The Cyclical Serpent

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David William Foster

"Just as Mexican national life has come to center on the sprawling, dynamic, almost indefinable metropolis of Mexico City, so recent Mexican cinema has focused on the city not merely as a setting for films but almost as a protagonist in its own right, whose conditions both create meaning for and receive meaning from the human lives lived in its midst. Through close readings of fourteen recent critically acclaimed films, this book watches Mexican cinema in this process of producing cultural meaning through its creation, enaction, and interpretation of the idea of Mexico City. David William Foster analyzes how Mexican filmmakers have used Mexico City as a vehicle for exploring such issues as crime, living space, street life, youth culture, political and police corruption, safety hazards, gender roles, and ethnic and social identities. The book is divided into three sections. 'Politics of the City' examines the films Rojo amanecer, Novia que te vea, Frida, naturaleza viva, and Sexo, pudor y lágrimas. 'Human Geographies' looks at El Callejon de los Milagros, Mecanica nacional, El castillo de la pureza, Todo el poder, and Lolo. 'Mapping Gender' discusses Danzon, De noche vienes, Esmeralda, La tarea, Lola, and Entre Pancho Villa y una mujer desnuda."--Back cover.

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Max Brooks

“The end was near.” —Voices from the Zombie War The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years. Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War. Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, “By excluding the human factor, aren’t we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn’t the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as ‘the living dead’?”

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Amit Goswami, with Maggie Goswami

You may not qualify as a scientist, but you love reading science fiction and are intrigued by problems of time, space, mind, and reality. You'd like nothing better than to explore the solar system, travel to the stars, and really penetrate the mysteries of hyperspace, curved space, black holes, and supernovae. The Cosmic Dancers will take you through the most challenging concepts of modern physics with the aid of examples from such masters of science fiction as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Silverberg, and Ursula K. Le Guin, not to mention their predecessors H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Cyrano de Bergerac.

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Philip De Souza

"It is a testament to the fascination generated by the subject, that even today the events of the Peloponnesian War are studied for what they can teach about diplomacy, strategy and tactics. This book reveals the darker side of Classical Greek civilization. From the horrific effects of overcrowding and the plague on the population of Athens to the vicious civil strife that often erupted in cities allied with Athens or Sparta, this volume offers vivid and at times disturbing insights into the impact of warfare on the people who are celebrated as the founders of Western civilization."--BOOK JACKET.