Over five hundred years since it was named, utopia remains a vital concept for understanding and challenging the world(s) we inhabit, even in - or rather because of - the condition of 'post-utopianism' that supposedly permeates them. In Rethinking Utopia David M. Bell offers a diagnosis of the present through the lens of utopia and then, by rethinking the concept through engagement with utopian studies, a variety of 'radical' theories and the need for decolonizing praxis, shows how utopianism might work within, against and beyond that which exists in order to provide us with hope for a better future. He proposes paying a 'subversive fidelity' to utopia, in which its three constituent terms: 'good' (eu), 'place' (topos), and 'no' (ou) are rethought to assert the importance of immanent, affective relations. The volume engages with a variety of practices and forms to articulate such a utopianism, including popular education/critical pedagogy; musical improvisation; and utopian literature. The problems as well as the possibilities of this utopianism are explored, although the problems are often revealed to be possibilities, provided they are subject to material challenge. Rethinking Utopia offers a way of thinking about (and perhaps realising) utopia that helps overcome some of the binary oppositions structuring much thinking about the topic. It allows utopia to be thought in terms of place and process; affirmation and negation; and the real and the not-yet. It engages with the spatial and affective turns in the social sciences without ever uncritically being subsumed by them; and seeks to make connections to indigenous cosmologies. It is a cautious, careful, critical work punctuated by both pessimism and hope; and a refusal to accept the finality of this or any world.

Yeats and the Logic of Formalism deals with formalism as a philosophy in Yeats's works and how that in turn affects both his art and his politics. Vereen M. Bell's understanding of ""formalism"" and ""philosophy"" stems from a meditation by Yeats in a manuscript note: ""Sometimes I doubt life's values behind my own thought. They should have been there before the stream began, before it became necessary for the work to create them."" In Bell's reading, formalism is not simply a philosophy of art but a philosophy of life as directed by art - an existential one at its source. While Bell understands that formalism is not a paradigm-shifting topic in today's theoretical debates, he does attempt to reconsider the concept's credibility in the context of other competing theoretical discourses. Bell invokes and elaborates upon Edward Said's reading of Yeats as a special kind of colonial subject. He revisits the issue of how much Yeats and Nietzsche have in common and tries to show, in the manner of J Hillis Miller, that the primordial is for Yeats what formalism ultimately sets itself against. ""Yeats and the Logic of Formalism"" mediates between older, more traditional readings of Yeats's work and recent theoretical, often antagonistic readings in an effort to restore a balanced perspective. The author centers most of his discussion on the poetry itself to provide a total reading of Yeats's work. Early in his career Yeats wrote: ""Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art."" Coded in the word Hope here - considering the cultural and historical circumstances under which Yeats worked - is what Bell believes is the meaning, existentially, of Yeats's career.

The Italian peasantry has often been described as tragic, backward, hopeless, downtrodden, static, and passive. In "Fate and Honor, Family and Village," Rudolph Bell argues against this characterization by reconstructing the complete demographic history of four country villages since 1800. He analyzes births, marriages, and deaths in terms of four concepts that capture more accurately and sympathetically the essence of the Italian peasant's life: "Fortuna" (fate), "onore" (honor, dignity), "famiglia" (family), and "campanilismo" (village).

"Fortuna" is the cultural wellspring of Italian peasant society, the worldview from which all social life flows. The concept of "Fortuna" does not refer to philosophical questions, predestination, or value judgments. Rather, Fortuna is the sum total of all explanations of outcomes perceived to be beyond human control. Thus, in Bell's view, high mortality does not lead peasants to a resigned acceptance of their fate; instead, they rely on honor, reciprocal exchanges of favors, and marriage to forge new links in their familial and social networks. With thorough documentation in graphs and tables, the author evaluates peasant reactions to time, work, family, space, migration, and protest to portray rural Italians as active, flexible, and shrewd, participating fully in shaping their destinies.

Bell asserts that the real problem of the Mezzogiorno is not one of resistance to technology, of high birth rates, or even of illiteracy. It is one of solving technical questions in ways that foster dependency. The historical and sociological practice of treating peasant culture as backward, secondary, and circumscribed only encourages disruption and ultimately blocks the road to economic and political justice in a post-modern world.

This Purdue volume includes 89 technical papers presented at the 43rd Purdue Industrial Waste Conference, held May 10, 11, and 12, 1988 at Purdue University. The papers address topics within broad categories such as toxic and hazardous wastes; site remediation; landfills; biological systems; sorptive processes; processes and product development; industrial wastes; and laws, regulations, and training. The data and information contained in this volume reflect some of the latest information available on industrial waste and waste management.

This 41st Edition presents case histories with operating data-and new research-on most topics of this major subject in today's world. This valuable Purdue Book will prove invaluable to all involved with waste treatment, providing information and data to help solve current problems. These proceedings of the May 1986 Purdue Conference include applications, research, methods and techniques, case histories, and operating data. The 91 papers include two special sections: 21 papers discuss toxic and hazardous wastes and 24 papers cover physical-biological systems. The book is further divided into papers on the following topics: (1) Pretreatment Programs and Systems; (2) Dairy Wastes; (3) Oilfield and Gas Pipeline Wastes; (4) Dye Wastes; (5) Coal, Coke and Power Plant Wastes; (6) Landfill Leachate; (7) Laws, Regulations, and Training; (8) Physical/Biological Systems; (9) Pulp and Paper Mill Wastes; (10) Plating Wastes; (11) Food Wastes; (12) Metal Wastes; and (13) Toxic and Hazardous Wastes.

The Italian peasantry has often been described as tragic, backward, hopeless, downtrodden, static, and passive. In Fate and Honor, Family and Village, Rudolph Bell argues against this characterization by reconstructing the complete demographic history of four country villages since 1800. He analyzes births, marriages, and deaths in terms of four concepts that capture more accurately and sympathetically the essence of the Italian peasant's life: Fortuna (fate), onore (honor, dignity), famiglia (family), and campanilismo (village).Fortuna is the cultural wellspring of Italian peasant society, the worldview from which all social life flows. The concept of Fortuna does not refer to philosophical questions, predestination, or value judgments. Rather, Fortuna is the sum total of all explanations of outcomes perceived to be beyond human control. Thus, in Bell's view, high mortality does not lead peasants to a resigned acceptance of their fate; instead, they rely on honor, reciprocal exchanges of favors, and marriage to forge new links in their familial and social networks. With thorough documentation in graphs and tables, the author evaluates peasant reactions to time, work, family, space, migration, and protest to portray rural Italians as active, flexible, and shrewd, participating fully in shaping their destinies.Bell asserts that the real problem of the Mezzogiorno is not one of resistance to technology, of high birth rates, or even of illiteracy. It is one of solving technical questions in ways that foster dependency. The historical and sociological practice of treating peasant culture as backward, secondary, and circumscribed only encourages disruption and ultimately blocks the road to economic and political justice in a post-modern world.

Over five hundred years since it was named, utopia remains a vital concept for understanding and challenging the world(s) we inhabit, even in - or rather because of - the condition of 'post-utopianism' that supposedly permeates them. In Rethinking Utopia David M. Bell offers a diagnosis of the present through the lens of utopia and then, by rethinking the concept through engagement with utopian studies, a variety of 'radical' theories and the need for decolonizing praxis, shows how utopianism might work within, against and beyond that which exists in order to provide us with hope for a better future. He proposes paying a 'subversive fidelity' to utopia, in which its three constituent terms: 'good' (eu), 'place' (topos), and 'no' (ou) are rethought to assert the importance of immanent, affective relations. The volume engages with a variety of practices and forms to articulate such a utopianism, including popular education/critical pedagogy; musical improvisation; and utopian literature. The problems as well as the possibilities of this utopianism are explored, although the problems are often revealed to be possibilities, provided they are subject to material challenge. Rethinking Utopia offers a way of thinking about (and perhaps realising) utopia that helps overcome some of the binary oppositions structuring much thinking about the topic. It allows utopia to be thought in terms of place and process; affirmation and negation; and the real and the not-yet. It engages with the spatial and affective turns in the social sciences without ever uncritically being subsumed by them; and seeks to make connections to indigenous cosmologies. It is a cautious, careful, critical work punctuated by both pessimism and hope; and a refusal to accept the finality of this or any world.

Lipids traditionally have been viewed as serving two functions: to form cellular membranes and to serve as energy stores. During the last two decades, a new role for lipids has taken center stage: lipids can act as signalling molecules. This book deals with a variety of lipids that have been shown to be messengers. Leading scientists explore all known lipid classes except steroid hormones. Researchers and educators in biochemistry as well as in molecular and cellular biology will appreciate this volume.

