What happens to imaginary friends once they've been forgotten? Do they know that they're imaginary? How would they spend their time? When the Earth is invaded by extra-dimensional beings, a few imaginary friends may be humanity's only hope.

The Arrernte people of Central Australia first encountered Europeans in the 1860s as groups of explorers, pastoralists, missionaries, and laborers invaded their land. During that time the Arrernte were the subject of intense curiosity, and the earliest accounts of their lives, beliefs, and traditions were a seminal influence on European notions of the primitive. The first study to address the Arrernte’s contemporary situation, Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past also documents the immense sociocultural changes they have experienced over the past hundred years. Employing ethnographic and archival research, Diane Austin-Broos traces the history of the Arrernte as they have transitioned from a society of hunter-gatherers to members of the Hermannsburg Mission community to their present, marginalized position in the modern Australian economy. While she concludes that these wrenching structural shifts led to the violence that now marks Arrernte communities, she also brings to light the powerful acts of imagination that have sustained a continuing sense of Arrernte identity.

“Every war brings forth one perfect book. . . . Now we have The Immaculate Invasion, the masterpiece of the 1994 US assault on and occupation of Haiti.” —Chicago Tribune Widely celebrated upon its original publication in 1999, National Book Award winning writer Bob Shacochis’s The Immaculate Invasion is a gritty, poetic, and revelatory look at the American intervention in Haiti. In 1994, the United States embarked on Operation Uphold Democracy, a response to the overthrow of the democratically elected Haitian government by a brutal military coup. As a reporter for Harper’s, Bob Shacochis traveled to Haiti and was embedded—long before the idea became popular in Iraq—with a team of Special Forces commandos for eighteen months. He came away with tremendous insight into Haiti, the character of American fighters, and what can happen when an intervention turns into a misadventure. In The Immaculate Invasion, Shacochis captures the exploits and frustrations, the inner lives and heroic deeds of young Americans as they struggle to bring democracy to a country ravaged by tyranny. The Immaculate Invasion is required reading for anyone who wants to understand what has happened in Haiti in the past, its current state, and its future path. “An extraordinary book about an extraordinary event . . . I felt transported to Haiti. I could hear it. I could smell it. At moments I felt moved almost to tears, only to find myself, a page or two later, laughing out loud.” —Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Soul of a New Machine

A critical survey of Australian culture, history and foreign policy from settlement until 2007, with a particular focus on Australia's relations with the Asia-Pacific and its anxieties about security.

In this, the first fully documented study of British and Irish popular reactions to the outbreak of the First World War, Catriona Pennell explores UK public opinion of the time and successfully challenges the myth of British 'war enthusiasm'. A Kingdom United explores what people felt, and how they acted, in response to an unanticipated and unprecedented crisis. It is a history of both ordinary people and elite figures in extraordinary times. Dr Pennell demonstrates that describing the reactions of over 40 million British and Irish people to the outbreak of war as either enthusiastic in the British case, or disengaged in the Irish, is over-simplified and inadequate. Emotional reactions to the war were ambiguous and complex, and changed over time. By the end of 1914 the populations of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland had largely embraced the war, but the war had also embraced them and showed no signs of relinquishing its grip. The five months from August to December 1914 set the shape of much that was to follow. A Kingdom United describes and explains that twenty-week formative process. Pennell draws from a vast array of diaries, letters, journals, and newspaper accounts by the very people who experienced the war in its first dramatic five months. She outlines the variety of responses felt amongst both the ordinary people and elite figures from across the country.