For Malibu and Kathy life changes overnight throwing them together into challenges just to live. Still faced with their denied passion for each other they find themselves forced together in an arrangement that is neither friends nor lovers but a combination of both. After living together for a year, first platonically and finally giving in to their consuming desire Kathy is at last free to become everything she and Malibu had dreamed of but now confused as to her feelings they begin to live apart. Twice Malibu asks her to marry him and she hesitates. The third time whether yes or no will be the last. Malibu in the meantime moves into a seedy hotel, works his drug business into the most lucrative in the Los Angeles area through a new partnership with a notorious mob lawyer and acquires a gorgeous harem that will stay with him for years. Then, he finds himself with his hand raised swearing to defend the Constitution. Ready to go to Vietnam, the assignment he is given instead leads him into the underworld.

The year is 1988. Naval Intelligence Service Vice Admiral Mark J. 'Malibu' Bowman is on the verge of putting a .45 caliber round in his own temple. In a single moment his Gulfstream III has been torn from the sky taking with it the two women who made his life what it is. He is stopped in his intention by the arrival of his replacement. He agrees to take on a mysterious, suicidal assignment in the desolation of Southern Arizona. Once there he becomes embroiled in a project leading to a plot hatched by the President himself to take over the world. Malibu's investigation into the conspiracy leads him to form an alliance with Vierte Reich, the Fourth Reich, with world domination plans of their own. A romantic alliance with a hard core attractive bar owner further complicates his mission. And this is just the beginning. He is joined by Dallas Raines, his former Executive Officer. After 9/11, the conspiracy goes to places that will kill millions. It is up to them to overcome the opposition and stop it.

You didn't have to be there.

Cross-Cultural Studies is the culminating effort of a distinguished team of international scholars who have worked since the mid-1980s to create the most complete analysis of Caribbean literature ever undertaken. Conceived as a major contribution to postcolonial studies, cultural studies, cultural anthropology, and regional studies of the Caribbean and the Americas, Cross-Cultural Studies illuminates the interrelations between and among Europe, the Caribbean islands, Africa, and the American continents from the late fifteenth century to the present. Scholars from five continents bring to bear on the most salient issues of Caribbean literature theoretical and critical positions that are currently in the forefront of discussion in literature, the arts, and public policy. Among the major issues treated at length in Cross-Cultural Studies are: The history and construction of racial inequality in Caribbean colonization; The origins and formation of literatures in various Creoles; The gendered literary representation of the Caribbean region; The political and ideological appropriation of Caribbean history in creating the idea of national culture in North and South America, Europe, and Africa; The role of the Caribbean in contemporary theories of Modernism and the Postmodern; The decentering of such canonical authors as Shakespeare; The vexed but inevitable connectedness of Caribbean literature with both its former colonial metropoles and its geographical neighbors. Contributions to Cross-Cultural Studies give a concrete cultural and historical analysis of such contemporary critical terms as hybridity, transculturation, and the carnivalesque, which have so often been taken out of context and employed in narrowly ideological contexts. Two important theories of the simultaneous unity and diversity of Caribbean literature and culture, propounded by Antonio Benítez-Rojo and +douard Glissant, receive extended treatment that places them strategically in the debate over multiculturalism in postcolonial societies and in the context of chaos theory. A contribution by Benítez-Rojo permits the reader to test the theory through his critical practice. Divided into nine thematic and methodological sections followed by a complete index to the names and dates of authors and significant historical figures discussed, Cross-Cultural Studies will be an indispensable resource for every library and a necessary handbook for scholars, teachers, and advanced students of the Caribbean region.