Most Popular Books by V.

A stunning special edition of Peter V. Brett’s thrilling debut THE PAINTED MAN, the modern fantasy classic that began The Demon Cycle, featuring over 30 illustrations by acclaimed fantasy artist Dominik Broniek.

“A comprehensive, highly detailed study [that] displays a stunning wealth of technical knowledge . . . a brisk and understandable narrative.” —HistoryNet The phrase “German secret weapons” immediately conjures up images of the V-1 and V-2 missiles that bombarded London in 1944. But what of the V-3 and V-4? What of Schmetterling, the Rochling shell, the Kurt bomb, the Hs293? These, and many other devices, were all part of the German secret armory, but are relatively unknown except to a handful of specialists. What of the German nuclear bomb? And the question of chemical warfare? The sheer magnitude of the secret weapon projects of the Third Reich is revealed in this comprehensive study written by one of the world’s great experts on weaponry. The book explores the various fields in which the Germans concentrated their weapon development and discusses the multiplicity of ideas, the difficulties, and, in several cases, how these ideas were subsequently exploited by the victors. Although much of the German wartime development was not completed before the war’s end, it nevertheless provided a foundation for a great deal of the munitions development that has since taken place. Comparisons with Allied projects are also drawn. This book explodes some of the myths surrounding Hitler’s secret weapons to reveal a truth all the stranger for being fact. Includes photographs and line drawings

Human Disease

This important study compares and evaluates the nature of church-state relations in the United States, the Netherlands, Australia, Germany, and England. The authors conclude that the American conception of church-state separation, with its traditional emphasis on avoiding government establishment of religion, actually discriminates against religious groups by denying religious organizations, particularly schools, access to government services provided to other organizations.

Widely practiced but not always understood, the Filipino martial arts have a rich history and distinctive character that have not fully been documented until now. Written in the context of Philippine history and culture, Filipino Martial Culture uncovers the esoteric components of the Filipino martial arts and the life histories of the men who perpetuate them. Included are: the history of turbulence and war in the Philippines from prehistoric times to the present day; the culture of the Filipino martial arts, including warrior ethos and worldview, spirituality, folklore, and weaponry; biographical sketches of eighteen Filipino masters and descriptions of their respective fighting styles; and a comparative study of the ethos, ideology, and development of the Filipino martial arts in relation to the considerable martial traditions of India, China, and Japan. In the course of his research, internationally renowned martial arts master and scholar Mark V. Wiley traveled the globe, interviewing top masters and recording their life histories, thoughts, and anecdotes. In addition, he collected 320 historical photographs and illustrations, including step-by-step sequences of the masters demonstrating the distinctive techniques of their particular martial styles. A classic reference for practitioners and researchers alike, this Filipino martial arts book is as much a definitive anthropological textbook as it is a practical guide to Arnis, Kali, Eskrima, and the other martial arts of the Philippines.

Written by one of America''s foremost political and legal theorists, Storm Over the Constitution examines the arguments of some of the leading proponents of the doctrine of ''original intent.'' According to legal scholars such as Judge Robert Bork, Lino Gralia, Charles Cooper, and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a jurisprudence of original intent requires that judges bring no theory to the interpretation of the Constitution. In this brilliant new book, Harry Jaffa illustrates how judges under the influence of this definition of ''original'' intent particularly neglect the Declaration of Independence as a guide. Jaffa shows that this definition is, from the point of view of the American Founding, anything but original; moreover, it is openly hostile to the natural-rights theory of those who wrote and ratified the Constitution. The author implores Americans to follow the example set by Abraham Lincoln, who admired the Declaration of Independence more openly, interpreted it more deeply, and implemented it more practically than any other president before or since. Lincoln''s achievement fulfilled a tradition of civic understanding and scholarship closer in time and purpose to the founders, and was thus more ''original.''

Borders cut through not just places but also relationships, politics, economics, and cultures. Eric V. Meeks examines how ethno-racial categories and identities such as Indian, Mexican, and Anglo crystallized in Arizona''s borderlands between 1880 and 1980. South-central Arizona is home to many ethnic groups, including Mexican Americans, Mexican immigrants, and semi-Hispanicized indigenous groups such as Yaquis and Tohono O''odham. Kinship and cultural ties between these diverse groups were altered and ethnic boundaries were deepened by the influx of Euro-Americans, the development of an industrial economy, and incorporation into the U.S. nation-state. Old ethnic and interethnic ties changed and became more difficult to sustain when Euro-Americans arrived in the region and imposed ideologies and government policies that constructed starker racial boundaries. As Arizona began to take its place in the national economy of the United States, primarily through mining and industrial agriculture, ethnic Mexican and Native American communities struggled to define their own identities. They sometimes stressed their status as the region''s original inhabitants, sometimes as workers, sometimes as U.S. citizens, and sometimes as members of their own separate nations. In the process, they often challenged the racial order imposed on them by the dominant class. Appealing to broad audiences, this book links the construction of racial categories and ethnic identities to the larger process of nation-state building along the U.S.-Mexico border, and illustrates how ethnicity can both bring people together and drive them apart.

