"When he brought Maggie Christensen and fencing buddy, Ian Silverstein, home to Hardwood, N.D., for spring break, Torrie Thorsen anticipated nothing more than a carefree vacation, He never expected that werewolves would drag his mother and his girlfriend screaming from the house in the dead of night - or that he and his father, Thorian, would end up joining them as hostages on a secret trail into an inconceivable world." "For the Thorsen destiny lies where the family's history began - in a place of legend called Tir Na Nog, where Thor thundered and Odin still walks. It is here where the blade of Thorian del Thorian once loyally served the House of the Sky - until the able swordsman transgressed...and was forced to flee through the Hidden Ways to seek refuge in Earth." "Prisoners of the House of Flame in the city of Falias - pawns in a treacherous intrigue that threatens to bring war to the Middle Dominion - there is no turning back now for the two Thorians, father and son. But an unlikely champion approaches from the reality they have abandoned - a displaced young hero who travels in the company of Gods. For it is Ian Silverstein who must raise his sword to save his captive friends - and prevent the fiery coming of Ragnarok, the End of All Days."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Child of the Fire is the first book-length examination of the career of the nineteenth-century artist Mary Edmonia Lewis, best known for her sculptures inspired by historical and biblical themes. Throughout this richly illustrated study, Kirsten Pai Buick investigates how Lewis and her work were perceived, and their meanings manipulated, by others and the sculptor herself. She argues against the racialist art discourse that has long cast Lewis’s sculptures as reflections of her identity as an African American and Native American woman who lived most of her life abroad. Instead, by seeking to reveal Lewis’s intentions through analyses of her career and artwork, Buick illuminates Lewis’s fraught but active participation in the creation of a distinct “American” national art, one dominated by themes of indigeneity, sentimentality, gender, and race. In so doing, she shows that the sculptor variously complicated and facilitated the dominant ideologies of the vanishing American (the notion that Native Americans were a dying race), sentimentality, and true womanhood. Buick considers the institutions and people that supported Lewis’s career—including Oberlin College, abolitionists in Boston, and American expatriates in Italy—and she explores how their agendas affected the way they perceived and described the artist. Analyzing four of Lewis’s most popular sculptures, each created between 1866 and 1876, Buick discusses interpretations of Hiawatha in terms of the cultural impact of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha; Forever Free and Hagar in the Wilderness in light of art historians’ assumptions that artworks created by African American artists necessarily reflect African American themes; and The Death of Cleopatra in relation to broader problems of reading art as a reflection of identity.

When news of Sir Harry Oakes' murder broke to the world on the morning of July, 8, 1943, one man was more concerned than most. He was the Duke of Windsor, then Governor of the British colony, whose job it was to ensure that the killer was caught and brought to justice. Although many believe the duke was a bungler, "Blood and Fire" points to evidence that he was a plotter with something to hide.

An analysis of the emergence, reception, and legacy of fusion, experimental music that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s as musicians combined jazz, rock, and funk in new ways.

First published in 1963, James Baldwin's A Fire Next Time stabbed at the heart of America's so-called ldquo;Negro problemrdquo;. As remarkable for its masterful prose as it is for its uncompromising account of black experience in the United States, it is considered to this day one of the most articulate and influential expressions of 1960s race relations. The book consists of two essays, ldquo;My Dungeon Shook mdash; Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation,rdquo; and ldquo;Down At The Cross mdash; Letter from a Region of My Mind.rdquo; It weaves thematic threads of love, faith, and family into a candid assault on the hypocrisy of the so-say ldquo;land of the freerdquo;, insisting on the inequality implicit to American society. ldquo;You were born where you were born and faced the future that you facedrdquo;, Baldwin writes to his nephew, ldquo;because you were black and for no other reason.rdquo; His profound sense of injustice is matched by a robust belief in ldquo;monumental dignityrdquo;, in patience, empathy, and the possibility of transforming America into ldquo;what America must become.rdquo;

A gripping biography tracing the controversial Louisiana politician's quest for political legitimacy

Washington Duke is very young when he first realizes there is racial discrimination in the South. Living outside of Hillsboro, North Carolina, in the mid-1820s, he is one of ten children in a family that shares the wilderness with bears, rattlesnakes, and mountain lions. Washington learns about the world around him from his scholarly father, nurtures a compassion for others, and eventually grows into a man deeply troubled by the institution of slavery. Unaware of what awaits him, Washington is conscripted into the Confederate Army and reluctantly leaves his three-hundred-acre farm in 1864 to fight in the war. When the Civil War is over, Washington is left widowed, with nothing but his farm, two blind mules, a wagon load of tobacco, and his four children. Determined to rise from the rubble, Washington soon begins building the foundation for the Duke financial empire although not without challenges. As Washington ages, his sons eventually capture his dream to establish Duke University. Even with the family's successes, though, there is tragedy and heartache; Washington's granddaughter, Doris, dies under suspicious circumstances in 1993 and her estate becomes embroiled in a legal battle. Based on a true story, this compelling and inspirational tale examines the life of a gentle giant and his descendants who together built a multibillion-dollar empire, numerous charitable foundations, and a renowned academic institution, proving that anyone can overcome adversity to achieve greatness.