This book deals with triumphant and tragic heroes, with victims and perpetrators as archetypes of the Western imagination. A major recent change in Western societies is that memories of triumphant heroism-for example, the revolutionary uprising of the people-are increasingly replaced by the public remembrance of collective trauma of genocide, slavery and expulsion. The first part of the book deals with the heroes and victims and explores the social construction of charisma and its inevitable decay. Part 2 focuses on a paradigm case of the collective trauma of perpetrators: German national identity between 1945 and 2000. After a time of latency, the legacy of nationalistic trauma was addressed in a public conflict between generations. The conflict took center stage in vivid public debates and became a core element of Germany's official political culture. Today public confessions of the guilt of the past have spread beyond the German case. They are part of a new post-utopian pattern of collective identity in a globalised setting.

Triumphant Bodies: Sexual-Political Conquest in British Women's Published Writing, 1660-1769 builds on recent scholarship such as Ros Ballaster's Seductive Forms and Catherine Gallagher's Nobody's Story in order to draw attention to professional female authors' use of a pliant vocabulary of sexuality and politics during the eighteenth century. Throughout the study, Smith emphasizes the blending of gendered, sexed, and politicized language a blending that allowed women to provocatively challenge, undermine, and rearticulate the terms of power and authority that were available to them in the literary marketplace. Triumphant Bodies centers on Aphra Behn, Mary Wortley Montagu, Charlotte Lennox, and Frances Brooke, with additional glances toward their contemporaries, including John Dryden, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Delarivier Manley, Henry Fielding, Anne Finch, Mary Leapor, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Horace Walpole. Smith positions women's writing within dominant traditions but argues that women writers simultaneously understood themselves s part of a gendered trajectory. By drawing together a diverse and expansive range of texts by women, this study suggests the complexity of any attempt to define women's authorial triumphs during this period of tremendous vigor and transformation in the literary marketplace.

for saxophone quartetA slow movement which explores the beautiful sonorities of saxophones played softly.

"The Bond" is a powerful memoir that chronicles the strength of the relationships formed among a collection of unrelated siblings who forged a remarkable, separate, and permanent family within a foster home. Kirkus.com calls it: "A poignant, infuriating, informative, and ultimately triumphant account of an unusual clan." BookLife.com wrote: "Grotticelli's unsparing honesty about his birth and foster families will make readers wince and keep them marveling at the indomitability of these children. That the foster siblings were able to forge familial bonds with each other is extraordinary." OnlineBookClub.com said: "This is a book about real people, real lives and real feelings. It is the story of their triumph over adversity and their struggle to find the kind of family love that many of us take for granted." Angelo M. Grotticelli is a veteran technology journalist. This is his first book.