Undercover investigator Lydia Ellen Parsons hasn't been home to Shoreditch Plains in years-thirteen years, to be exact. But a mysterious and threatening note arrives along with the invitation to her sister's wedding, telling her that now might be the time to go home.

Along with her two partners, the quiet former detective, Beauregard "Beau" Theodosius Jenkins III, and the obnoxious Robert "Bo" Parker, a former Marine, she finally returns to her hometown. Just as LP and her cohorts arrive, the future in-laws of the bride decide to take over the Parson family and gain control over their sphere of influence, prompting her grandfather to hire LP and her partners to investigate.

In the chaotic world of the Parson Compound, LP forgets to mention to her friends that her family is anything but average-they're a mafia family.

During early modern European expansion, America emerged as dynamic meeting ground, continuously forging multidirectional global encounters. Relating Continents dismisses the semantics of ‘encounter’ which, in the politics of naming, euphemistically substitutes invasive violence, but invests in the notion’s dimension as an enactment of literary, cultural, and social relations, fusing people, goods, texts, artifacts, ideas, and senses of belonging. Understanding the practice of relating as both connecting and narrating, this anthology investigates the linking of continents in Romance literary and cultural history, as well as the tales of entanglement produced in the process. The contributors revisit the worldwide impact of distant or in-person negotiations between conquerors and local actors; they assess how colonial interventions shift hemispheric native networks, and they examine the ties between America, Africa, and Asia. By doing so, they prove the global constitution of early modern Spanish and Portuguese American literatures, their historical and cultural contexts, and their long-lasting legacies.

Organophoshorus Chemistry provides a comprehensive and critical review of the recent literature. Coverage includes phosphines and their chalcogenides, phosphonium salts, low coordination number phosphorus compounds, penta- and hexa- coordinated compounds, tervalent phosphorus acid derivatives, quiquevalent phosphorus acids, nucleotides and nucleic aicds, ylides and related compounds, phosphazenes and the application of physical methods in the study of organophosphorus compounds. This Specialist Periodical Report will be of value to research workers in universities, government and industrial research organisations whose work involves the use of organophosphorus compounds. It provides a concise but comprehensive survey of a vast field of study, with a wide variety of applications, enabling the reader to keep abreast of the latest developments in their specialist fields.

This book applies regional analysis to the challenges facing global investment agencies seeking to enhance trade in lagging regions. It shows how spatial interaction and agent-based modelling can be used as the basis for developing new plans and policies. An in-depth analysis of trade routes is presented, which can be used to develop policies for increasing efficiency and reducing costs. Landlocked Uganda and the sea-locked South Pacific Islands serve to illustrate the problems of covering sizable distances, accelerating export flows and improving supply chain efficiency. These examples also provide an excellent illustration of the power of regional science, from assembling data bases in difficult situations to developing and applying models of the trade system.

This Palgrave Pivot offers new insights into leading Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa, investigating the dynamic composition of her texts, and situating her work in a larger hemispheric tendency of performativity emerging at the turn of the millennium. Presenting Anzaldúa as a quintessential figure of feminist and decolonial theory-making in the Americas, this book argues that the Chicana writer articulated her notions on fluctuations through “performative concepts� which did not respect the borders of single texts or editions, but organically grew through them. The offered close readings of Anzaldúa’s published works, drafts, and archive material demonstrate the constant changes and intertwined phases of her literary and conceptual production.

Cicero has played a pivotal role in shaping Western culture. His public persona, his self-portrait as model of Roman prose, philosopher, and statesman, has exerted a durable and profound impact on the educational system and the formation of the ruling class over the centuries. Joining up with recent studies on the reception of Cicero, this volume approaches the figure of Cicero from a 'biographical', more than 'philological', perspective and considers the multiple ways by which different ages reacted to Cicero and created their 'Ciceros'. From Cicero's lifetime to our times, it focuses on how the image of Cicero was revisited and reworked by intellectuals and men of culture, who eulogized his outstanding oratorical and political virtues but, not rarely, questioned the role he had in Roman politics and society. An international group of scholars elaborates on the figure of Cicero, shedding fresh light on his reception in late antiquity, Humanism and Renaissance, Enlightenment and modern centuries. Historians, literary scholars and philosophers, as well as graduate students, will certainly profit from this volume, which contributes enormously to our understanding of the influence of Cicero on Western culture over the times.

