This collection of true stories about grizzly and black bears in the greater southwest from the 1820s to present day demonstrates changing attitudes toward bears and the preservation of the animals and their habitats

When Theodore Dreiser first published Sister Carrie in 1900 it was suppressed for its seamy plot, colloquial language, and immorality—for, as one reviewer put it, its depiction of "the godless side of American life." It was a side of life experienced firsthand by Dreiser, whose own circumstances often paralleled those of his characters in the turbulent, turn-of-the-century era of immigrants, black lynchings, ruthless industrialists, violent labor movements, and the New Woman. This masterful critical biography, the first on Dreiser in more than half a century, is the only study to fully weave Dreiser's literary achievement into the context of his life. Jerome Loving gives us a Dreiser for a new generation in a brilliant evocation of a writer who boldly swept away Victorian timidity to open the twentieth century in American literature. Dreiser was a controversial figure in his time, not only because of his literary efforts, which included publication of the brutal and heartbreaking An American Tragedy in 1925, but also because of his personal life, which featured numerous sexual liaisons, included membership in the communist party, merited a 180-page FBI file, and ended in Hollywood. The Last Titan paints a full portrait of the mature Dreiser between the two world wars—through the roaring twenties, the stock market crash, and the Depression—and describes his contact with important figures from Emma Goldman and H.L. Mencken to two presidents Roosevelt. Tracing Dreiser's literary roots in Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, and especially Whitman, Loving has written what will surely become the standard biography of one of America's best novelists.

On the day Colonel Mann was handed the job his life changed. He was hand picked from the U.S. Special Forces to come up with a plan for a revolutionary fi ghting force. It was a new concept for the Western Coalition nations, who were at war with a new threat emerging in the Middle East, The Islamic State. America the leading Superpower and their Coalition Allies having suffered casualties in The Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan since early 2000, were reluctant to put boots on the ground in this new insurrection in Iraq and Syria. Into this uncertain scenario, the idea of using an expendable military unit emerged from the bowels of the Pentagon. Colonel Mann stood before the Generals and CIA advisors as they briefed him on his mission. Put together a military unit, using selected convicts from our prisons. Train them in Special Forces tactics, as a Quick reaction force to be used in future operations. It was a decade before the emergence of ISIS, when Colonel Mann got the wheels in motion. It was a tedious process for there were many obstacles to overcome. It was kept top-secret from the start, for western political leaders would never publicly sanction such a ticking time bomb. The Pentagon put it under the umbrella of "Black Ops". Having used Americans and foreign soldiers as mercenaries for years, this new unit was an extension of foreign policy. It was a new tool, in the experimental phase for the world was dealing with global terrorism. The concept of the new Penal Army Unit is about a rarely used, little known, controversial method in the modern history of warfare, using condemned criminals to fight in near suicidal missions. Russian and German Armies were known to have Penal army units during World War 2. The Devils Brigade (1st Special Service Force), was the combined Canadian/US Commando unit in WW 2, set the standard in quick strike Combined Forces in the Allied camp. In 2014 Force X would emerge as it's modern progeny and nemesis of terrorists.

Peter Friedlander documents the formation of a local United Automobile Workers union at a mid-sized parts factory during the turbulent 1930s. Blending oral history based on personal interviews with a keen analysis of the worker's class structure and widely varied cultural backgrounds, Freidlander describes the transformation of a working-class community by its own actions and the ensuing stratification and factionalizing within that union. The result is a firsthand account of the experience of unionization in personal and social terms.

“Some of the pieces included here are important and some are curiosities, but all are absorbing . . . Recommended for casual and serious math enthusiasts.” —Library Journal From the archives of the world’s most famous newspaper comes a collection of its very best writing on mathematics. Big and informative, The New York Times Book of Mathematics gathers more than 110 articles written from 1892 to 2010 that cover statistics, coincidences, chaos theory, famous problems, cryptography, computers, and many other topics. Edited by Pulitzer Prize finalist and senior Times writer Gina Kolata, and featuring renowned contributors such as James Gleick, William L. Laurence, Malcolm W. Browne, George Johnson, and John Markoff, it’s a must-have for any math and science enthusiast. “Many fascinating problems are explained in language that the layperson will understand . . . This compilation of real-world applications will interest those with an inclination toward mathematics or problem-solving.” —Publishers Weekly

What Movies Teach About Race: Exceptionalism, Erasure, & Entitlement reveals the way that media frames in entertainment content persuade audiences to see themselves and others through a prescriptive lens that favors whiteness. These media representations threaten democracy as conglomeration and convergence concentrate the media’s global influence in the hands of a few corporations. By linking film’s political economy with the movie content in the most influential films, this critical discourse study uncovers the socially-shared cognitive structures that the movie industry passes down from one generation to another. Roslyn M. Satchel encourages media literacy and proposes an entertainment media cascading network activation theory that uncovers racialized rhetoric in media content that cyclically begins in historic ideologies, influences elite discourse, embeds in media systems, produces media frames and representations, shapes public opinion, and then is recycled and perpetuated generationally.