Princess Jehosheba wants nothing more than to please the harsh and demanding Queen Athaliah, daughter of the notorious Queen Jezebel. Her work as a priestess in the temple of Baal seems to do the trick. But when a mysterious letter from the dead prophet Elijah predicts doom for the royal household, Jehosheba realizes that the dark arts she practices reach beyond the realm of earthly governments. To further Athaliah and Jezebel's strategies, she is forced to marry Yahweh's high priest and enters the unfamiliar world of Yahweh's temple. Can her new husband show her the truth and love she craves? And can Jehosheba overcome her fear and save the family--and the nation--she loves? With deft skill, Mesu Andrews brings Old Testament passages to life, revealing a fascinating story of the power of unconditional love.

Ted Striphas argues that, although the production and propagation of books have undoubtedly entered a new phase, printed works are still very much a part of our everyday lives. With examples from trade journals, news media, films, advertisements, and a host of other commercial and scholarly materials, Striphas tells a story of modern publishing that proves, even in a rapidly digitizing world, books are anything but dead. From the rise of retail superstores to Oprah's phenomenal reach, Striphas tracks the methods through which the book industry has adapted (or has failed to adapt) to rapid changes in twentieth-century print culture. Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Amazon.com have established new routes of traffic in and around books, and pop sensations like Harry Potter and the Oprah Book Club have inspired the kind of brand loyalty that could only make advertisers swoon. At the same time, advances in digital technology have presented the book industry with extraordinary threats and unique opportunities. Striphas's provocative analysis offers a counternarrative to those who either triumphantly declare the end of printed books or deeply mourn their passing. With wit and brilliant insight, he isolates the invisible processes through which books have come to mediate our social interactions and influence our habits of consumption, integrating themselves into our routines and intellects like never before.

Three short chapter books in one volume tell the story of Neptune, the pirate's parrot, who sails the high seas with Captain Snatchit and his crew. Then the pirate ship, the Seaslug, sinks and he flies away to find a new home.In "The Pirate's Parrot", Neptune discovers a green island. It's a parrots' paradise until Captain Snatchit lands there too. When the pirates start chopping down trees, the parrots decide to get rid of them. But how? Neptune holds the key...In "Captain Snatchit's Revenge", the Captain finds out he was tricked. He vows to catch that pesky parrot Neptune!In "The Wreck of the Seaslug", Captain Snatchit salvages his old ship and sets up his pirate base on Parrot Island. This is going to need the parrots' most ingenious plan yet...With thrills, spills, laughs and plenty of bad pirate language, these stories are ideal for reading aloud, or for more confident readers to enjoy on their own.

Restaging the Past is the first edited collection devoted to the study of historical pageants in Britain, ranging from their Edwardian origins to the present day. Across Britain in the twentieth century, people succumbed to ‘pageant fever’. Thousands dressed up in historical costumes and performed scenes from the history of the places where they lived, and hundreds of thousands more watched them. These pageants were one of the most significant aspects of popular engagement with the past between the 1900s and the 1970s: they took place in large cities, small towns and tiny villages, and engaged a whole range of different organised groups, including Women’s Institutes, political parties, schools, churches and youth organisations. Pageants were community events, bringing large numbers of people together in a shared celebration and performance of the past; they also involved many prominent novelists, professional historians and other writers, as well as featuring repeatedly in popular and highbrow literature. Although the pageant tradition has largely died out, it deserves to be acknowledged as a key aspect of community history during a period of great social and political change. Indeed, as this book shows, some traces of ‘pageant fever’ remain in evidence today.

Biotechnology is a rapidly growing research area which is immediately translated into industrial applications. Although over 1000 research papers have emerged on various aspects of red beet and the chemistry of betalaines pigments, surprisingly no comprehensive book is available. The proposed Red Beet book encompasses a scholarly compilation of recent biotechnological research developments made in basic science, biochemistry of the chief components, technological developments in augmenting and recovery of such useful compounds and value-added products with discussions on future perspectives. The book will provide detailed information of the chemistry of the main components of normal and genetically engineered beetroot.

Fun and Software offers the untold story of fun as constitutive of the culture and aesthetics of computing. Fun in computing is a mode of thinking, making and experiencing. It invokes and convolutes the question of rationalism and logical reason, addresses the sensibilities and experience of computation and attests to its creative drives. By exploring topics as diverse as the pleasure and pain of the programmer, geek wit, affects of play and coding as a bodily pursuit of the unique in recursive structures, Fun and Software helps construct a different point of entry to the understanding of software as culture. Fun is a form of production that touches on the foundations of formal logic and precise notation as well as rhetoric, exhibiting connections between computing and paradox, politics and aesthetics. From the formation of the discipline of programming as an outgrowth of pure mathematics to its manifestation in contemporary and contradictory forms such as gaming, data analysis and art, fun is a powerful force that continues to shape our life with software as it becomes the key mechanism of contemporary society. Including chapters from leading scholars, programmers and artists, Fun and Software makes a major contribution to the field of software studies and opens the topic of software to some of the most pressing concerns in contemporary theory.

