It’s 2070, and the post-Collapse world is staggering toward another, perhaps final, destruction. Blanco, is a reluctant member of Mister Splinter’s Magnifico Cirque de Curiosities. Travelling through dangerous lands, this heavily-armed band of freaks and circus performers survive by conning and killing, robbing and running – and putting on a show. But simple survival is not their real purpose. Their leader, seen only by his ‘doctors’, enforces brutal rule, and none are more harshly treated than Blanco, who becomes aware the circus is much more than it seems. Worse, something is growing inside him, something that is changing and killing him. From the ruins of London, across Europe and Asia Minor to the remote Tien Shan mountains, Blanco and the circus fight toward a final showdown, for Blanco’s last chance of survival - and perhaps even for the entire human species. A page-turning spec-fic thriller and wild ride through the near future.

An authoritative introduction to the specialised histories of the modern circus, its unique aesthetics, and its contemporary manifestations and scholarship, from its origins in commercial equestrian performance, to contemporary inflections of circus arts in major international festivals, educational environments, and social justice settings.

The author of the Chance Purdue series introduces a Chicago detective who goes under the big top to take down the ringmaster of a Russian conspiracy. When the CIA chooses Birch Kirby, a mediocre detective with a personal life even less thrilling than his professional one, no one is more surprised by the selection than Birch himself. But the agency needs someone for a secret mission, and Birch may be just the clown for the job. Going undercover as a circus performer, he travels to Grizzly Gulch to investigate the source of daily, un-decodable secret messages that are being transmitted to the KGB. Birch interacts with wildly colorful characters while stumbling through performances as well as his assignment. With the clock ticking, Birch must hurry to take a right step toward bringing the curtain down on this very important case. Praise for Ross H. Spencer’s The Dada Caper “Parodies of the private‐eye novel come and go. Here is The Dada Caper by Ross H. Spencer. It has every cliché down pat, including rat-tat-tat writing in which paragraphs are seldom more than one sentence. . . . The hero is a private eye who is always tailing the wrong people and hitting the wrong guys. The Dada Caper is wild, shrewd, mad and unexpectedly funny.” —The New York Times

Every day brings a fresh barrage of bewildering claims about science and technology. How non-scientists tell the difference between the hyperbole and those developments that are important? With a modest amount of critical thinking, an understanding of how science is practiced, and a qualitative understanding of the two most sacred principles in science — the first and second laws of thermodynamics — anyone can make the distinction. Critical thinking and the practice of science are not emphasized in undergraduate science courses for non-scientists, while exposure to the first and second laws is usually reserved for physical science and engineering majors. This book introduces non-scientists to these topics and provides detailed applications to a variety of topics.

In 1874, the Hedrick family arrived in L 'Arbre croche or "crooked tree," as the Jesuit missionaries had called it one hundred and fifty years earlier. The wilderness of Little Traverse Bay had just been opened for homesteading, and the Hedricks joined a dozen other white families in the trading post of Little Traverse, situated in virgin forest. From the age of four until he left the area at eighteen, U. P. Hedrick saw the shabby trading post rum into the tidy village of Harbor Springs. In those years, mechanized logging replaced the homesteader's crosscut saw; the passenger pigeon disappeared; and the railroad arrived. Hedrick writes of his youth and shows himself to be a sharp and often witty observer of the little details of domestic life on the Michigan frontier. He expounds on cooking whitefish and blackberry rolypoly, on the farmer's "arsenal of axes," on pigs and their parts-both edible and useful, on wild and cultivated fruits, on trees, on kettles, and on Indians of the area. Lovers of Michigan's woods and fields, lakes and rivers; professional historians; and storytellers will find themselves delighted by Hedrick's account. The Land of the Crooked Tree is a Great Lakes Books reprint.

This is a textual, bibliographical and cultural study of 60 years of Bradbury's fiction. The authors draw upon correspondence with his publishers, agents and friends, as well as archival manuscripts, to examine the story of Bradbury's authorship over more than half a century.