Two distinguished scholars offer eight steps to help organizations discover and embrace an authentic higher purpose—something that will dramatically improve every aspect of any enterprise, including the bottom line. What does a lofty notion like purpose have to do with business basics like the bottom line? Robert E. Quinn and Anjan J. Thakor say pretty much everything. Leaders and managers are taught that employees are self-interested and work resistant, so they create systems of control to combat these expectations. Workers resent these systems, and performance suffers. To address the performance issues, managers double down on the coercion, creating a vicious cycle and a self-fulfilling prophecy. But there is a better way. Quinn and Thakor show that when an authentic higher purpose permeates business strategy and decision-making, the cycle is broken. Employers and employees see themselves as working together toward an inspiring goal, not just trying to hit quarterly targets. They fully engage, become proactive contributors, and, ironically, easily exceed those quarterly targets. Based on their widely acclaimed Harvard Business Review article, Quinn and Thakor offer eight sometimes surprising steps for shifting from a transaction-oriented mind-set focused on constraints to a purpose-oriented mind-set focused on possibility. This iconoclastic book will help any organization discover its authentic purpose and weave it into the fabric of everything it does, leading to unprecedented levels of personal satisfaction, service and product innovation, and economic growth.

Contains more than 400 photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki before, during, and after those fateful days

A contemporary successor to the Louis V. Pirsson and Adolph Knopf editions, providing a guide and reference that explains how rocks occur, their commercial usage, and how to identify them through macroscopic, handspecimen features. Gives complete coverage of rock-forming minerals, rocks and man-made, rock-like materials, as well as meteorites, impactites, grossans, and more. Tables are provided for identifications based on megascopic examinations and simple field tests that require no sophisticated laboratory equipment. Plus, numerous illustrations represent rocks and rock-forming minerals as they appear in nature.

New York Times bestselling author Maria V. Snyder brings her Chronicles of Ixia series to its exhilarating conclusion.

A gripping account of Andrew Jackson''s triumphant military career by acclaimed military historian Robert Remini, winner of the National Book Award. Andrew Jackson is best known as the president who created "Jacksonian democracy," with its focus on manifest destiny and laissez-faire economics. But rarely are his accomplishments as a general highlighted. Jackson''s effective use of spies in war time and of martial law in peace time sparked a debate about the curtailing of civil liberties in the name of national security that continues to this day. Most of all, Jackson was a great motivator who could, with a few carefully selected words and by his own brave example, turn around starved, deserting troops, convincing them to fight. With dramatic scenes of fierce battles and victories, Remini reveals here why Jackson''s bold leadership as a general led to his election as President of the United States in 1828.

Jay Pasachoff and Alex Filippenko combine extensive research experience (including years of research in such areas as radio astronomy, solar eclipses, supernovae, active galaxies, black holes, and cosmology), teaching experience, and textbook-writing experience to offer a book that is unparalleled in its ability to present the latest science in a way that students can understand. This brief and beautifully illustrated text - one of the briefest available for the course - offers concise coverage of a wide range of astronomical topics. An early discussion of the scientific method stresses its importance in the verification of observations. The authors emphasize the study of origins in this text, first by singling out specifics in the headings of each chapter and then by dealing with a variety of relevant material in the text itself. This new edition includes a new chapter on the dozens of exoplanets that are being discovered around other stars. Automatically packaged with TheSky™ CD-ROM and four months'' free access to InfoTrac College Edition, the new edition extends student learning opportunities beyond the walls of the classroom.

This highly practical book provides evidence-based strategies for helping adults with ADHD build essential skills for time management, organization, planning, and coping. Each of the 12 group sessions--which can also be adapted for individual therapy--is reviewed in step-by-step detail. Handy features include quick-reference Leader Notes for therapists, engaging in-session exercises, and reproducible take-home notes and homework assignments. The paperback edition includes the adult ADHD criteria from DSM-5. The treatment program presented in this book received the Innovative Program of the Year Award from CHADD (Children and Adults with ADHD).

An insightful, up-to-date look at creating in the digital environment In a practical, easy-to-understand format, The Art of 3-D Computer Animation and Effects covers every aspect of creating and outputting fully rendered three-dimensional computer still images or animations, including visual effects for live action. Along with helpful insights into the newest techniques available in the latest software programs and hardware, this new edition provides solid conceptual and critical basics through a combination of technical explanations and creative techniques. Creative vision can be brought to life on the screen through an easy-to-understand, step-by-step approach supported by full-color sample work by such leading companies as Pixar Animation Studios, Square, DreamWorks SKG, Fox, Disney, and many independent artists and studios. Isaac Victor Kerlow (Los Angeles, CA) is Director of Digital Production at the Walt Disney Company and a longtime active member of SIGGRAPH and the Visual Effects Society.

