In addition to possessing the world's largest economies, China and the United States have extensive higher education systems comparable in size. By juxtaposing their long and distinctive educational traditions, Palace of Ashes offers compelling evidence that American colleges and universities are quickly falling behind in measures such as scholarly output and the granting of doctoral degrees in STEM fields. China, in contrast, has massed formidable economic power in support of its universities in an attempt to create the best educational system in the world. Palace of Ashes argues that the overall quality of US institutions of higher learning has declined over the last three decades. Mark S Ferrara places that decline in a broad historical context to illustrate how the forces of globalization are helping rapidly developing Asian nations-particularly China-transform their major universities into serious contenders for the world's students, faculty, and resources. Ferrara finds that American institutions have been harmed by many factors, including chronic state and federal defunding, unsustainable tuition growth, the adoption of corporate governance models, adjunctification, and the overall decline of humanities education relative to job-related training. Ferrara concludes with several key recommendations to help US universities counter these trends and restore the palace of American higher learning.

If you had an allergy so severe that accidentally eating a forbidden food could kill you in minutes--as you gasp for breath, your throat and tongue swell shut, your blood pressure drops and organs fail--how would it change your life, and your relationship to food? For people with food-induced anaphylaxis, the severest form of allergic response, simply eating in restaurants, accepting invitations to dinner, going on overnight field trips, or traveling through foreign countries means facing one's mortality with every meal. In this book, Mark S. Ferrara weaves history, science, and psychology to recount the story of his struggles with allergic asthma and a life-threatening allergy to nuts--and his difficulties living and working in the Far East and Near East--to show how the quest for self-actualization can lead to an acceptance of transience that borders on the mystical. Along the way, he guides parents in keeping food-allergic children safe at home and at school and offers strategies that adolescents and adults may use to negotiate social spaces involving food. He explains how survivors of anaphylaxis can cope with the sometimes-irrational fears of food that follow that traumatic experience, so they may live happy, healthy, meaningful lives.

When Captain Christopher Newport and his crew landed on the muddy banks of the James River in 1607, after four months at sea, they aimed to establish a new colony not for God, or the greater good of humanity-but for the sake of profit. The Pilgrims who settled in Cape Cod in 1620 as agents of Plymouth Company found evidence of divine election in the fortunes they accumulated from a lucrative system of town-founding in the New World. The innovative and often ruthless entrepreneurs who followed these colonists carved out the immense North American frontier wilderness from the Atlantic Ocean to the golden sands of the California coast, and they forged industrial and technological revolutions that shook the world. New Seeds of Profit examines the role of business leaders from George Washington to Donald Trump in shaping the United States into a business nation unlike any other in world history. By tracing the influence of industry and commerce on American society through portraits of successful entrepreneurs, New Seeds of Profit sheds light on the esteemed place Americans reserve for their wealthiest business leaders-and it measures the true cost of that adulation. In this fascinating, entertaining, and often surprising book, Mark S. Ferrara exposes the unexpected and uninvited consequences of venerating business leaders by demonstrating how enterprise driven by the bottom line endangers people and the environment. In a story teeming with the heroes and scoundrels of enterprise, New Seeds of Profit offers an alternative paradigm that delivers just returns to investors and provides self-actualizing work, while preserving missions that encourage sustainable stewardship of the earth and advance the common good.

Between Noble and Humble: Cao Xueqin and the Dream of the Red Chamber ( , literally New Biography of Cao Xueqin) is a translation of a scholarly work by the famous mainland Chinese critic Zhou Ruchang. Written for the Western reader, it historicizes the life and times of the Chinese novelist Cao Xueqin (c. 1715-1763) and comprehensively introduces the origins of the novel Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng). This translation is unique because it offers the first book-length biography of Cao Xueqin in English. Zhou carefully historicizes the decline of the once illustrious Cao clan, and he demonstrates how Cao Xueqin's own childhood experiences in a wealthy bondservant family during the Qing dynasty profoundly informed the encyclopedic narrative that he would later write. In Between Noble and Humble, Zhou also offers intriguing and controversial theories about Honglou meng based on decades of careful research, for instance, that the famous commentator Red Inkstone was in fact a female relative of Cao Xueqin.

The historical and literary antecedents of the President's campaign rhetoric can be traced to the utopian traditions of the Western world. The ""rhetoric of hope"" is a form of political discourse characterised by a forward-looking vision of social progress brought about by collective effort and adherence to shared values (including discipline, temperance, a strong work ethic, self-reliance, and service to the community). By combining his own personal story (as the biracial son of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya) with national mythologies like the American Dream, Obama creates a narrative persona that embodies the moral values and cultural mythos of his implied audience. In doing so, he draws upon the Classical world, Judeo-Christianity, the European Enlightenment, the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, the presidencies of Jefferson, Lincoln, and FDR, slave narratives, the Black church, the civil rights movement, and even popular culture. Barack Obama's understanding of history as an ongoing process of transformation toward social betterment provides the basis for his ultimate rhetorical formulation of a multicultural utopia that transcends national boundaries.

One of the most important relationships that human beings have with plants is changing our consciousness-consider the plants that give us coffee, tea, chocolate, and nicotine. Sacred Bliss challenges traditional attitudes about cannabis by tracing its essential role in the spiritual and curative traditions in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the Americas from prehistory to the present day. In highlighting the continued use of cannabis around the globe, Sacred Bliss offers compelling evidence of cannabis as an entheogen used for thousands of years to evoke peak-experiences, or moments of expanded perception or spiritual awareness. Today, the growing utilization of medical cannabis to alleviate the pain and symptoms of physical illness raises the possibility of using cannabis to treat the mind along with the body. By engaging sacred and secular texts from around the world, Sacred Bliss demonstrates that throughout religious history, cannabis has offered access to increased imagination and creativity, heightened perspective and insight, and deeper levels of thought.