In Communication Yearbook 11 major contributions from leading scholars in a variety of communication fields are presented and then critiqued by other authorities (often representing complementary or competing schools of thought). Topics addressed and commented on include the mass media audience, the theory of mediation, effective policy for health care communication and feminist criticism of television.

The Communication Yearbook 13 includes chapters on the following topics: Interaction goals in negotiation, an analysis of ethnographic narrative, the role of the news media in international relations, Japan as an information exporter, group decision making, new models for mass communication research.

Under the impact of accelerated globalization, transnational integration and international security concerns, the geopolitics of Europe's borders and border regions has become an area of critical interest. The progressive enlargement of the EU has positioned its borders at the heart of recent discussions on the changing nature of the EU, the meaning of 'Europe' and what constitutional shape a more politically unified Europe might take. With enlargement, the EU must elaborate strategies to contend with a fiercely competitive world - and to build fortress-like defences against perceived tensions arising from greater cultural mixing and threats such as terrorism. The authors build up an integral picture of the EU's internal and external borders and borderlands to reveal the processes of re-bordering and social change currently taking place in Europe. They explore issues such as security, immigration, economic development and changing social and political attitudes, as well as the EU's relations with the Islamic world and other world powers. The book embraces an array of disciplinary, ideological and theoretical perspectives, offering detailed case studies of different border regions and the concerns of the local inhabitants, while engaging in broader discussions of developments across Europe, state policies and the EU's relations with neighbouring states. Geopolitics of European Union Enlargement will be of key interest to students and researchers in the fields of European politics, geography, international studies, sociology and anthropology.

Under the impact of accelerated globalization, transnational integration and international security concerns, the geopolitics of Europe's borders and border regions has become an area of critical interest. The progressive enlargement of the EU has positioned its borders at the heart of recent discussions on the changing nature of the EU, the meaning of 'Europe' and what constitutional shape a more politically unified Europe might take.
With enlargement, the EU must elaborate strategies to contend with a fiercely competitive world - and to build fortress-like defences against perceived tensions arising from greater cultural mixing and threats such as terrorism. The authors build up an integral picture of the EU's internal and external borders and borderlands to reveal the processes of re-bordering and social change currently taking place in Europe. They explore issues such as security, immigration, economic development and changing social and political attitudes, as well as the EU's relations with the Islamic world and other world powers. The book embraces an array of disciplinary, ideological and theoretical perspectives, offering detailed case studies of different border regions and the concerns of the local inhabitants, while engaging in broader discussions of developments across Europe, state policies and the EU's relations with neighbouring states.
Geopolitics of European Union Enlargement will be of key interest to students and researchers in the fields of European politics, geography, international studies, sociology and anthropology.

Contemporary globalisation both challenges conventional forms of democracy and is opening up new needs and possibilities for democratisation beyond the territoriality of national states. These issues are explored by an international and multidisciplinary array of experts who focus on federalism, multi-cultural societies, the European Union and potential agents for the democratisation of global institutions.

First published in 2012. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2012. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A novel of intersecting historical threads. Love narrates celebrated Norwegian writer Tomas Espedal's search for death. The decision blossoms within I-the I-person-"like some interior bloom, black and beautiful" on a warm spring day in May, and it is this resolution that fills his self-imposed final year with meaning: Death. It can be so beautiful. One must create this beauty for oneself. One must submit to this naturalness, one must choose it, like pulling the duvet over oneself in bed or jumping off a bridge. But almost immediately life deals I a wildcard: a new love affair brings some of the best days he's ever known and threatens his pact with death. Will he be able to leave Aka and the child she's carrying? He has put an endpoint on his life to intensify experience but is he sure that disappearing from their lives, becoming an absent father, is the best thing for all of them? Set against Espedal's constant reference, the ebb and flow of the seasons, something close to ecstasy propels this most introspective of narratives towards a universal truth.

Borders increasingly capture the attention of policy-makers and scholars across Europe. The deepening and widening of the European Union, the spread of Euroregions, and the creation of new states in eastern Europe since the early 1990s have thrown the changing internal and external borders of the EU into sharp relief. Globalization has brought more widespread and fundamental changes, with increased cross-border flows of goods, capital, information and people.

Contemporary globalisation both challenges conventional forms of democracy and is opening up new needs and possibilities for democratisation beyond the territoriality of national states. These issues are explored by an international and multidisciplinary array of experts who focus on federalism, multicultural societies, the European Union and potential agents for the democratisation of global institutions.

