By Yuanfei Wang

In Writing Pirates, Yuanfei Wang connects Chinese literary production to emerging discourses of pirates and the sea. In the late Ming dynasty, so-called “Japanese pirates” raided southeast coastal China. Hideyoshi invaded Korea. Europeans sailed for overseas territories, and Chinese maritime merchants and emigrants founded diaspora communities in Southeast Asia. Travel writings, histories, and fiction of the period jointly narrate pirates and China’s Orient in maritime Asia. Wang shows that the late Ming discourses of pirates and the sea were fluid, ambivalent, and dialogical; they simultaneously entailed imperialistic and personal narratives of the “other”: foreigners, renegades, migrants, and marginalized authors. At the center of the discourses, early modern concepts of empire, race, and authenticity were intensively negotiated. Connecting late Ming literature to the global maritime world, Writing Pirates expands current discussions of Chinese diaspora and debates on Sinophone language and identity.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. 227p.

By Cherly L. Neely

Though numerous studies have been conducted regarding perceived racial bias in newspaper reporting of violent crimes, few studies have focused on the intersections of race and gender in determining the extent and prominence of this coverage, and more specifically how the lack of attention to violence against women of color reinforces their invisibility in the social structure. This book provides an empirical study of media and law enforcement bias in reporting and investigating homicides of African American women compared with their white counterparts. The author discusses the symbiotic relationship between media coverage and the response from law enforcement to victims of color, particularly when these victims are reported missing and presumed to be in danger by their loved ones. Just as the media are effective in helping to increase police response, law enforcement officials reach out to news outlets to solicit help from the public in locating a missing person or solving a murder. However, a deeply troubling disparity in reporting the disappearance and homicides of female victims reflects racial inequality and institutionalized racism in the social structure that need to be addressed. It is this disparity this important study seeks to solve.

East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2015. 125p.

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By Ron Hansen

"Scrupulously researched. Hansen's informed interpretation of events makes convincing, if melancholy, reading." -Boston Sunday Globe

"A novel that reads like history." -Austin American-Statesman,

"A carefully crafted and distinctly macabre work of fiction." -Village Voice

"Hansen has written a convincing novel that is provocative, disturbing, and illuminating." -Raleigh News & Observer

"Hansen is a fearless storyteller. . .. [He] creates a savagely human portrait of Hitler. . .. [Hitler's Niece] reads, like all good books, as a vehicle for the writer's obsession--an intelligent, haunting, an‹ oddly devotional exploration of the unimaginable Hitler in love. -BookForum

NY. Perennial. 1999. 321p.

By Robert Graves

“From The Autobiography Of Tiberius Claudius Born B.C. X Murdered And Deified A.D. Liv.”

NY. Vintage Random House. 1961. 453p.

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By Robert Graves

“The troublesome reign of Tiberius Claudius Caesar, emperor of the Romans (born 10 b.c., died a.d. 54), as described by himself; also his murder at the hands of the notorious agrippin a (mother of the emperor nero) and his subsequent deification, as described by others.”

NY. Vintage Random House. 1962. 584p.

By Vian Bakir • Andrew McStay

This open access book deconstructs the core features of online misinformation and disinformation. It finds that the optimisation of emotions for commercial and political gain is a primary cause of false information online. The chapters distil societal harms, evaluate solutions, and consider what must be done to strengthen societies as new biometric forms of emotion profiling emerge. Based on a rich, empirical, and interdisciplinary literature that examines multiple countries, the book will be of interest to scholars and students of Communications, Journalism, Politics, Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, and Information Science, as well as global and local policymakers and ordinary citizens interested in how to prevent the spread of false information worldwide, both now and in the future.

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. 286p..

By Jordan Schildcrout

The “villainous homosexual” has long stalked America’s cultural imagination, most explicitly in the figure of the queer murderer, a character in dozens of plays. But as society’s understanding of homosexuality has changed, so has the significance of these controversial characters, especially when employed by LGBT theater artists themselves to explore darker fears and desires. Murder Most Queer examines the shifting meanings of murderous LGBT characters in American theater over a century, showing how these representations wrestle with and ultimately subvert notions of gay villainy.

Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014. 247p.

By Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba

In The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel, Chigbo Anyaduba examines fictional responses to mass atrocities occurring in postcolonial Africa. Through a comparative reading of novels responding to the genocides of the Igbo in Nigeria (1966-1970) and the Tutsi in Rwanda (1990-1994), the book underscores the ways that literary encounters with genocides in Africa’s postcolonies have attempted to reimagine the conditions giving rise to exterminatory forms of mass violence. The book concretizes and troubles one of the apparent truisms of genocide studies, especially in the context of imaginative literature: that the reality of genocide more often than not resists meaningfulness. Particularly given the centrality of this truism to artistic responses to the Holocaust and to genocides more generally, Anyaduba tracks the astonishing range of meanings drawn by writers at a series of (temporal, spatial, historical, cultural and other) removes from the realities of genocide in Africa’s postcolonies, a set of meanings that are often highly‐specific and irreducible to maxims or foundational cases. The book shows that in the artistic projects to construct meanings against genocide’s nihilism writers of African genocides deploy tropes that while significantly oriented to African concerns are equally shaped by the representational conventions and practices associated with the legacies of the Holocaust.

Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021. 280p.

By Catherine Lester

Watership Down (Martin Rosen, 1978) is as controversial as it is beloved. Whether due to the tear-jerking hit song 'Bright Eyes' or its notorious representation of violence inflicted by and upon animated rabbits, the film retains the ability to move and shock audiences of all ages, remaining an important cultural touchstone decades after its original release. This open access collection unites scholars and practitioners from a diversity of perspectives to consider the ongoing legacy of this landmark of British cinema and animation history. The authors provide nuanced discussions of Watership Down’s infamous animated depictions of violence, death and its contentious relationship with child audiences, as well as examinations of understudied aspects of the film including its musical score, use of language, its increasingly relevant political and environmental themes and its difficult journey to the screen, complete with behind-the-scenes photographs, documents and production artwork. As the first substantial work on Watership Down, this book is a valuable companion on the film for scholars, students and fans alike.

I couldn't download this on OAPEN. You can give it a try...if you want.

By Tatjana Neubauer

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said: »Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.« In the 1990s, nobody fell deeper than O.J. Simpson. Once considered a national treasure, the athlete was accused of brutally slaying his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman on June 12, 1994. Within days, the media and public developed an unprecedented obsession with the story, turning a murder investigation and trial into a sensationalized reality show. Tatjana Neubauer examines the mediatization, deliberate manipulation, and the simplification of popular criminal trials for profit on television. She demonstrates that TV conflated legal proceedings into entertainment programming by commodifying events, people, and places.

Bielefeld, Germany: transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, 2023. 271p.

Edited by Ralf Grüttemeier

From the 19th century onwards, famous literary trials have caught the attention of readers, academics and the public at large. Indeed it is striking that more often than not, it was the texts of renowned writers that were dealt with by the courts, as for example Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal in France, James Joyce's Ulysses and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer in the US, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover in Great-Britain, up to the more recent trials on Klaus Mann's Mephisto and Maxim Biller's novel Esra in Germany. By bringing together international leading experts, Literary Trials represents the first step towards a systematic discussion of literary trials on a global scale. Beginning by first reassessing some of the most famous of these trials, it also analyses less well-known but significant literary trials. Special attention is paid to recent developments in the relationship between literature and judicature, pointing towards an increasing role for libel and defamation in the societal demarcation of what literature is, and is not, allowed to do.

New York: London: Bloomsbury Academic, .2016. 242p.

By Tatyana Karpenko-Seccombe , Kenisha Nelson , Christine Fray , Roxanne Harvey , Karyl Powell-Booth; Adele Jones , Nadia Wager and Xiaomin Sheng

News media shape public opinion on social issues such as child sexual abuse (CSA), using particular language to foreground, marginalize or legitimize certain viewpoints. Given the prevalence of CSA and the impact of violence against children in Jamaica, there is a need to examine the representation of children and their experience of violence in the news media, which remain the main source of information about such abuse for much of the population. The study aims to analyze accounts of CSA in Jamaican newspapers in order to show how different representations impact public understanding of CSA. This study offers a new perspective around child abuse by using an eight-million word corpus from articles over a three-year period (2018- 2020).

The study argues that media reports often fail to conceptualise and represent accurately children who have experienced abuse. Representations of children are generic, their experiences often reduced to statistical summaries. Corpus analysis uncovered the use of terms which normalize sexual abuse. From the reader’s perspective, there was little emotional connection to the child or the child’s experience. The newspapers rarely report first-hand survivors’ experience of abuse, depriving these children of a voice. Instead, a marked preference is given to institutional voices. An issue of concern is a tendency to sensationalism with disproportionate attention given to cases involving celebrities.

By exposing these problems, the authors hope that news media in Jamaica can play a more positive role in heightening awareness around child abuse and allowing the voices of victims/ survivors to be heard.

Basel, SWIT: MDPI Books, 2022. 98p.

Edited by Giulia Gaimari and Catherine Keen

Ethics, Politics and Justice in Dante presents new research by international scholars on the themes of ethics, politics and justice in the works of Dante Alighieri, including chapters on Dante’s modern ‘afterlife’.

Together the chapters explore how Dante’s writings engage with the contemporary culture of medieval Florence and Italy, and how and why his political and moral thought still speaks compellingly to modern readers. The collection’s contributors range across different disciplines and scholarly traditions – history, philology, classical reception, philosophy, theology – to scrutinise Dante’s Divine Comedy and his other works in Italian and Latin, offering a multi-faceted approach to the evolution of Dante’s political, ethical and legal thought throughout his writing career.

