: by spring of the next year, the Donner Party was synonymous with the most harrowing extremes of human survival. But until now, the full story of what happened, what it tells us about human nature and about America's westward expansion, remained shrouded in myth. Drawing on fresh archaeological evidence, recent research on topics ranging from survival rates to snowfall totals, and heartbreaking letters and diaries made public by descendants a century-and-a-half after the tragedy, Ethan Rarick offers an intimate portrait of the Donner party and their unimaginable ordeal: a mother who must divide her family, a little girl who shines with courage, a devoted wife who refuses to abandon her husband, a man who risks his life merely to keep his word. But Rarick resists both the gruesomely sensationalist accounts of the Donner party as well as later attempts to turn the survivors into archetypal pioneer heroes. "The Donner Party," Rarick writes, "is a story of hard decisions that were neither heroic nor villainous. Often, the emigrants displayed a more realistic and typically human mixture of generosity and selfishness, an alloy born of necessity." A fast-paced, heart-wrenching, clear-eyed narrative history, A Desperate Hope casts new light on one of America's most horrific encounters between the dream of a better life and the harsh realities such dreams so often must confront.

Perilous Passage is an account of Terry Wilson's lifetime apprenticeship under the master shamanic practitioner, Brion Gysin, the hidden master of the avant-garde, of whom William Burroughs said, "He is the only man I respect." The book focuses on events as they developed just prior to and after Gysin's death in 1986 and details the extreme psychic 'Third Mind' eff ects known as 'The Process.' Perilous Passage is a cautionary tale about the uses and abuses of power, a paranoid espionage thriller that includes transcribed audio hallucinations, notes, cutups, interview format, and collaged material. Like Gysin and Burroughs, Wilson treats language itself as a parasitic invader which must be resisted, broken up and reassembled. This book is about how Gysin's magic was passed on and is being carried into the future.

By mid-1942 the Allies were losing the Mediterranean war: Malta was isolated and its civilian population faced starvation. In June 1942 the British Royal Navy made a stupendous effort to break the Axis stranglehold. The British dispatched armed convoys from Gibraltar and Egypt toward Malta. In a complex battle lasting more than a week, Italian and German forces defeated Operation Vigorous, the larger eastern effort, and ravaged the western convoy, Operation Harpoon, in a series of air, submarine, and surface attacks culminating in the Battle of Pantelleria. Just two of seventeen merchant ships that set out for Malta reached their destination. In Passage Perilous presents a detailed description of the operations and assesses the actual impact Malta had on the fight to deny supplies to Rommel's army in North Africa. The book's discussion of the battle's operational aspects highlights the complex relationships between air and naval power and the influence of geography on littoral operations.