Poets from Homer to Bruce Springsteen have given voice to the intensity, horror, and beauty of war. The greatest war poets praise the victor while mourning the victim; they honor the dead while raising deep questions about the meaning of honor. Poets have given memorable expression to the personal motives that send men forth to fight: idealism, shame, comradeship, revenge. They have also helped shape the larger ideas that nations and cultures invoke as incentives for warfare: patriotism, religion, empire, chivalry, freedom. The Poetry of War shows how poets have shaped and questioned our basic ideas about warfare. Reading great poetry, Winn argues, can help us make informed political judgments about current wars. From the poems he discusses, readers will learn how soldiers in past wars felt about their experiences, and why poets in many periods and cultures have embraced war as a grand and challenging subject.

In contemporary Norwegian fiction, Tomas Espedal's work stands out as uniquely bound up with the author's personal experiences. His first book, Tramp, introduced us to the wanderer Tomas; Against Art told us how a boy approaches art and eventually becomes a writer; Against Nature examined love's labor-the job of writing; and in Bergerners, he is torn between his love for his home town and what lies beyond. Now, in The Year, we encounter the author's struggle to reconcile his inner life with the external world, and the myriad forms of love, hate, loss, and death-both personal and literary-with the immutable pattern of time and the seasons. It is the journal of a year, a diary like no other. And suffusing it all are questions Petrarch asked: How do you live when the one you love is gone? And when your life force shifts from spring to autumn, how do you find the good death? Written as a long poem, The Year is Espedal's riveting stream of consciousness-profound, edgy, sometimes manic, but always intensely intimate.

Poets from Homer to Bruce Springsteen have given voice to the intensity, horror, and beauty of war. The greatest war poets praise the victor while mourning the victim; they honor the dead while raising deep questions about the meaning of honor. Poets have given memorable expression to the personal motives that send men forth to fight: idealism, shame, comradeship, revenge. They have also helped shape the larger ideas that nations and cultures invoke as incentives for warfare: patriotism, religion, empire, chivalry, freedom. The Poetry of War shows how poets have shaped and questioned our basic ideas about warfare. Reading great poetry, Winn argues, can help us make informed political judgments about current wars. From the poems he discusses, readers will learn how soldiers in past wars felt about their experiences, and why poets in many periods and cultures have embraced war as a grand and challenging subject.

The year is 323 bce. King Alexander of Macedonia--Alexander the Great--lies paralyzed by poison in his palace in Babylon. He is thirty-two years old, had Aristotle as a mentor, and is the greatest military commander the world has ever seen. At the other end of the palace, Phyllis, a cook for Alexander's army, sits locked in a room, arrested on suspicion of being the poisoner. All of her adult life she has lived in the field--and for a long period of time was Alexander's lover. Who has poisoned the king? Phyllis is allowed to live as long as she writes down everything she knows about Alexander. She tells a brutal story of the violent daily life in the war, about the planning of the expansion into the Arabian Peninsula, about an invisible library containing marvelous manuscripts and discoveries, and about the passion between a cook and a king. With The Invisible Library, Thorvald Steen interweaves known and unknown, relying on facts until they run out, then building his story on what is probable, to tell the story of a little-known period in the life of one of the most renowned figures in history. The result is an existential and inspired novel that goes to the heart of the human experience--who are we in war, in love, during the final days of life?

Richard I (1157-99) was king of England from 1189 until his death, but he is best known as a soldier, not a monarch. He earned his moniker Richard the Lionheart as a knight and military leader, and his revolt against his father Henry II and his conquest of Cyprus as part of the Crusades helped to solidify his historical legend. In Lionheart, Norwegian author Thorvald Steen, celebrated for his historical novels, brings his characteristic accuracy and artistic vision to the life of Richard I. Lionheart is the story of a man living in the shadow of his own myth, also a fanatic general who wants to conquer the world's greatest sanctum and a king that is suddenly vulnerable. At the age of fifteen he leads an army against his father. Fourteen years later he is the Pope's obvious choice to lead the third Crusade. But the Richard of Steen's novel is less sure of himself and his role--is it true that he is God's chosen one, like his mother says? Built on extensive research, Steen paints a dark and conflicted, yet credible and convincing, portrait of a man who has engrossed historians, poets, novelists and readers for centuries. "Thorvald Steen's new novel Lionheart is a fascinating read. . . . Steen manages to give flesh and blood to a historical icon, and creates a story with energy, dressed in sober yet sublime language."--Dagsavisen, on the Norwegian edition

Space and nature have long been the concerns of human geography, bound up with a strong sense of the importance of place. Understanding how society changes entails understanding the geography of social change. In this new reader, the editors argue for a new way of looking at the relationship between society and its spatial organization, between society and nature, and between the interdependence and unique character of places. First, through a selection of material ranging from the changing geography of class cultures, gender relations, city structures, state power to the processes of international law, the readings demonstrate that neither space nor society can be understood independently of the other. Social change involves spatial change and spatial change affects social organization. The two sides of the relation mediate a geography of change. Second, a number of the articles explore the relation between society and nature, and demonstrate that that, too involves a continuous and changing interrelationship. Nature cannot be understood outside of its social interpretation and use; equally nature, the environment, has an impact upon the quality and future of our lives. Third, this collection presents an approach to the geography of place which has methodological implications for all those in social science who are concerned with the central problem of appreciating the of outcomes without losing sight of general processes of chance. To grasp the dynamic relation between society, space and nature is important not only for human geography, but for all the social sciences. Geography Matters! brings together a wide range of articles, from both geographers and non-geographers. It addresses a series of economic, political and cultural issues from a geographical angle that will put the social distinctiveness of place back on the agenda for all the social sciences.