This book presents methods and tools of network biology and bioinformatics for understanding the disease dynamics and identification of drug targets. The initial section of chapters introduce the theoretical aspects followed by the different applications for construction and analysis of biological networks, methods for identifying crucial nodes in networks, and network dynamics. The book covers the latest advances in the network medicine, exploring the different types of biological networks, and their applications. It further reviews the role of R language in the network-based approaches that help in understanding biological systems and identifying biological functions. Towards the end, the book explores the recent developments and applications in machine learning and its potential for advancing network biology. Finally, the book elucidates a comprehensive yet a representative description of challenges associated with the understanding of disease dynamics using network biology. Given its scope, the book is intended for researchers and advanced postgraduate students of bioinformatics, computational biology, and medical sciences. ​

Mama Called the Doctor is the poignant memoir of a suburban stay-at-home Mom, who at the age of thirty-eight, became pregnant with her fourth child and began her unbelievable journey from personal tragedy and heartache to self-acceptance and peace.

Antoinette Romana was living a dream life with her husband Angelo and three children when she received a shocking phone call from her doctor after her amniocentesis. Her precious baby had Down syndrome, and Antoinette and her husband had just four days to make an agonizing decision that would ultimately change their lives forever. Antoinette details her conversations with family members who backed her with unwavering support and also her dialogue with the doctors and counselors who shared their honest, sometimes emotionless feedback as she and Angelo bravely faced a difficult situation head-on with great strength, faith in God, and an unwavering love for each other.

Antoinette shares her openly honest and heartfelt story of survival with the hope that in reaching out, she will help those who have traveled on the same journey know that they are not alone.

As the demand for food banks and other emergency food charities continues to rise across the continent, this is the first systematic Europe-wide study of the roots and consequences of this urgent phenomenon. Leading researchers provide case studies from the UK, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Spain, each considering the history and driving political and social forces behind the rise of food charity, and the influence of changing welfare states. They build into a rich comparative study that delivers valuable evidence for anyone with an academic or professional interest in related issues including social policy, exclusion, poverty and justice.

This book is an innovative and critical contribution to the study of the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) people in the context of Europe. Combining legal and Foucauldian approaches, it investigates the ways in which current discourses about LGBTIQ rights in Europe are tightly bound to contemporary debates about national and trans-national citizenship. The author defines and analyzes the concept of 'multisexual citizenship' to illustrate new, flexible forms of sexual and gendered citizenship that could radically transform practices of citizenship and the current human rights framework in Europe. She does this by combining critical deconstructions of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights with ethnographic observations and sociological analysis. This interdisciplinary work will appeal to sociologists, lawyers and researchers of gender and LGBTIQ rights.

The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller: A Nomad Memory is the first comprehensive treatment of a singularly important American poet of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Michael Heller (b. 1937) has amassed a body of poetry and criticism that places him in the vanguard of modern literature, and this essay collection provides the first extensive critical treatment of his varied career. This book 's multifaceted appraisal of his engagement with poetry as well as crucial ideas across various traditions establishes him as a preeminent writer among his contemporaries and younger generations, and as a major poet in any era.

To understand why the concept of aesthetic sexuality is important, we must consider the influence of the first volume of Foucault's seminal "The History of Sexuality." Arguing against Foucault's assertions that only scientia sexualis has operated in modern Western culture while ars erotica belongs to Eastern and ancient societies, Byrne suggests that modern Western culture has indeed witnessed a form of ars erotica, encompassed in what she calls 'aesthetic sexuality'.To argue for the existence of aesthetic sexuality, Byrne examines mainly works of literature to show how, within these texts, sexual practice and pleasure are constructed as having aesthetic value, a quality that marks these experiences as forms of art. In aesthetic sexuality, value and meaning are located within sexual practice and pleasure rather than in their underlying cause; sexuality's raison d'etre is tied to its aesthetic value, at surface level rather than beneath it. Aesthetic sexuality, Byrne shows, is a product of choice, a deliberate strategy of self-creation as well as a mode of social communication.

The book intends to give a modern presentation of the classical Markov and Lagrange spectrum, which are fundamental objects from the theory of Diophantine approximations and of their several generalizations related to Dynamical Systems and Differential Geometry. Besides presenting many classical results, the book includes several topics of recent research on the subject, connecting several fields of Mathematics - Number Theory, Dynamical Systems and Fractal Geometry.It includes topics as: