Bøger udgivet af St. Martin's Griffin

Using the experience of the authors in a variety of educational, business and theater settings, this book investigates the connection between practical theater work and drama theory, and its effect on the development and dynamic of any working group.

While traveling alone from Richmond, Virginia, to New York City, Poe disappeared for nearly a week. When seen again he was terribly drunk and nearly dead in Baltimore. In the hospital, four days later, after periods of raving delirium, he died. The immediate cause of death given was "congestion of the brain." At first no one seriously doubted that Poe died from drunken debauchery. However, Poe adherents suggested many theories of a physical nature about precipitating causes but no one has seroiusly probed the mystery of the missing week . . . until now.

In the years before World War I, New York City's Greenwich Village was a place of great artistic and political ferment. Political causes attracted throngs of supporters. Artistic movements filled cafes and restaurants with boisterous conversation. And for the first time, women began to seize power and shape the landscape of the time: Margaret Sanger began her crusade for birth control; Mabel Dodge hosted salons for the avant-garde; Dorothy Day founded the Catholic Workers Movement; Elizabeth Gurley Flynn helped to organize the Workers of the World. The list of women who played integral roles in American life and letters then is endless, and Sandra Adickes captures them all while evoking the now-lost paradise that New York offered to women at the turn of the century.

The profession of directing is barely a century old. On Directing considers the position of the director in theater and performance today. What is a director? How do they begin work on a play or performance? What methods are used in rehearsal? Is the director an enabler, a collaborator or dictator? As we enter the new millennium, is the very concept of directing under increasing threat from changes in thinking and practice? The full diversity of today's approaches to directing are explored through a series of interviews with leading contemporary practitioners. On Directing is a landmark book about the director's craft.

This major new reference book presents more than 700 biographies of Shakespeare's contemporaries and richly illustrates the variety and complexity of the life of the period he lived. With its useful glossary of unusual terms, and extensive cross-references, this invaluable book emphasizes the cultural continuity between the last phase of Elizabethan England and the Jacobean age, and the authors also pay attention to American connections. This extensive and detailed study will be invaluable to all those interested in Shakespeare and his times.

In this book, Jamie Cockfield examines the impact of the revolution on the Russians who were caught in the middle of wartime alliances and nationalist ardor during World War I.

Francis Spufford explores the British obsession with polar exploration in a book that Jan Morris, writing in The Times, called, "A truly majestic work of scholarship, thought and literary imagination . . ." The title, a last quote from one explorer to his party as he left their tent never to return, embodies the danger and mystery that fueled the romantic allure of the poles and, subsequently, the British imagination. Far from being a conventional history of polar exploration, I May Be Some Time attempts to understand what was going on in the minds of the polar explorers as they headed toward destinies like Terra Nova. Serving up a heady brew of Captain Perry, Jane Eyre, gastronomic obsessions with iced desserts, and the daily lives of Eskimos, Spufford treats the reader to one of the most satisfying and imaginative contemporary works dealing with exploration and human need.

Kate Moss wears a sexual pout in a Calvin Klein ad. Kurt Cobain's suicide is held aloft as the archetypal example of teen alienation. What truth, if any, is contained in these depictions of today's youth? What message about our children is being transmitted? In Channel Surfing, Henry Giroux turns his gaze to this barrage of media images and sees a message that sells our children short by damning them to the preconceived role of alienated outcast. Surfing from one channel of communication to the next, Giroux builds up a complex web of associations between characters in films, tarnished real-life teen idols, and sexualized presentations of nubile young clothing models to show us the dark vision of our children that rides the airwaves and inhabits the print media. Channel Surfing, Henry Giroux's most fascinating and intriguing book yet, is sure to create controversy and debate at the same time that it calls for a more ethical attitude towards the prospect of our children's future.

IN HIS BEST-SELLING The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, William Irwin Thompson intrigued readers with his thoughts on mythology and sexuality. In his newest book, Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness, he takes the reader on a journey through the evolution of consciousness, from the preverbal communications of early stone carvings, to the writings of Marcel Proust, around the monumental wrappings of Christo, and up to the rebirth of interest in the Taoist philosophy of Lao Tzu. Owing as much to the rhythmic constructions of jazz as to established methods of scholarship, Thompson plays a riff on biology and culture, seeing the birth of the mind in Proust's madeleine, the displacement of humanity in Christo's wrapping of the Bundestag, and, in Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, the path forward to a new planetary culture. In Coming Into Being, William Irwin Thompson presents a fascinating vision of our past, our present, and our future that no one will want to miss.

As the first full-length study of conspiracy theories in the Middle East, The Hidden Hand reveals how such theories play a powerful role in the political life of the region. Placing conspiracy theories in their historical context, Daniel Pipes shows how the idea of the conspiracy has come to suffuse life in the Middle East, from the most private family conversations to the highest and most public levels of politics. Pipes then looks at conspiracies and their strength as a partial explanation for much of the region's problems, including its record of political extremism, its culture of violence, and its lack of modernization. Concluding with speculations about the future of conspiracy theories, Pipes provides a key to understanding the often complicated political culture of the Middle East.

Adam Garfinkle convincingly demonstrates that the antiwar movement, even at its radical height, was of marginal value and at times actually proved counterproductive to stopping the Vietnam War.

In EDITH WHARTON ABROAD, Sarah Bird Wright has carefully chosen selections from Edith Wharton's travel writing that convey the writer's control of her craft. Wharton disliked the generality of guidebooks and focused instead on the "parentheses of travel" - the undiscovered hidden corners of Europe, Morocco, and the Mediterranean. This collection spans a period of three decades and takes the reader with Wharton from France to Italy and to Greece. Included is an excerpt from her unpublished memoir, THE CRUISE OF THE VANDIS, as well as front line depictions of Lorraine and the Vosges during World War I.