Run over by a car at age five, Billy Anderson died three times prior to emergency surgery and was left in a vegetative coma after large portions of his damaged brain were removed. Though doctors did not expect him to survive, God had other plans supernaturally healing Billy only six days after his skull-shattering accident. Yet beyond the undeniably miraculous healing, little Billy was also given a glimpse of heaven. Returning home just thirteen days after his brush with death, Billy stunned his parents by telling them of his visits to heaven.

Unfortunately, Billy gradually lost all of his heavenly visits, leaving him with a life-long yearning to recover the memories of his out-of-body experiences. Forty years later, in a dramatic session with a clinical hypnotherapist, Bill's lost memories, including his encounters with Jesus, were completely restored. Now, through Bill's extraordinary journey, we have the blessed opportunity to learn what it's like to venture beyond the veil, to ex

Bergeners is a love letter to a writer's hometown. The book opens in New York City at the swanky Standard Hotel and closes in Berlin at Askanischer Hof, a hotel that has seen better days. But between these two global metropolises we find Bergen, Norway its streets and buildings and the people who walk those streets and live in those buildings. Using James Joyce's Dubliners as a discrete guide, celebrated Norwegian writer Tomas Espedal wanders the streets of his hometown. On the journey, he takes notes, reflects, writes a diary, and draws portraits of the city and its inhabitants. Espedal writes tales and short stories, meets fellow writers, and listens to their anecdotes. In the way that anyone from a small town can relate to, he is drawn away from Bergen but at the same time he can't seem to stay away. Espedal's Bergeners is a book not just about Bergen, but about life in a way no one else could have captured.

Space and nature have long been the concerns of human geography, bound up with a strong sense of the importance of place. Understanding how society changes entails understanding the geography of social change. In this new reader, the editors argue for a new way of looking at the relationship between society and its spatial organization, between society and nature, and between the interdependence and unique character of places. First, through a selection of material ranging from the changing geography of class cultures, gender relations, city structures, state power to the processes of international law, the readings demonstrate that neither space nor society can be understood independently of the other. Social change involves spatial change and spatial change affects social organization. The two sides of the relation mediate a geography of change. Second, a number of the articles explore the relation between society and nature, and demonstrate that that, too involves a continuous and changing interrelationship. Nature cannot be understood outside of its social interpretation and use; equally nature, the environment, has an impact upon the quality and future of our lives. Third, this collection presents an approach to the geography of place which has methodological implications for all those in social science who are concerned with the central problem of appreciating the of outcomes without losing sight of general processes of chance. To grasp the dynamic relation between society, space and nature is important not only for human geography, but for all the social sciences. Geography Matters! brings together a wide range of articles, from both geographers and non-geographers. It addresses a series of economic, political and cultural issues from a geographical angle that will put the social distinctiveness of place back on the agenda for all the social sciences.

The companion volume to Espedal's Against Art, written in his characteristic poetic prose. In contemporary Norwegian fiction Tomas Espedal's work stands out as uniquely personal; it can be difficult to separate the fiction from Espedal's own experiences. Against Nature, a companion volume to Espedal's earlier Against Art, is an examination of factory work, love's labor, and the work of writing. Espedal dwells on the notion that working is required in order to live in compliance with society, but is this natural? And how can it be natural when he is drawn toward impossible things-impossible love, books, myths, and taboos? He is drawn into the stories of Abelard and Heloise, of young Marguerite Duras and her Chinese lover, and soon realizes that he, too, is turning into a person who must choose to live against nature. "A masterpiece of literary understatement. Everybody who has recently been thirsting for a new, unexhausted realism, like water in the desert, will love this book."-Die Zeit, on the Norwegian edition

The Earl of Burford cannot believe his luck. Rex Ransom, his favourite film star, and a hot-shot producer want to film their next feature at Alderley, the family's seventeenth-century country estate. Somewhat less enthusiastic are the Countess and poor Merryweather, the family's butler, who suddenly find themselves hosting the incoming Hollywood crowd. And that's before there's a murder in the dead of night. Paying homage to Golden Age crime fiction in which even the red herrings are impeccably turned out, The Affair of the Mutilated Mink is a must-read for armchair sleuths.