Taylor Lautner stars as a daring New York City bike messenger in this action-packed crime drama. In desperate need of cash to clear his mounting debts to the Chinese mafia, Cam (Lautner) has a fateful encounter when he crashes his bike into parkour enthusiast Nikki (Marie Avgeropoulos). After teaching himself the art of the sport, Nikki invites the athletic Cam to join her crew that uses their free running skills to pull off heists set up by their boss Miller (Adam Rayner). In search of bigger pay-offs, the team continues to raise the stakes and take on increasingly risky ventures that attract the unwanted attention of violent criminal gangs and their dangerous enforcers.

The Titans are back, united against a common foe...aren't they? All seems lost when Tim Drake wakes, out of uniform and seemingly out of time. Surely he was just fighting alongside Nightwing, Superboy, Starfire, Beast Boy, and Donna Troy? But where is Raven and what links her to the Fearsome Five? A blood sacrifice is coming that will change the world forever. This collection includes Titans United: Bloodpact #1-6!

Tabari's Tafsir or "Comprehensive Exposition of the Interpretation of the Verses of the Qur'an" is one of the great monuments of classical Arabic and Islamic scholarship which, over a millennium, has been a fundamental reference work for scholars engaged in the tradition of Quranic commentary and exegesis. This two-volume translation focuses on thirty selected verses and Suras, or Chapters, associated with special merits and blessings and also includes Tabari's own introduction to the Tafsir. Volume I contains: Tabari's introduction; The Opening; the Throne Verse and the final three verses from The Cow (2:255 & 284-286); The Family of Imran (3:7 & 18); Repentance (9:38-40 & 128-129); the story of Moses and Khadir from The Cave (18:60-82); the Verse of Light from The Light (24:35-42); Prostration; Ya' Sin. Volume II contains: The Companies (39:53-55); The Smoke; The Beneficent; The Inevitable Occasion; Iron; The Gathering (59:18-24); Sovereignty; The Resurrection; The Most High; The Sun; The Night; The Earthquake; The Chargers; Rivalry; The Disbelievers; Aid; Sincerity; Daybreak; People.

Tabari's Tafsir or "Comprehensive Exposition of the Interpretation of the Verses of the Qur'an" is one of the great monuments of classical Arabic and Islamic scholarship which, over a millennium, has been a fundamental reference work for scholars engaged in the tradition of Quranic commentary and exegesis. This two-volume translation focuses on thirty selected verses and Suras, or Chapters, associated with special merits and blessings and also includes Tabari's own introduction to the Tafsir. Volume I contains: Tabari's introduction; The Opening; the Throne Verse and the final three verses from The Cow (2:255 & 284-286); The Family of Imran (3:7 & 18); Repentance (9:38-40 & 128-129); the story of Moses and Khadir from The Cave (18:60-82); the Verse of Light from The Light (24:35-42); Prostration; Ya' Sin. Volume II contains: The Companies (39:53-55); The Smoke; The Beneficent; The Inevitable Occasion; Iron; The Gathering (59:18-24); Sovereignty; The Resurrection; The Most High; The Sun; The Night; The Earthquake; The Chargers; Rivalry; The Disbelievers; Aid; Sincerity; Daybreak; People.

This is one title in a series of short, illustrated biographies. They tell the stories of those who have shaped our present and our past, from Beethoven to Dietrich, from Einstein to Churchill. George Orwell (1903-1949) wrote seminal reportage on the conditions of the poor - such as "Down and Out in Paris and London" and "The Road to Wigan Pier" - and was one of the first critics to write seriously about popular culture. During his last years he turned to allegory and fantasy to produce "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty-Four", the two books that were to make him world famous. Politically provocative, after his death he became an icon both for the left and the right at the cost of obscuring the realities of his achievements.