Certain chapters focus on his early philosophical Convivio and on the accomplished Latin Eclogues of his final years, while others tackle knotty themes relating to judgement, justice, rhetoric and literary ethics in his Divine Comedy, from hell to paradise. The closing chapters discuss different modalities of the public reception and use of Dante’s work in both Italy and Britain, bringing the volume’s emphasis on morality, political philosophy, and social justice into the modern age of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

London: UCL Press, 2019. 192p.

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By Irving Stone

FROM THE COVER: “Set in the days of the deadly Borgias, the warring popes and the mighty Medicis, this is the truly great novel of Michelangelo, his lifelong friendships, his passionate loves and his unquenchable genius. ….

"Irving Stone has painted the portrait of a supreme craftsman, one of the most versatile artists of all time, and he has also laid before us a cyclorama of one of the world's most astounding ages." New York Times

NY. Fontana books. 1970. 786p.

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By Billy Hayes with William Hoffer

FROM CHAPTER 1: “Some twelve miles west of Istanbul, beyond the outskirts of the city in the flat farm country near the coast, is Yesilkoy International Airport. Every day at noon Pan American Flight No. 1 arrives from Teheran. It sorts out its incoming and outgoing passengers, then takes off again at one to continue its journey to Frankfort, London, and New York. On October 6, 1970, feeling like an Ian Fleming character, with dark aviator sunglasses over my eyes and my trenchcoat collar pulled up to my ears, I watched Flight No. 1, a Boeing 707, land on the concrete runway. I pulled the brim of my lucky hat low over my eyes and eased up against the wall near the passenger check-in counter. A short pudgy man in his mid-thirties pushed past me…..”

NY. E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc. 1977. 285p.

Adapted from the story by Susan Coolidge

A classic 1950s children’s book for girls. A little marked up and obviously well read.

Whitcome and Tombs. 1950s. 88p.

By Amanda Anderson

Prostitute, adulteress, unmarried woman who engages in sexual relations, victim of seduction—the Victorian "fallen woman" represents a complex array of stigmatized conditions. Amanda Anderson here reconsiders the familiar figure of the fallen woman within the context of mid-Victorian debates over the nature of selfhood, gender, and agency. In richly textured readings of works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others, she argues that depictions of fallen women express profound cultural anxieties about the very possibility of self-control and traditional moral responsibility.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. 264p.

By Bill Bryson

FROM CHAPTER 1: “In the late summer of 1996, an old journalist friend from London named Simon Kelner called me in New Hampshire, to where I had lately moved after living for twenty-some years in Britain. Simon had recently been made editor of Night& Day magazine, a supplement ofthe Mail on Sunday newspaper, and it was his idea that I should write a weekly column for him on America. At various times over the years Simon had persuaded me to do all kinds of work that I didn't have time to do, but this was way out of the question.

"No," I said. "I can't. I'm sorry. It's just not possible. I've got too much on."

"So can you start next week?"

"Simon, you don't seem tounderstand. I can't do it."

"We thought we'd call it 'Notes from a Big Country.'" "Simon, you'll have to call it 'Big Blank Space in the Magazine' because I cannot do it."

NY. Broadway Books. 1999. 299p.

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By Max Byrd

FROM THE COVER: “It is 1784, and Jefferson, the newly appointed American ambassador to the court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, has just arrived in Paris-a city adrift in intrigue, upheaval, and temptation that will challenge his principles, incite his passions, and change Thomas Jefferson forever.... Through the eyes of his impressionable young secretary, William Short, we watch as the future president builds his dream of an America with fellow patriots John Adams and Ben Franklin, and as he struggles between political ambition and an unexpected crisis of the heart with a woman who has the power to destroy him. And we discover-behind the face the complex Virginian shows the world -an enigmatic statesman who fights for individual liberty even as he keeps slaves, who champions free will even as he denies it to his daughters, and who holds men to the highest standards of honor-even as he embarks on a shadowy double life of his own.”

"A Novel To Be Admired And Enjoyed,The Best Fictionalized Life Of Jefferson Yet!' -Jack McLaughlin,

NY. Bantam. 1994. 470p.

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By Jane Shaw

FROM THE COVER FLAP: “It was Imposible for Susan, when she knew someone was needing help, not to do something about it. This incurable habit of hers led her into m any awkward situations when she was staying over Christmas with her cousins, the Carmichaels. Charlotte, Midge and Bill all assured her that they would really prefer her t o stop trying to put everything right, but Susan persisted, and proved, in an exciting climax, that her interference wasmore than justified. Jane Shaw's lively sense of humour makes this a very engaging tale; from Susan herself to the " Plum * and Chang the cat, the characters are real, and your interest in them will be kept and held from the first to the last page…”

London. Children’s Press. 1950. 188p.