Most of the interesting and difficult problems in statistical mechanics arise when the constituent particles of the system interact with each other with pair or multipartiele energies. The types of behaviour which occur in systems because of these interactions are referred to as cooperative phenomena giving rise in many cases to phase transitions. This book and its companion volume (Lavis and Bell 1999, referred to in the text simply as Volume 1) are princi pally concerned with phase transitions in lattice systems. Due mainly to the insights gained from scaling theory and renormalization group methods, this subject has developed very rapidly over the last thirty years. ' In our choice of topics we have tried to present a good range of fundamental theory and of applications, some of which reflect our own interests. A broad division of material can be made between exact results and ap proximation methods. We have found it appropriate to inelude some of our discussion of exact results in this volume and some in Volume 1. Apart from this much of the discussion in Volume 1 is concerned with mean-field theory. Although this is known not to give reliable results elose to a critical region, it often provides a good qualitative picture for phase diagrams as a whole. For complicated systems some kind of mean-field method is often the only tractable method available. In this volume our main concern is with scaling theory, algebraic methods and the renormalization group."

This two-volume work provides a comprehensive study of the statistical mechanics of lattice models. It introduces readers to the main topics and the theory of phase transitions, building on a firm mathematical and physical basis. Volume 1 contains an account of mean-field and cluster variation methods successfully used in many applications in solid-state physics and theoretical chemistry, as well as an account of exact results for the Ising and six-vertex models and those derivable by transformation methods.

Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling defends feeling against customary distrust or condescension by showing that the 18th-century cult of sentiment, despite its sometimes surreal manifestations, has led to a positive culture of feeling. The very reaction against sentimentalism has taught us to identify sentimentality. Fiction, moreover, remains a principal means not just of discriminating quality of feeling but of appreciating its essentially imaginative nature.

Protect your child. Leading pediatric experts answer all your questions about reducing the risks of antibiotic overuse. ""An important book for parents.the best source I have seen about the dangers of antibiotic resistance and the risks of antibiotic overuse."" --Scott Dowell, M.D., M.P.H. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ""Finally, a book that discusses the problem of antibiotic overuse in a readable way, combining daily experiences in pediatric practice with scientific explanations."" --S. Michael Marcy, M.D., American Academy of Pediatrics If your child has a cough, cold, ear infection, or sore throat, will antibiotics help? The answer may surprise you. Overuse of antibiotics has led to antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, or ""superbugs."" Antibiotics are increasingly ineffective because they are often prescribed inappropriately to treat viral infections, such as colds, bronchitis, and sore throats. Natural supplements may offer more relief. Clearly organized and packed with vital information, Breaking the Antibiotic Habit covers all the key issues, including:
* Distinguishing between strep throat and sore throat, sinus infection and the common cold, pneumonia and bronchitis, and ear infections and ear fluids
* Helping children with viral infections feel better--without antibiotics
* Getting the most from over-the-counter remedies and natural supplements--which are best for specific symptoms, and which to avoid altogether

This two-volume work provides a comprehensive study of the statistical mechanics of lattice models. It introduces readers to the main topics and the theory of phase transitions, building on a firm mathematical and physical basis. Volume 1 contains an account of mean-field and cluster variation methods successfully used in many applications in solid-state physics and theoretical chemistry, as well as an account of exact results for the Ising and six-vertex models and those derivable by transformation methods.

Most of the interesting and difficult problems in statistical mechanics arise when the constituent particles of the system interact with each other with pair or multipartiele energies. The types of behaviour which occur in systems because of these interactions are referred to as cooperative phenomena giving rise in many cases to phase transitions. This book and its companion volume (Lavis and Bell 1999, referred to in the text simply as Volume 1) are princi pally concerned with phase transitions in lattice systems. Due mainly to the insights gained from scaling theory and renormalization group methods, this subject has developed very rapidly over the last thirty years. ' In our choice of topics we have tried to present a good range of fundamental theory and of applications, some of which reflect our own interests. A broad division of material can be made between exact results and ap proximation methods. We have found it appropriate to inelude some of our discussion of exact results in this volume and some in Volume 1. Apart from this much of the discussion in Volume 1 is concerned with mean-field theory. Although this is known not to give reliable results elose to a critical region, it often provides a good qualitative picture for phase diagrams as a whole. For complicated systems some kind of mean-field method is often the only tractable method available. In this volume our main concern is with scaling theory, algebraic methods and the renormalization group."