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are commonly characterised as an age of ‘neoliberalism’ in which individualism, competition, free markets and privatisation came to dominate Britain’s politics, economy and society. This historical framing has proven highly controversial, within both academia and contemporary political and public debate. Standard accounts of neoliberalism generally focus on the influence of political ideas in reshaping British politics; according to this narrative, neoliberalism was a right-wing ideology, peddled by political economists, think-tanks and politicians from the 1930s onwards, which finally triumphed in the 1970s and 1980s. The Neoliberal Age? suggests this narrative is too simplistic. Where the standard story sees neoliberalism as right-wing, this book points to some left-wing origins, too; where the standard story emphasises the agency of think-tanks and politicians, this book shows that other actors from the business world were also highly significant. Where the standard story can suggest that neoliberalism transformed subjectivities and social lives, this book illuminates other forces which helped make Britain more individualistic in the late twentieth century. The analysis thus takes neoliberalism seriously but also shows that it cannot be the only explanatory framework for understanding contemporary Britain. The book showcases cutting-edge research, making it useful to researchers and students, as well as to those interested in understanding the forces that have shaped our recent past.

'Fascinating' The Times 'Blakeian in its singularity' New Statesman 'A wonderful adventure' Irish Times 'Rich, complex and original' Tom Holland 'A crisp, ambitious and thoroughly contemporary introduction' Times Literary Supplement Poet, artist, visionary and author of the unofficial English national anthem 'Jerusalem', William Blake is an archetypal misunderstood genius. In this radical new biography, we return to a world of riots, revolutions and radicals, discuss movements from the Levellers of the sixteenth century to the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s, and explore the latest discoveries in neurobiology, quantum physics and comparative religion to look afresh at Blake's life and work - and, crucially, his mind. Taking the reader on wild detours into unfamiliar territory, John Higgs places the bewildering eccentricities of a most singular artist into context and shows us how Blake can help us better understand ourselves.

Sixteen-year-old Lorena Leland's dreams of a rich and fulfilling life as a writer are dashed when the stock market crashes in 1929. Seven years into the Great Depression, Rena's banker father has retreated into the bottle, her sister is married to a lazy charlatan and gambler, and Rena is an unemployed newspaper reporter. Eager for any writing job, Rena accepts a position interviewing former slaves for the Federal Writers' Project. There, she meets Frankie Washington, a 101-year-old woman whose honest yet tragic past captivates Rena. As Frankie recounts her life as a slave, Rena is horrified to learn of all the older woman has endured--especially because Rena's ancestors owned slaves. While Frankie's story challenges Rena's preconceptions about slavery, it also connects the two women whose lives are otherwise separated by age, race, and circumstances. But will this bond of respect, admiration, and friendship be broken by a revelation neither woman sees coming?

Abandoned by the crown she serves, an orphan soldier will do anything to help her fellow mageborn--even join forces with the prince who betrayed her. Raised on the streets, orphan Grace Marchant has always questioned the harsh laws of the Kingdom of Rathlynn. Confronting Prince Bastien Larelwynn - keeper of a dark, golden and deadly magic - was never her plan, but when her closest friend is the next mageborn taken away to the shadowy dungeons, she has no choice but to act. Deep in the castle, Grace discovers that the Queen of Rathlynn has a devastating plan to use the mageborn's stolen powers to cement her rule forever. Begging the coldly handsome Prince Bastien to spare her friend's life, Grace is surprised to see a flicker of compassion in his obsidian black eyes, and the fire in her blood calls out to him... but if he senses the luminous mageborn power secretly unfurling within her like liquid sunlight, it's only a matter of time before she too will be imprisoned. But Grace is shocked when Bastien, with a mysterious smile, keeps any knowledge of her powers to himself. Despite his duties to the realm, Bastien pities the mageborn, and the two hatch a plan that could change everything. As raging fire melts blackest ice, passion and desire quickly quiet her fear and suspicion. But with her golden mageborn light growing stronger every day, Grace must ask herself if she can really trust her former enemy... and with betrayal at every turn, will they save the mageborn and get out alive?