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Leaving Mundania
Exposing a subculture only beginning to enter the imagination of mainstream America, this is the story of live action role-playing (LARP) games. A hybrid of games—such as Dungeons & Dragons, historical reenactment, fandom, and good old-fashioned pretend—LARP games are thriving and this book explores its multifaceted culture and related phenomenon, including the Society for Creative Anachronism, a medieval reenactment group that boasts more than 32,000 members. The history of LARP is detailed and is shown to have arisen from the pageantry of Tudor England and is currently being used as a training tool for the U.S. military. Along the way, the author duels foes with foam-padded weapons, lets the great elder god Cthulhu destroy her parents' beach house, and endures an existential awakening in the high-art LARP scene of Scandinavia.
A Road to Extinction
The Jarawa, one of the oldest tribes of human beings in the world, are at risk of extinction because of a road that now runs through their forests in the Indian-administered Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal — and no one seems to care. Tourists take the road each day to try and get selfies with the tribespeople, who came from what is now Botswana over 60,000 years ago. Once proud of their independence, the Jarawa are now tempted with biscuits and trinkets, as if they were exotic animals in a human safari park. They cannot survive like this, and are already suffering from their loss of privacy. In this astonishing EnvelopeBooks publication, Jonathan Lawley returns to what was once a penal colony, built by the British to house mutineers from 1857 Indian Rebellion. He asks what responsibility colonial administrators like his own grandfather may have had for the sad plight of these palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, and what the Indian government should now be doing to protect them. Sumptuously illustrated with the author’s never-before-seen archive photographs and highly recommended by leading figures in the British media and government.
Noble Endeavours
In 1613 a beautiful Stuart princess married a handsome young German prince. This was a love match, but it was also an alliance that aimed to weld together Europe's two great Protestant powers. Before Elizabeth and Frederick left London for the court in Heidelberg, they watched a performance of The Winter's Tale. In 1943, a group of British POWS gave a performance of that same play to a group of enthusiastic Nazi guards in Bavaria. When the amateur actors suggested doing a version of The Merchant of Venice that showed Shylock as the hero, the guards brought in the costumes and helped create the sets. Nothing about the story of England and Germany, as this remarkable book demonstrates, is as s...
GUILT BY SILENCE
On a cobbled street in old Vienna, an accident leaves David Tardiff a shadow of his brilliant self and his young daughter, Lindsay, severely injured. On a deserted highway in New Mexico, five of the world's leading scientists disappear in a burst of flames. One woman—David's wife, CIA officer Mariah Bolt—is the link between both tragedies. Confronted by the devastating destruction of her family and too many unanswered questions, she's determined to prove that neither was an accident. As she probes deeper into what really happened in Vienna, she realizes that she can trust no one—not the government, not her mentor, not even her husband. Because now Mariah is the target.
The Attraction of Cuba
Chris Hilton went to Havana in the early 2000s to escape the drudgery of everyday life in England—and, boy, did he escape it. Suddenly he found himself mixed up with a variety of gangland chancers, some Cuban, one British, all living on the edge of legality. There was always a risk of their money-making schemes getting rumbled by the police but that’s what made it so compelling: the chance, the risk. Office life this wasn’t. And then there was Jamilia—a refugee from rural poverty, who’d come to the big city as a teenager, and been rescued from the streets by an unnerving family of small-time criminals. “A little crazy is good,” Jamilia tells Chris—and a little crazy they become, living hard, loving hard and putting back a deal of Cuban rum. But how long can craziness last? And what happens when good fortune turns to bad?
The Mental Life of the Architectural Historian
Starting with the question concerning the discursive formation of architectural history, the chapters compiled in this book attempt to re-read the historiography of early modern architecture from the point of view of the theoretical work produced since the post-war era. Central to the objectives of the argument are the ways in which, firstly, architectural history differs from the traditions of art history, and, secondly, that the historical narrative works its autonomy through theoretical representation, the discursive flow of which is interrupted by the historian’s urge to support arguments with references to buildings, texts, drawings, and historical events. The historians discussed in ...
The Pity of War
In 1613, a beautiful Stuart princess married a handsome young German prince. This was a love match, but it was also an alliance that aimed to meld Europe's two great Protestant powers. Before Elizabeth and Frederick left London for the court in Heidelberg, they watched a performance of The Winter's Tale. In 1943, a group of British POWs gave a performance of that same play to a group of enthusiastic Nazi guards in Bavaria. Nothing about the story of England and Germany, as this remarkable book demonstrates, is as simple as we might expect. Miranda Seymour tells the forgotten story of England’s centuries of profound connection and increasingly rivalrous friendship with Germany, linked by a ...
From Bedales to the Boche: The Ironies of an Edwardian Childhood
From Bedales to the Boche charts the history of two brothers, born into late Victorian England, who were sent by their idealistic, Germanophile father to Britain's most progressive secondary school, where the ideas of its pioneering headteacher and founder fostered their ambitions to become music-hall entertainers and then to master the challenges of the First World War.