Protect your child. Leading pediatric experts answer all your questions about reducing the risks of antibiotic overuse. "An important book for parents…the best source I have seen about the dangers of antibiotic resistance and the risks of antibiotic overuse." —Scott Dowell, M.D., M.P.H. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention "Finally, a book that discusses the problem of antibiotic overuse in a readable way, combining daily experiences in pediatric practice with scientific explanations." —S. Michael Marcy, M.D., American Academy of Pediatrics If your child has a cough, cold, ear infection, or sore throat, will antibiotics help? The answer may surprise you. Overuse of antibiotics has led to antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, or "superbugs." Antibiotics are increasingly ineffective because they are often prescribed inappropriately to treat viral infections, such as colds, bronchitis, and sore throats. Natural supplements may offer more relief. Clearly organized and packed with vital information, Breaking the Antibiotic Habit covers all the key issues, including:

• Distinguishing between strep throat and sore throat, sinus infection and the common cold, pneumonia and bronchitis, and ear infections and ear fluids
• Helping children with viral infections feel better—without antibiotics
• Getting the most from over-the-counter remedies and natural supplements—which are best for specific symptoms, and which to avoid altogether

Scientists in lipid biochemistry research have increasingly recognized the role of lipids as signaling molecules, aside from their importance in forming cellular membranes and storing energy. This book provides the latest findings on a wide variety of complex lipids in cells that function either as intracellular or intercellular messengers. International investigators present current data on the most extensively studied examples of both intracellular and intercellular messengers generated from lipids, and describe their basic mechanisms, which also utilize receptors in the G-protein-coupled family. The in-depth discussions address such topics as lipid signaling for protein kinase C activation, phosphatidic acid and lyso-phosphatidic acid, ceramide as a messenger, bioactive properties of Sphingosine and structurally related compounds, platelet-activating factor and PAF-like mimetics, and prostaglandins and related compounds. Lipid Second Messengers is an up-to-date reference on developments in the expanding field of lipid-derived signals and will be of interest to biochemists, physiologists, pharmacologists, geneticists, and biologists.

As a feeling or instinct for kinship, empathy is rooted in human connectedness - it belongs to the field of emotional forces that attract and repel and alloy. Since empathy springs from a person's sense of oneness with another, it differs from sympathy, which marks a distance between the unharmed perceiver and the injured perceived, and from altruism, which also poses difference by setting between them the objective duty of the unharmed to help the injured. This book is an experiment in empathy: it takes a new step by mapping out the profile empathy had in the creative imagination of Europe in the Middle Ages, the period when European culture took permanent shape. The studies give special attention to how the stimuli of art were used to teach, and hold up for imitation models of empathetic fervour. They identify areas in which the dynamic between insiders and outsiders forced subversive explorations of what it meant to be human. Like falling in love across ethnic, racial, or religious borders, empathy has its dangers, one of which is assimilation to former outsiders. This book is also an emphatic experiment in that it is a collaborative work by a number of scholars in different fields. Each contributor is an acknowledged expert, not only in one area, but also in crisscrossing the artificial borders of academic departments to reveal the interlocking connections that give emotional power to all images, verbal, pictorial, or performative. Thus, a number of themes weave through the whole book: art history, musicology, theology, biography, spirituality, and feminism.

"How to Do It" shows us sixteenth-century Italy from an entirely new perspective: through manuals which were staples in the households of middlebrow Italians merely trying to lead better lives. Addressing challenges such as how to conceive a boy, the manuals offered suggestions such as tying a tourniquet around your husband's left testicle. Or should you want to goad female desires, throw 90 grubs in a liter of olive oil, let steep in the sun for a week and apply liberally on the male anatomy. Bell's journey through booklets long dismissed by scholars as being of little literary value gives us a refreshing and surprisingly fun social history.
"Lively and curious reading, particularly in its cascade of anecdote, offered in a breezy, cozy, journalistic style." --Lauro Martines, "Times Literary Supplement"
" Bell's] fascinating book is a window on a lost world far nearer to our own than we might imagine. . . . How pleasant to read his delightful, informative and often hilarious book." --Kate Saunders, "The Independent"
"An extraordinary work which blends the learned with the frankly bizarre." --"The Economist"
"Professor Bell has a sly sense of humor and an enviably strong stomach. . . . He wants to know how people actually behaved, not how the Church or philosophers or earnest humanists thought they should behave. I loved this book." --Christopher Stace, "Daily Telegraph"

