Historic house museums--one of the most prevalent types of history museums in the country--have long depicted the owners of the house and their families, but representing the servants has introduced a unique set of challenges. While museum professionals have increasingly incorporated women, immigrants, African Americans, and other minorities into portrayals of the past, these portrayals often show an idealistic world without class antagonisms or ethnic conflict. Exploring the domestic conflicts that may have existed between mistress and servant often creates a more vivid and believable experience for guests. Through her examination of the pitfalls of interpretation, Pustz offers advice for museum professionals on programming accurate and compelling depictions of those who lived their lives in the back stairs and kitchen rather than in the parlor. Based on extensive surveys of historians at historic house museums, this informative study presents examples of successful interpretation programs, including those that have made the kitchen and servants' quarters the most popular stops on the tour. Pustz encourages museum curators to look beyond the archives of their own institution and explore other era-appropriate sources, including advertising and housekeeping guides, when trying to create a complete picture of the house's servants, who often left behind few records.

The Vampire Nation goes to war with the United States military. Caught in the crossfire is Major Ursula Carlson, whose attempt to change the military's perspective on the use of vampires in military operations is largely ignored. Since the military feels they can't trust the vampires, they intend to destroy them. Denied a promotion to head an elite force, Ursula is on the run for attempting to stop the slaughter. Solomon and a handful of vampires, along with Ursula, are the only ones standing between the human race and the vampire nation.

All the Lost Voices is a first-person narrative that vacillates between the narrator’s present condition in a Mexico City brothel and his past experiences growing up fast and frightened in the unforgiving landscape of his hometown, Paterson, New Jersey. The parallel story lines are artfully interwoven creating a sometimes furious, sometimes apologetic exposition that encompasses not only a glimpse into the current psychosis of the protagonist, Tony De Felice, but a rearward view of the process that has brought this madness to surface. Alcoholism, violence, thieving, murder, exile, the imprisonment of his father, the loss of a fragile youth—all are addressed in drunken rants and gentle, often philosophical appeals to the reader, a tempestuous marriage of form and content offset by unexpectedly funny bits of wisdom and hilarious scenes of youthful indiscretion. The novel advances in several directions at once, from Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City to Tuxpan in the present tense, and from Paterson to Florida to Oregon to any and all points of the American map in the past tense, via car, train, plane, and bus. Yet in spite of this motion, the narrator remains emotionally frozen, bound to his past and locked within the parameters of his mind, feverishly writing his way towards an elusive understanding of himself.

Seventeen-year-old twins Sadie and Mason Peabody deal regularly with the usual teenage drama: school, friends, and parents. But bright and intuitive as they are, neither could have guessed just what destiny has in store for them. Centuries before, an intricate plan was laid by the Originals, a group of witches and warlocks who struggled to maintain the balance between light and dark magic. Their efforts set into motion an eternal battle that threatens to entomb the world in a maze of power, ambition, and fear. These powerful magic users knew that they needed some insurance against oblivion, so they devised a way to secretly transfer their magic through their lineage. Sadie and Mason are suddenly forced into the family business, a world of magic they cant hope to understand, let alone control. The twins must now find a way to navigate their strange new existence. As the old world collides with the new, the bizarre becomes their new normal. As a force more powerful than even the Originals is unleashed, the newest witch and warlock in the family will have to dig deep to survive, let alone save the world.

This early work by the Booker Prize-winning author Barry Unsworth chronicles one of his literary obsessions the corruption of innocence and forms it into a compelling contemporary narrative set in the rambling, overgrown grounds of an English estate. There, relying on his rich sister Audrey's beneficence, Simon obsessively digs a secret system of tunnels from which to spy on others. When Josh, a good-looking naif, becomes a gardener at Audrey's home, the two women of the household, Audrey and her distant relative and housekeeper, Marion, find Josh's strength and seeming innocence a potent spell, and his response escalates unacknowledged tensions between them. Meanwhile, Simon, worried about Josh, takes steps to prevent the exposure of his underground labyrinth. The explosive chemistry between the characters will eventually rip apart and rearrange all their lives.

Meet the operatives of the Carnacki Institute—JC Chance: the team leader, brave, charming, and almost unbearably arrogant; Melody Chambers: the science geek who keeps the antisupernatural equipment running; and Happy Jack Palmer: the terminally gloomy telepath. Their mission: Do Something About Ghosts. Lay them to rest, send them packing, or just kick their nasty ectoplasmic arses… In a quiet London suburb, four university students participating in an experiment inside a reputed haunted house hold a séance that goes terribly wrong. What—or who—ever they summoned has taken their minds away, leaving them empty shells. Enter the Ghost Finders, ready to confront an enraged poltergeist for the students’ very souls. All in a day’s work—except the team doesn’t know that in another part of the city, a different entity has also breached the threshold between worlds. And this time what is at stake is not four lives—but the very existence of all humanity.

"I am an AIDS doctor. When I began that work in 1992, we knew what caused AIDS, how it spread, and how to avoid getting it, but we didn't know how to treat it or how to prevent our patients' seemingly inevitable progression toward death. The stigma that surrounded AIDS patients from the very beginning of the epidemic in the early 1980s continued to be harsh and isolating. People looked askance at me: What was it like to work in that kind of environment with those kinds of people? My patients are 'those kinds of people.' They are an array and a combination of brave, depraved, strong, entitled, admirable, self-centered, amazing, strange, funny, daring, gifted, exasperating, wonderful, and sad. And more. At my clinic most of the patients are indigent and few have had an education beyond high school, if that. Many are gay men and many of the patients use or have used drugs. They all have HIV, and in the early days far too many of them died. Every day they brought us the stories of their lives. We listened to them and we took care of them as best we could."—from the Introduction In 1992, Dr. Susan C. Ball began her medical career taking care of patients with HIV in the Center for Special Studies, a designated AIDS care center at a large academic medical center in New York City. Her unsentimental but moving memoir of her experiences bridges two distinct periods in the history of the epidemic: the terrifying early years in which a diagnosis was a death sentence and ignorance too often eclipsed compassion, and the introduction of antiviral therapies that transformed AIDS into a chronic, though potentially manageable, disease. Voices in the Band also provides a new perspective on how we understand disease and its treatment within the context of teamwork among medical personnel, government agencies and other sources of support, and patients. Deftly bringing back both the fear and confusion that surrounded the disease in the early 1990s and the guarded hope that emerged at the end of the decade, Dr. Ball effectively portrays the grief and isolation felt by both the patients and those who cared for them using a sharp eye for detail and sensitivity to each patient's story. She also recounts the friendships, humor, and camaraderie that she and her colleagues shared working together to provide the best care possible, despite repeated frustrations and setbacks. As Dr. Ball and the team at CSS struggled to care for an underserved population even after game-changing medication was available, it became clear to them that medicine alone could not ensure a transition from illness to health when patients were suffering from terrible circumstances as well as a terrible disease.