Hegel''s aim in this work is to interpret the varied phenomena of Nature from the standpoint of a dialectical logic. Those who still think of Hegel as a merely a priori philosopher will here find abundant evidence that he was keenly interested in and very well informed about empirical science.

This text is intended to be of use for first courses in computer architecture taught in computer science and electrical/computing engineering departments. The fourth edition places more emphasis on design, and covers topics such as RISC processors, performance analysis and memory systems.

Geared toward graduate students and professionals in structural engineering, this text presents a detailed treatment of the elastic and inelastic behavior of metal beams, columns, beam-columns, and rigid frames. All four topics receive separate chapters, in which the background for their general behavior is discussed in terms of specific structural tests. The chapters also examine theoretical elastic behavior and the termination of usefulness by elastic buckling, behavior in the inelastic region, and the uses of various conceptual models in predicting inelastic instability. The final section of each chapter covers procedures and provides interpretations of structural specifications. Two additional chapters offer an introduction to the text and derive the differential equations governing the elastic deformations of prismatic thin-walled open members. Numerous examples throughout the treatment illustrate theory and applications.

Physical distancing restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the uptake of virtual options for prevention providers and clinical service provision in general. In this paper, we bring together experiences from the HEAL Prevention Cooperative, a unique cohort of research projects representing a continuum of care from community-level promotion to indicated prevention with older adolescents and young adults to increase access to services to prevent opioid misuse. We offer options that preventionists and other providers can implement or continue to use to expand access to youth and families who experience difficulty accessing opioid-related preventive services and supports. We also discuss challenges in implementing physical distancing adaptations that were required to operate during the pandemic. We discuss intervention adaptations along four pillars useful for providers and researchers: connecting with partners, recruitment, prevention service provision, and data collection and evaluation. We also provide recommendations for health professionals and practitioners and for future research.

Morbid obesity, also known as clinically severe obesity, is an abnormal obesity defined as the condition of having body weight over 100 pounds over an ideal body weight or having a body mass index of 40 or higher. The term reflects the fact that this kind of obesity becomes associated with significant morbidity by increasing the risk of various obesity-related medical conditions. This book presents new and significant research in the field from around the world.

"Relations between the United States and the Middle East are going through a period of significant change in which the use of force in pursuit of national interests has proved to be increasingly counter-productive. A new policy direction has been adopted which seeks to promote economic integration, development and cooperation. The recent proliferation of US-Middle East free trade agreements is a corner-stone of this new foreign policy approach. Imad El-Anis here offers an analysis of how free trade and economic integration can impact US-Middle East relations by using the Jordan-US relationship as an example. This book is essential reading for those wishing to understand the new direction of US foreign economic policy towards the Middle East and the accompanying reforms taking shape in the Arab world."--Bloomsbury publishing.

This one-semester text is designed for an upper-level majors course. Vertebrates features a unique emphasis on function and evolution of vertebrates, complete anatomical detail, and excellent pedagogy. Vertebrate groups are organized phylogenetically, and their systems discussed within such a context. Morphology is foremost, but the author has developed and integrated an understanding of function and evolution into the discussion of anatomy of the various systems.

The author brings together a generous selection derived from her many literary gems, in which she illustrates her groundbreaking-and sometimes explosive-studies of female sexuality and perversions, perverse transference, malignant bonding, perverse motherhood, and the impact upon children of viewing domestic violence. Along with these are vivid descriptions of group analytic psychotherapy with forensic patients and, uniquely, of the joint group treatment of incest survivors and perpetrators. She also outlines the development of forensic psychotherapy as a new field of clinical and academic endeavour and her involvement in this. In a series of interviews with Brett Kahr she describes her professional journey, from being trained by Horacio Etchegoyen in her native Argentina, followed by an eye-opening period at the Menninger Clinic, then eventually to London and a distinguished career at the Portman Clinic.

Ispirato al modello dei romanzi storcici di Walter Scott, di cui però offre una rielaborazione del tutto originale, Taras Bul''ba viene pubblicato per la prima volta nel 1835, nella raccolta Mirgorod. Ambientato nell''Ucraina cosacca, in un''epoca non ben definita tra XV e XVII secolo ha come protagonisti il vecchio e valoroso guerriero Taras e i suoi due giovani figli, Ostap e Andrij, che mandati dal padre a istruirsi a Kiev, compiranno al ritorno il loro vero apprendistato nella Seč, la libera comunità dei cosacchi. Epopea di un universo arcaica perduto, dove gli uomini hanno ancora fede in grandi ideali e si lanciano in coraggiose imprese, questo grande romanzo di Gogol'' è il palcoscenico di sanguinose battaglie e di estremo egoismo, di pantagruelici banchetti e di sfrenata allegria, fino al tragico, emozionante epilogo.

