Author: Claudia Casper File Type: pdf Winner, Philip K. Dick Award for Science Fiction This unsettling novel is set thirty years in the future, in the wake of a third world war. Runaway effects of climate change have triggered the collapse of nationstates and wiped out over a third of the global population. One of the survivors, a former soldier nicknamed Mercy, suffers from PTSD and is haunted by guilt and lingering memories of his family. His pain is eased when he meets a dancer named Ruby, a performer who breathes new life into his carefully constructed existence. But when his long-lost brother Leo arrives with news that Mercys children have been spotted, the two brothers travel into the wilderness to look for them, only to find that the line between truth and lies is trespassed, challenging Mercys own moral code about the things that matter amid the wreckage of war and tragedy. Set against a sparse yet fantastical landscape, The Mercy Journals explores the parameters of personal morality and forgiveness at this watershed moment in humanitys history and evolution. Claudia Caspers previous novels include The Reconstruction (St. Martins Press). **From Publishers Weekly Its 2047, and a third world war and climate change have left billions dead. A new global government has created a set of emergency laws to facilitate humanitys survival. Allen Mercy Quincy enforces new environmental standards. But Allen isnt without his demons, not the least of which is the unknown location of his two sons. He suffers from PTSD and journals as a process of mnemectomyaattempting to degrade unwanted memories by placing them outside of himself. But memory is a difficult thing to escape, and when Allens selfish, self-destructive brother Leo reappears, begging him to travel north to their familys cabin on Vancouver Island, Allen is besieged by the past. The book, presented as a pair of journals uncovered in 2072, is part cautionary tale, part survival narrative. Each journal has its own feel the first details Allens day-to-day life and his brief affair with a dancer the second is more introspective, with days and weeks bleeding together as Allen and Leo confront one another. Casper (The Reconstruction) employs clear, concise prose that at a steady clip, and the exploration, through one mans account, of what it means to outlive ones purpose is tightly constructed if not especially groundbreaking. Agent Phyllis Wender, Gersh Agency. (May) Review From the opening paragraph I dove into the deep end of a dystopian world that was terrifying, familiar and thrilling and made me keep reading until the shocking end. The novel focuses on family and survival and love and human nature hunger, passion, possession and murder. A masterpiece. Jamie Lee Curtis Claudia Caspers The Mercy Journals is a book of extraordinary vision. Part Lord of the Flies, part Romeo Dallaires Shake Hands with the Devil, I came out of this book deeply touched by the characters who moved through it, but also more alert. Theres a sense of the prescient in this novel of where we could end up if were not careful. Aislinn Hunter, author of The World Before Us I admire tremendously how The Mercy Journals takes current concerns -- global warming, PTSD, anti-immigration policies, war -- and weaves them seamlessly into a gripping and mysterious plot set in a future world that, like any excellent sci fi, is really about today. John Colapinto, staff writer at The New Yorker Casper employs clear, concise prose that moves at a steady clip, and the exploration, through one mans account, of what it means to outlive ones purpose is tightly constructed. Publishers Weekly Posing profound questions about compassion, values, and our capacity for life-saving change, Claudia Casper performs a remarkably incisive and sensitive variation on the dystopian theme in this suspenseful and provocative tale of sacrifice and survival. Booklist From the opening paragraph I dove into the deep end of a dystopian world that was terrifying, familiar and thrilling and made me keep reading until the shocking end. The novel focuses on family and survival and love and human nature hunger, passion, possession and murder. A masterpiece. Jamie Lee Curtis Claudia Caspers The Mercy Journals is a book of extraordinary vision. Part Lord of the Flies, part Romeo Dallaires Shake Hands with the Devil, I came out of this book deeply touched by the characters who moved through it, but also more alert. Theres a sense of the prescient in this novel of where we could end up if were not careful. Aislinn Hunter, author of The World Before Us I admire tremendously how The Mercy Journals takes current concerns -- global warming, PTSD, anti-immigration policies, war -- and weaves them seamlessly into a gripping and mysterious plot set in a future world that, like any excellent sci fi, is really about today. John Colapinto, staff writer at The New Yorker Casper employs clear, concise prose that moves at a steady clip, and the exploration, through one mans account, of what it means to outlive ones purpose is tightly constructed. Publishers Weekly Posing profound questions about compassion, values, and our capacity for life-saving change, Claudia Casper performs a remarkably incisive and sensitive variation on the dystopian theme in this suspenseful and provocative tale of sacrifice and survival. Booklist

Author: Brian Tucker File Type: epub Reading Riddles Rhetorics of Obscurity from Romanticism to Freud explores how the riddle becomes a figure for reading and writing in early German Romanticism and how this model then enables Sigmund Freuds approach to the psyche. It traces a migration of ideas from literature to psychoanalysis and argues that the relationship between them must be situated at the methodological level. Through readings of texts by August Wilhelm, Friedrich Schlegel, G.W.F. Hegel, and Ludwig Tieck Reading Riddles documents how the Romantics expand the field of poetic signification to include obscure, distorted signs and how they applied this rhetoric of obscurity to the self. The book argues that this model of self and signification plays a central role in the formulation of Freuds psychoanalytic theory. If the self is a riddle, as many in the nineteenth century claim, Freud takes the figure seriously and interprets the mind according to all the structures and techniques of that textual genre. **

Author: Peter James File Type: pdf The Old World has confronted archaeologists with many riddles, perhaps the most tantalizing of which is the Dark Age, an economic and cultural recession so devastating that it is supposed to have lasted for 400 years, from 1200 to 800 BC. In Centuries of Darkness, a group of archaeologists presents a controversial challenge to this claim.The dates for the Near East and Mediterranean are derived from the highly regarded chronology of ancient Egypt. Peter James and his team ask whether those dates might have been miscalculated. In this intricate piece of scholarly detective work, the authors propose a pioneering theory. Deciphering the clues from papyri and pottery, they search layer by layer through the excavated treasures of a vast area from Spain to France and from Denmark to the Sudan, until they reach Egypt - where they unearth 250 years of ghost history. Their discoveries lead to a questioning of the so-called Dark Age and the purposes which belief in it has served. As a result, our notions about the Trojan War, the foundation of Rome, the origins of the Greek alphabet, and the Golden Age of Solomon all have to be reexamined, revolutionizing our view of the ancient world.

Author: Paul E. Ceruzzi File Type: pdf This engaging history covers modern computing from the development of the first electronic digital computer through the dot-com crash. The author concentrates on five key moments of transition the transformation of the computer in the late 1940s from a specialized scientific instrument to a commercial product the emergence of small systems in the late 1960s the beginning of personal computing in the 1970s the spread of networking after 1985 and, in a chapter written for this edition, the period 1995-2001. The new material focuses on the Microsoft antitrust suit, the rise and fall of the dot-coms, and the advent of open source software, particularly Linux. Within the chronological narrative, the book traces several overlapping threads the evolution of the computers internal design the effect of economic trends and the Cold War the long-term role of IBM as a player and as a target for upstart entrepreneurs the growth of software from a hidden element to a major character in the story of computing and the recurring issue of the place of information and computing in a democratic society. The focus is on the United States (though Europe and Japan enter the story at crucial points), on computing per se rather than on applications such as artificial intelligence, and on systems that were sold commercially and installed in quantities.