After his introduction to the renovation business, Rick Dammas tries to take control of his destiny. He enjoys the benefits of fast money, and gets caught up in the thrill of the sale. In such a cutthroat business Dammas is determined to stay on top by any means possible. His devious dealings cause mayhem and nightmares for all who come into contact with him, whether worker or client. His priorities in life are food, money and horse racing, each ultimately bringing him crashing to the ground. Carefully woven into this story is a glimpse into the renovation business showing what happens when unqualified tradesmen and unscrupulous salespeople join forces to do inadequate work, for maximum profit. This insight, and Rick’s wheeling and dealing with other people’s lives and money make RENOVATORS INCORPORATED / Bloodsuckers at the Door a compelling read.

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The link between gender and corruption has been studied since the late 1990s. Debates have been heated and scholars accused of bringing forward stereotypical beliefs about women as the “fair” sex. Policy proposals for bringing more women to office have been criticized for promoting unrealistic quick-fix solutions to deeply rooted problems. This edited volume advances the knowledge surrounding the link between gender and corruption by including studies where the historical roots of corruption are linked to gender and by contextualizing the exploration of relationships, for example by distinguishing between democracies versus authoritarian states and between the electoral arena versus the administrative branch of government—the bureaucracy. Taken together, the chapters display nuances and fine-grained understandings. The book highlights that gender equality processes, rather than the exclusionary categories of “women” and “men”, should be at the forefront of analysis, and that developments strengthening the position of women vis-à-vis men affect the quality of government.

The author describes the reasons why humanitarian military interventions succeed or fail, basing his analysis on the interventions carried out in the 1990s in Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, Kosovo, and East Timor.

This innovative social and cultural history explores the daily lives of the lowest echelons in president Porfirio Díaz’s army through the decades leading up to the 1910 Revolution. The author shows how life in the barracks—not just combat and drill but also leisure, vice, and intimacy—reveals the basic power relations that made Mexico into a modern society. The Porfirian regime sought to control and direct violence, to impose scientific hygiene and patriotic zeal, and to build an army to rival that of the European powers. The barracks community enacted these objectives in times of war or peace, but never perfectly, and never as expected. The fault lines within the process of creating the ideal army echoed the challenges of constructing an ideal society. This insightful history of life, love, and war in turn-of-the-century Mexico sheds useful light on the troubled state of the Mexican military more than a century later.