Messianism is one of the great themes in intellectual history. But because it has done so much important ideological work for the people who have written about it, the historical roots of the discourse have been obscured from view. What did it mean to talk about "messiahs" in the ancient world, before the idea of messianism became a philosophical juggernaut, dictating the terms for all subsequent discussion of the topic? In this book, Matthew V. Novenson offers a revisionist account of messianism in antiquity. He shows that, for the ancient Jews and Christians who used the term, a messiah was not an article of faith but a manner of speaking. It was a scriptural figure of speech, one among numerous others, useful for thinking about kinds of political order: present or future, real or ideal, monarchic or theocratic, dynastic or charismatic, and other variations besides. The early Christians famously seized upon the title "messiah" (in Greek, "Christ") for their founding hero and molded the sense of the term in certain ways; but, Novenson shows, this is just what all ancient messiah texts do, each in its own way. If we hope to understand the ancient texts about messiahs (from Deutero-Isaiah to the Parables of Enoch, from the Qumran Community Rule to the Gospel of John, from the Pseudo-Clementines to Sefer Zerubbabel), we must learn to think not in terms of a world-historical idea but of a language game, of so many creative reuses of an archaic Israelite idiom. In The Grammar of Messianism, Novenson demonstrates the possibility and the benefit of thinking of messianism in this way.

A Fun Ride You Always Wished For Have you ever wondered why you fear something? Chances are there. It is a matter worth thinking. Fear is the offspring of unawareness or ignorance. Once you learn driving well you will not fear the road. It is said fear diminishes with the accumulation of knowledge. A book like this should work on this basic principle and it does, I believe. Chemistry is not a nightmare. Nor is it a monster that kills your confidence. It is just like any of your favourite subject, hobby or game. It is just FUN. To experience it you need to cross the bridge between fear and fun. You will get clues and keys to open every single door in any subject as if in a treasure hunt, if you search for them. Before you flip through this cute little book you should know something. This is not a study guide which follows your textbook formulae. Instead, this is a fun-filled rollercoaster ride. Ride as you wish. This books sole aim is to make your chemistry study easy. Also it brings you back to your environment to show you that the real chemistry is there, not in the printed text of a book that you learn by heart. This tiny friend of yours will walk you through the unlimited instances and examples of chemistry in your day-to-day life. From the food we eat to the medicines we take chemistrys magic is visible. No more introductions. Lets start a fun packed tour across the wonder world of chemistry. Lets fasten our seat belts. Here we go. Hurray...

Twenty-?ve years have passed since the publication of the Russian version of the book Estimation of Dependencies Based on Empirical Data (EDBED for short). Twen- ?ve years is a long period of time. During these years many things have happened. Looking back, one can see how rapidly life and technology have changed, and how slow and dif?cult it is to change the theoretical foundation of the technology and its philosophy. I pursued two goals writing this Afterword: to update the technical results presented in EDBED (the easy goal) and to describe a general picture of how the new ideas developed over these years (a much more dif?cult goal). The picture which I would like to present is a very personal (and therefore very biased) account of the development of one particular branch of science, Empirical - ference Science. Such accounts usually are not included in the content of technical publications. I have followed this rule in all of my previous books. But this time I would like to violate it for the following reasons. First of all, for me EDBED is the important milestone in the development of empirical inference theory and I would like to explain why. S- ond, during these years, there were a lot of discussions between supporters of the new 1 paradigm (now it is called the VC theory ) and the old one (classical statistics).

This streamlined, readable account of human development gives you the conceptual foundations that enable you to become an educated and critical interpreter of developmental information. ESSENTIALS OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT: A LIFE-SPAN VIEW also offers an introduction to relevant research and its application to important issues in life-span development. In addition, the book emphasizes the application of human development research across diverse professional settings. If you''re pursuing a career related not just to psychology but to education, health, or human sciences--be it as a nurse, physician, educator, psychologist, social worker, or others--this text will show you how human development research can allow you to work more effectively with future patients, students, or clients. Succinct and filled with real-life examples that aid your understanding, it will capture your interest while introducing you to the essential issues, forces, and outcomes that make us who we are. Available with InfoTrac Student Collections http://gocengage.com/infotrac. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version.

Composite materials have grown rapidly both in their applications and their economic importance, and they will no doubt continue to do so. With this growth has come increased attention in engineering curricula, but most coursework tends to focus on laminate theory and the analysis of composites, not on the practical design aspects most important to