A few years have passed since Catherine's time in the The Juliette Society, but things haven't been going the way she planned. Her life with her fiancé Jack has become predictable and boring, especially in the bedroom. Now working as a journalist, she struggles to find inspiration in her work or at home - until she starts writing about the death of a publicly beloved model, Inana Luna, whose experiences reflect Catherine's own blossoming sexuality and independence. What started as a routine story quickly becomes Catherine's obsession as she follows the tale of a woman whose tracks take her down a road with too many familiar facets: a fascination with kink, lustful men, and some very sexy intrigue. Like the Roman god Janus, Catherine is simultaneously looking to the past and the future. Can her experiences with The Juliette Society, along with Inana's diary, help her figure out what she really wants in life, love, and sex? Or will the story drag her back down into a tantalizing world from which she might not be able to escape a second time?

A few years have passed since Catherine’s time in the The Juliette Society, but things haven’t been going the way she planned. Her life with her fiancé Jack has become predictable and boring, especially in the bedroom. Now working as a journalist, she struggles to find inspiration in her work or at home—until she starts writing about the death of a publicly beloved model, Inana Luna, whose experiences reflect Catherine’s own blossoming sexuality and independence. What started as a routine story quickly becomes Catherine’s obsession, as she follows the tale of a woman whose tracks take her down a road with too many familiar facets: a fascination with kink, lustful men, and some very sexy intrigue. Like the Roman god Janus, Catherine is simultaneously looking to the past and the future. Can her experiences with The Juliette Society, along with Inana's diary, help her figure out what she really wants in life, love, and sex? Or will the story drag her back down into a tantalizing world from which she might not be able to escape a second time?

The pendulum has shifted in Catherine's life once again. Four years after peeling back the curtain on The Janus Chamber, we find her now ironically working as a political journalist, settled into a mundane routine and dating life because she chose to tell the truth about Inana Luna instead of embracing a life of decadence with The Juliette Society. Meeting a man who reignites her passion for cinema and guilt-free sex makes her realize what she's been missing, but an unwanted scandal douses the flame. Forced to lay low, she finds an opportunity to take back her career with a human interest story in Honduras, but there are people who see Catherine's article as a threat and will do everything they can to stop her from writing. The world she finds is unlike anything she's ever seen. Catherine is The Mismade Girl, and as her life is turned upside down, she must choose to either perish . . . or be remade anew.

A few years have passed since Catherine's time in the The Juliette Society, but things haven't been going the way she planned. Her life with her fianc� Jack has become predictable and boring, especially in the bedroom. Now working as a journalist, she struggles to find inspiration in her work or at home - until she starts writing about the death of a publicly beloved model, Inana Luna, whose experiences reflect Catherine's own blossoming sexuality and independence. What started as a routine story quickly becomes Catherine's obsession as she follows the tale of a woman whose tracks take her down a road with too many familiar facets: a fascination with kink, lustful men, and some very sexy intrigue. Like the Roman god Janus, Catherine is simultaneously looking to the past and the future. Can her experiences with The Juliette Society, along with Inana's diary, help her figure out what she really wants in life, love, and sex? Or will the story drag her back down into a tantalizing world from which she might not be able to escape a second time?

Renowned philosopher and cultural theorist Kristeva (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection) offers an extended consideration of artistic figurations of the severed head, the organizing theme to an exhibition she coordinated at the Louvre in 1998. Though she follows a single historical trajectory, moving from Paleolithic skull cults to antique Greek sculpture to the Surrealist drawings, Kristeva eschews the disciplinary constraints of art history, instead employing psychoanalysis to explore the intertwined problems of representation and mortality posed by the severed head. For Kristeva, the capacity to figure the life of the mind first requires a confrontation with this horrific object that stands at the boundary between life and death, registering not only the loss of corporeal form but also subjective interiority. Though this book does not engage with recent images of decapitation, it is not without contemporary political-cultural import; for Kristeva, these cruel artistic figurations offer us the capacity to contemplate the sacred within a technology-driven contemporary visual culture. Verdict While a challenging text, this beautifully written and richly layered meditation on mortality and representation will undoubtedly appeal to those readers interested in semiotic and psychoanalytically informed readings of art.-Jonathan Patkowski, CUNY Graduate Ctr.(c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Renaissance Fun is about the technology of Renaissance entertainments in stage machinery and theatrical special effects; in gardens and fountains; and in the automata and self-playing musical instruments that were installed in garden grottoes. How did the machines behind these shows work? How exactly were chariots filled with singers let down onto the stage? How were flaming dragons made to fly across the sky? How were seas created on stage? How did mechanical birds imitate real birdsong? What was ‘artificial music’, three centuries before Edison and the phonograph? How could pipe organs be driven and made to play themselves by waterpower alone? And who were the architects, engineers, and craftsmen who created these wonders? All these questions are answered. At the end of the book we visit the lost ‘garden of marvels’ at Pratolino with its many grottoes, automata and water jokes; and we attend the performance of Mercury and Mars in Parma in 1628, with its spectacular stage effects and its music by Claudio Monteverdi – one of the places where opera was born. Renaissance Fun is offered as an entertainment in itself. But behind the show is a more serious scholarly argument, centred on the enormous influence of two ancient writers on these subjects, Vitruvius and Hero. Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture were widely studied by Renaissance theatre designers. Hero of Alexandria wrote the Pneumatics, a collection of designs for surprising and entertaining devices that were the models for sixteenth and seventeenth century automata. A second book by Hero On Automata-Making – much less well known, then and now – describes two miniature theatres that presented plays without human intervention. One of these, it is argued, provided the model for the type of proscenium theatre introduced from the mid-sixteenth century, the generic design which is still built today. As the influence of Vitruvius waned, the influence of Hero grew.

This text is a history of the world's oldest global conservation body - the World Conservation Union, established in 1948 as a forum for governments, non-governmental organizations and individual conservationists. The author draws on unpublished archives to reveal the often turbulent story of the IUCN and its achievements in, and influence on, conservation and environmental policy worldwide - establishing national parks and protected areas and defending threatened species.