Answers to your most pressing SOA development questions

How do we start with service modeling? How do we analyze services for better reusability? Who should be involved? How do we create the best architecture model for our organization? This must-read for all enterprise leaders gives you all the answers and tools needed to develop a sound service-oriented architecture in your organization.

Praise for Service-Oriented Modeling

Service Analysis, Design, and Architecture

"Michael Bell has done it again with a book that will be remembered as a key facilitator of the global shift to Service-Oriented Architecture. . . . With this book, Michael Bell provides that foundation and more--an essential bible for the next generation of enterprise IT."
--Eric Pulier, Executive Chairman, SOA Software

"Michael Bell's insightful book provides common language and techniques for business and technology organizations to take advantage of the SOA paradigm. By focusing modeling techniques on the business problem, Bell provides a way for professionals to work throughout the life cycle to create reusable and enduring services."
--Mike Zbranak, CIO, Chase Card Services

"This book will become an imperative business and technology service-oriented modeling recipe for any manager, architect, modeler, analyst, and developer in today's software development industry."
--Jeff Schneider, CEO, MomentumSI

"'Innovative' and 'groundbreaking' are words that best describe Michael Bell's Service-Oriented Modeling. It depicts a true service modeling approach that elegantly closes a clear and critical service modeling gap in the SOA industry. This holistic book ties these concepts togetherusing real-world examples across a service life cycle that transitions services from ideas and concepts into production assets that deliver business value. A must-read for business and technical SOA practitioners."
--Eric A. Marks, CEO, AgilePath Corporation

"As hot as SOA is today, many business and technology professionals still find it challenging to mind the gap between their disparate methodologies and objectives. Herein Michael Bell speaks clearly to both camps in straightforward language, outlining disciplines each can use to communicate effectively and advance the realization of corporate aims. This book is a bible for all who seek to drive business/technology into the future."
--Mark Edward Goodrich, Director, Investing Product Management, Reuters Media

"This book takes senior IT architects and systems designers into the depths of modeling for SOA, with a fresh new perspective on tools, terminology, and how to turn the theory into practice. His full life-cycle approach balances process, control, and accountability to align all the participants in the delivery pipeline--clearing the road for successful SOA business solutions."
--Phil Gilligan, Chief Technology Officer, EBS

Is there a resemblance between the contemporary anorexic teenager counting every calorie in her single-minded pursuit of thinness, and an ascetic medieval saint examining her every desire? Rudolph M. Bell suggests that the answer is yes.
"Everyone interested in anorexia nervosa . . . should skim this book or study it. It will make you realize how dependent upon culture the definition of disease is. I will never look at an anorexic patient in the same way again."--Howard Spiro, M.D., "Gastroenterology"
" This] book is a first-class social history and is well-documented both in its historical and scientific portions."--Vern L. Bullough, "American Historical Review"
"A significant contribution to revisionist history, which re-examines events in light of feminist thought. . . . Bell is particularly skillful in describing behavior within its time and culture, which would be bizarre by today's norms, without reducing it to the pathological."--Mary Lassance Parthun, "Toronto Globe and Mail"
"Bell is both enlightened and convincing. His book is impressively researched, easy to read, and utterly fascinating."--Sheila MacLeod, "New Statesman"

Review and retain the information you need for success on the boards with Nelson Pediatrics Board Review: Certification and Recertification. This highly practical review tool follows the American Board of Pediatrics (ABP) general pediatrics content outline, with topics weighted to correlate with the exam. Must-know information is presented in a way that's easy to study and remember, and is backed by the Nelson family of references that you know and trust for current, authoritative information in your field. Equips residents and physicians with an efficient, comprehensive system for study, designed specifically to help you perform at your best on the board exam. Presents information in a bulleted, high-yield format, with topics matching ABP content guidelines. Provides a real-world balance of necessary fundamental information and cutting-edge advances - all carefully written and reviewed by editors and contributors from the world renowned Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Features over 600 board-style questions with full, discursive answers online. Includes reader-friendly features that promote testing success: tables that show differences between diagnoses, genetic disorders grouped by key features in phenotypic presentation rather than in alphabetical order, and more - all designed to help you recall key information when taking exams. Provides online links to the Nelson Textbook of Pediatrics that offer a complete presentation of the content, including evidence-based treatment and management. Enhanced eBook version included with purchase. Your enhanced eBook allows you to access all of the text, figures, and references from the book on a variety of devices.