Since his death in 1950, George Orwell has been canonised as England's foremost political writer, and the standard-bearer of honesty and decency for the honourable 'Left'. In this controversial polemic, Scott Lucas argues that the exaltation of Orwell, far from upholding dissent against the State, has sought to quash such opposition. Indeed, Orwell has become the icon of those who, in the pose of the contrarian, try to silence public opposition to US and U K foreign policy in the 'War on Terror'. Lucas's lively and readable critique of public intellectuals including Christopher Hitchens, Michael Walzer, David Aaronovitch, and Johann Hari - who have all invoked Orwellian honesty and decency to shut down dissent - will appeal to anyone disillusioned with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Renaissance Papers is a collection of the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The nine articles in this volume reflect a wide range of approaches to Renaissance literary performance and theory. The first four essays seek reasons for the success of various Renaissance plays: Christopher Cobb examines how Thomas Heywood casts heroic action in a positive light in his romantic dramas, whereas Lucas Erne urges that Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy owes its success to its Christian portrait of Heironimo's unsuccessful attempt to recognize a benevolent deity. Robert Reeder looks at Renaissance educational manuals in order to clarify views on precocity in Richard III, Bartholomew Fair, and Twelfth Night; and Thomas L. Martin and Duke Pesta investigate and refute postmodern claims about a "transvestite stage." Scott Lucas shows how several sonnets of Fulke Greville's Caelica disorient the reader, underscoring the poet's doubts about human reason and perception; and Pamela Macfie illustrates how Marlowe's ghostly allusions to Ovid's Heroides in Hero and Leander darken the portrayal of the tragic lovers' frustration. The final three essays concern the 17th-century literary giants Donne and Milton: Jay Stubblefield shows Donne's 1619 sermon to the Virginia Company to be a uniquely Thomistic commentary on the conflicting motives behind England's exploits in the New World; and John Wall and John T. Shawcross explore the effects of John Milton's poems on Renaissance and modern readers. M. Thomas Hester is professor of English at North Carolina State University.

"This book...broadens our understanding of the post-World War II confrontation between the United States and the USSR and serves as a strong stimulus for the study of the contribution to the clash of ideas, using documents from former Communist archives."
--Ilya V. Gaiduk, "American Historical Review"

Freedom's War is the first book to examine comprehensively the American pursuit of the liberation of Eastern Europe from the end of World War II until the failure of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. It shows how the American vision of freedom led to interventions in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and it details the massive propaganda campaign to persuade people at home and abroad of the virtues of U.S. possession of the atomic bomb. Most significantly, Freedom's War explores in detail the most important legacy of the Cold War: the forging of a network linking government and private groups, from labor unions to women's organizations to academics in the crusade against Communism. Beginning with the declaration of the Truman Doctrine, Lucas argues that the Cold War was a total war that required the contribution of all sectors of American society.

From its groundbreaking study of U.S. efforts to "liberate" Eastern Europe to its explanation of the ill-fated intervention in Vietnam, Freedom's War is an essential book for students and general readers alike.

This work offers a bold reassessment of a major work of sixteenth-century English literature. Perhaps no other work of secular poetry was as widely read in Tudor England as the historical verse tragedy collection ""A Mirror for Magistrates"". For over sixty years (1559-1621), this compendium of monologues presented in the voices of fallen political figures from England's past remained almost constantly in print, offering both exemplary warnings to English rulers and inspiring models for literary authors, including Spenser and Shakespeare. In a striking departure from previous scholarship, Scott Lucas shows that modern critics have misconstrued the purpose of the tragic verse narratives of the Mirror, approaching them primarily as uncontroversial meditations on abstract political and philosophical doctrines. Lucas revises this view, revealing many of the Mirror tragedies to be works topically applicable in form and politically contentious in nature. Lucas returns the earliest poems of ""A Mirror for Magistrates"" to the troubled context of their production, the tumultuous reign of the Catholic Queen Mary (1553-1558). As Protestants suffering from the traumatic collapse of King Edward VI's 'godly' rule (1547-1553) and from the current policies of Mary's government, the Mirror authors radically reshaped their poem's historical sources in order to craft emotionally moving narratives designed to provide models for interpreting the political failures of Edward VI's reign and to offer urgent warnings to Marian magistrates. Lucas' study also reveals how, in later poems, the Mirror authors issued oblique appeals to Queen Elizabeth's officers, boldly demanding that they allow the realm of 'the literary' to stand as an unfettered discursive arena of public controversy. Lucas thus provides a provocative new approach to this seminal but long-misunderstood collection, one that restores the Mirror to its rightful place as one of the greatest works of sixteenth-century English political literature.