In the spring of 2020, Tyrel Nelson lost his mother. And he lost his job in the summer. Isolated by the pandemic and hamstrung by agony, he felt forgotten by the world as it marched on. Unhappy, uneasy, and unemployed, he began picking himself up by putting down his thoughts on a yellow legal pad. Battling through his bereavement on paper proved to be cathartic. But he needed more – a writing project he could sink his grief into. So he sorted through many of the narratives he had composed over the last dozen years. Reflecting and reexamining his existence, Tyrel brainstormed what to do with the pieces which pulled at him the most. A compilation describing significant individuals, places, and moments during the past decade-plus started to take shape. Travels and Tribulations is an emotional collection of vignettes, which commences in 2008 and concludes in 2020. While readers follow him on excursions in North, Central, and South America, they also accompany Nelson to the peaks and valleys of his personal life. Profoundly impacted by the deaths of both his parents, the author guides the audience through his anguish, depicting reminiscences and regrets as he openly tries to make sense of everything.

Separated from the fleet, Billy and Linda West, searching for a new planet to call home after Earth is destroyed by an asteroid storm, arrive on a mysterious world where they find themselves trapped in the middle of an ancient war between two violent nations and forced to choose sides.

If you work at a multinational company, at some point you may be asked to travel the world to maintain or install equipment or seek to boost your firms reputation. It happened to Andrew Mackay, and he was unprepared from the moment he stepped on an helicopter to go to a Chevron platform in the North Sea, when everyone was dressed for freezing temperatures except him. Working as what he calls a travelling prostitute, Mackay was surprised to find that almost all of the time, he was on his own. Higher-ups never asked about his well-being, and he had to quickly adapt to indigenous populations, cultures, and traditions. In sharing his experiences while working abroad, he hopes to prepare other employees at multinational companies who may not appreciate what traveling on the job entails. If your organisation has not done its homework in advance, your very life could be at risk. From being kidnapped at an airport, left stranded, forced to spend extra time in strange places, and navigating dangerous situations, youll learn how to survive when working overseas in Trials and Tribulations of a Travelling Prostitute.

Despite its immense significance and ubiquity in our everyday lives, the complex workings of trust are poorly understood and theorized. This volume explores trust and mistrust amidst locally situated scenes of sociality and intimacy. Because intimacy has often been taken for granted as the foundation of trust relations, the ethnographies presented here challenge us to think about dangerous intimacies, marked by mistrust, as well as forms of trust that cohere through non-intimate forms of sociality.

DIVProminent art historian looks at the birth of the art museum and contemplates its future as a public institution./div

A collection of essays that provide an overview of solar physics, discussing how scientists study the Sun and what they have discovered about various celestial phenomena.

In its ports, we find a priceless cargo of information; here are the first foreign descriptions of tea and porcelain, a panorama of unusual social practices, cannibal islands, and Indian holy men--a marvelous, mundane world, contained in the compass of a novella. In Mission to the Volga, we move north on a diplomatic mission from Baghdad to the upper reaches of the Volga River in what is now central Russia. This colorful documentary by Ibn Fadlan relates the trials and tribulations of an embassy of diplomats and missionaries sent by caliph al-Muqtadir to deliver political and religious instruction to the recently-converted King of the Bulghars. During eleven months of grueling travel, Ibn Fadlan records the marvels he witnesses on his journey, including an aurora borealis and the white nights of the North. Crucially, he offers a description of the Viking Rus, including their customs, clothing, tattoos, and a striking account of a ship funeral.