In this book, William Irwin Thompson explores the nature of myth. Acknowledging the persuasive power of myth to create and inform culture, he weaves the human ability to create life with and communicate through symbols with myths based on male and female forms of power.

By focusing on the woman rather than the author, George Tucker paints a new and welcome picture of Jane Austen: not the spinster recluse of previous biographies, but a vibrant, well-traveled woman who was very much a part of the world in which she lived.

From Justice Department officials seizing people's homes based on mere rumors to the IRS and its master plan to prohibit the nation's self-employed from working for themselves to the perpetrators of the Waco siege, government officials are tearing the Bill of Rights to pieces. Today's citizen is now more likely than ever to violate some unknown law or regulation and be placed at the mercy of an administrator or politician hungering for publicity. Unfortunately, the only way many government agencies can measure their "public service" is by the number of citizens they harass, hinder, restrain, or jail. Already a major issue in the deliberations of the Congress that took office in January of 1995, the power and size of government is certain to be a prominent factor in the 1996 presidential elections. Lost Rights provides a highly entertaining analysis of the bloated excess of government and the plight of contemporary Americans beaten into submission by a horrible parody of the Founding Fathers' dream.

Smelling the virtual flowers and counting the road-kill on the digital superhighway are just a couple of things that Kroker/Weinstein explains. Others include: the theory of the virtual class; virtual ideology; the will to virtuality; the political economy of virtual reality; prime time reports; virtual (photographic) culture; and the virtual history file.

Mark Burnell's Chameleon features international spy Stephanie Patrick in a thriller continuing her story from The Rhythm Section, a major motion picture from the producers of the James Bond film series, starring Blake Lively and Jude Law.Lisbeth. Bourne. Eve. Stephanie.What do you do when you finally see who you really are-what you really are-and it's everything society rejects? You tell yourself it can't be true. That's what you do, that's the first thing. And maybe it's what you continue to do. But not me. I'd already lied to myself for long enough. When the moment came, I stopped pretending I was someone else and chose to be the real me instead. I chose to be honest.Brutally honest. Stephanie Patrick was trained to infiltrate and to kill, but she thought she'd left that life behind. Now, the shadowy and powerful organization known as Magenta House has recalled her for what she thinks will be one last assignment-a job that may set her free, allowing her to pursue a new life.Konstantin Komarov, who made his fortune through the turbulent years of the post-Soviet era, is a master dealmaker. He now sits at the heart of an international financial empire and is as comfortable in Manhattan as he is in Moscow or Magadan. Like Stephanie, he wants to leave his deeply scarred past behind, but will the connections that helped make him rich let him go?Komarov is dangerous, Stephanie is lethal. They are both chameleons. Working in the shadows, they have survived by adapting, whatever the circumstances, in worlds so brutal, violent, and full of betrayal, that they have trusted nobody but themselves. Brought together by their intersecting objective---the mysterious cypher Koba-things soon become very personal. Will finding Koba force them together or pull them apart?

Before the famed Nuremberg Tribunal, there was Rüsselsheim, a small German town, where ordinary civilians were tried in the first War Crimes Trial of World War II. As the tide of World War II turned, a hitherto unknown incident set a precedent for how we would bring wartime crimes to justice: In August 1944, the 9- man crew of an American bomber was forced to bail out over Germany. As their captors marched them into Rüsselsheim, a small town recently bombed to smithereens by Allies, they were attacked by an angry mob of civilians--farmers, shopkeepers, railroad workers, women, and children. With a local Nazi chief at the helm, they assaulted the young Americans with stones, bricks, and wooden clubs. They beat them viciously and left them for dead at the nearby cemetery. It could have been another forgotten tragedy of the war. But when the lynching was briefly mentioned in a London paper a few months later, it caught the eye of two Army majors, Luke Rogers and Leon Jaworski. Their investigation uncovered the real human cost of the war: the parents and a newlywed wife who agonized over the fate of the men, and the devastating effect of modern warfare on civilian populations. Rogers and Jaworski put the city of Rüsselsheim on trial, insisting on the rule of law even amidst the horrors of war. Drawing from trial records, government archives, interviews with family members, and personal letters, highly-acclaimed military historian Gregory A. Freeman brings to life for the first time the dramatic story. Taking the reader to the scene of the crime and into the homes of the crew, he exposes the stark realities of war to show how ordinary citizens could be drawn to commit horrific acts of wartime atrocities, and the far-reaching effects on generations.

On opening day of the new baseball season a small model-kit airplane flies down from the stands and buzzes the mound, where a decorated veteran pilot is about to throw out the first ball. The toy plane is the exact replica of the one flown by the war hero. Everyone laughs, thinking it's a prank or a publicity stunt. Until it explodes, killing dozens.Seconds later a swarm of killer drones descend upon the picnicked crowd, each one carrying a powerful bomb. All across the country artificial intelligence drive systems in cars, commuter trains and even fighter planes go out of control. The death toll soars as the machines we depend upon every day are turned into engines of destruction.Joe Ledger and the Department of Military Sciences go on the hunt for whoever is controlling these machines, but the every step of the way they are met with traps and shocks that strike to the very heart of the DMS. No one is safe. Nowhere is safe. Enemies old and new rise as America burns.Joe Ledger and his team are back in Jonathan Maberry's seventh book in the series. They begin a desperate search for the secret to this new technology and the madmen behind it. But before they can close in the enemy virus infects Air Force One. The president is trapped aboard as the jet heads toward the heart of New York City. It has become PREDATOR ONE.