The best-practices solution guide for rescuing broken software systems Incremental Software Architecture is a solutions manual for companies with underperforming software systems. With complete guidance and plenty of hands-on instruction, this practical guide shows you how to identify and analyze the root cause of software malfunction, then identify and implement the most powerful remedies to save the system. You'll learn how to avoid developing software systems that are destined to fail, and the methods and practices that help you avoid business losses caused by poorly designed software. Designed to answer the most common questions that arise when software systems negatively impact business performance, this guide details architecture and design best practices for enterprise architecture efforts, and helps you foster the reuse and consolidation of software assets. Relying on the wrong software system puts your company at risk of failing. It's a question of when, not if, something goes catastrophically wrong. This guide shows you how to proactively root out and repair the most likely cause of potential issues, and how to rescue a system that has already begun to go bad. * Mitigate risks of software development projects * Increase ROI and accelerate time-to-market * Accurately assess technological achievability and viability * Identify actual software construction value propositions Fierce competition and volatile commerce markets drive companies to invest heavily in the construction of software systems, which strains IT and business budgets and puts immense strain on existing network infrastructure. As technology evolves, these ever-more-complex computing landscapes become more and more expensive and difficult to maintain. Incremental Software Architecture shows you how to revamp the architecture to effectively reduce strain, cost, and the chance of failure.

Democracy is back, at least as a topic of concern among rural sociologists. The Neoliberal cast of the recent pursuit of globalization in world politics has led to the development of a wide range of critiques united by the same question: what about democracy? From this perspective, the main issue with globalization is the globalization of what - the market or the policy, the citizen as consumer or the citizen as citizen. This volume brings together some of the recent work of rural sociologists on democracy, in an effort to bring into sharper focus this work's distinctive contributions to the understanding the question of what is and should be globalized, with particular emphasis on rural concerns and rural people. Half the world still lives in rural areas, and the entire world depends upon the success of rural areas in providing the means for human subsistence. The impact of globalization on rural democratization thus has implications for everyone. The volume has three sections. The first draws together a range of theoretical work on rural democratization. The second explores processes of rural democratization in the rich countries of the world. The third investigates the distinctive manifestations of rural democratization efforts in the poor countries.

Now back in print, Vereen M. Bell's The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy was the first critical book devoted to an author who would become one of the most celebrated American writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Published in 1988, before McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and had his novels adapted into acclaimed films, Bell's study offered the first systematic review of the author's work. According to Bell, part of the difficulty of analyzing McCarthy's fiction is that the novelist by design works against all conventional ways of seeing and dealing with the world. Any formulaic readings, particularly those associated with the traditional schemes of southern literature, will be distorted. McCarthy's novels are provocatively mysterious yet specific and vivid as well. They are also freestanding and unclassifiable Bell shows how McCarthy transforms the world through language, how he reconstitutes both urban and rural settings so that otherwise barely articulate and unheroic people live vividly in a context that is both modernist and antimodernist. In this respect, Bell argues, McCarthy's work is about the tension between visions of the world and the intractable, opposing materiality of it, between the mysteriousness of an individual's private engagement with experience and social normality's tendency to flatten it out. At the same time, Bell shows McCarthy's infatuation with the reality of evil, how the evil in human form in his novels is as inexplicably gratuitous and violent as the inhuman form of random and destructive natural events. Such violence, for McCarthy, is built into existence and cannot be evaded or rationalized away. With detailed readings of McCarthy's first five novels—The Orchard Keeper, Child of God, Outer Dark, Suttree, and Blood Meridian—Bell demonstrates the novelist's faith in the protean capacity of language to disclose the layered possibilities and richness of being. Widely cited by scholars, Bell's book established many of the foundational critical frameworks for approaching McCarthy's work. It is now available in an affordable paperback edition.