This volume explores Shakespeare's interest in pity, an emotion that serves as an important catalyst for action within the plays, even as it generates one of the audience's most common responses to tragic drama in the theater. For Shakespeare, the word "pity" contained a broader range of meaning than it does in modern English, and was often associated with ideas such as mercy, compassion, charity, pardon, and clemency. This cluster of ideas provides Shakespeare's characters with a rich range of possibilities for engaging some of humanity's deepest emotional commitments, in which pity can be seen as a powerful stimulus for fostering social harmony, love, and forgiveness. However, Shakespeare also dramatizes pity's potential for deception, when the appeal to pity is not genuine, and conceals contrary motives of vengeance and cruelty. As Shakespeare's works remain relevant for modern audiences and readers, so too does his dramatization of the powerful ways in which emotions such as pity remain essential to our understanding of our shared humanity and of our awareness of compassion's role in our own private and civic lives.

First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Addressing a distinct gap in the field, Shawn Smith explores Pynchon as a historical novelist and thinker. Interpreting Pynchon's four major novels: V., Gravity's Rainbow, Vineland and Mason & Dixon, he argues that what we call the postmodern characteristics of Thomas Pynchon's narrative technique are rhetorical arguments, expressed through the forms of his texts, for Pynchon's philosophy of what twentieth century history has meant, as well as a rhetorical commentary on the problems of historiographic representation. Focusing on Pynchon as a historical novelist, as well as a writer with complex ideas on both historiographic representation and how historical knowledge develops and is communicated, this book's fresh approach makes it invaluable to Pynchon scholars and students of postmodern fiction.

In 1903, despite the vehement objections of his parents, Albert Einstein married Mileva Maric, the companion, colleague, and confidante whose influence on his most creative years has given rise to much speculation. Beginning in 1897, after Einstein and Maric met as students at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic, and ending shortly after their marriage, these fifty-four love letters offer a rare glimpse into Einstein's relationship with his first wife while shedding light on his intellectual development in the period before the annus mirabilis of 1905. Unlike the picture of Einstein the lone, isolated thinker of Princeton, he appears here both as the burgeoning enfant terrible of science and as an amorous young man beset, along with his fiance, by financial and personal struggles--among them the illegitimate birth of their daughter, whose existence is known only by these letters. Describing his conflicts with professors and other scientists, his arguments with his mother over Maric, and his difficulty obtaining an academic position after graduation, the letters enable us to reconstruct the youthful Einstein with an unprecedented immediacy. His love for Maric, whom he describes as "a creature who is my equal, and who is as strong and independent as I am," brings forth his serious as well as playful, often theatrical nature. After their marriage, however, Maric becomes less his intellectual companion, and, failing to acquire a teaching certificate, she subordinates her professional goals to his. In the final letters Einstein has obtained a position at the Swiss Patent Office and mentions their daughter one last time to his wife in Hungary, where she is assumed to have placed the girl in the care of relatives. Informative, entertaining, and often very moving, this collection of letters captures for scientists and general readers alike a little known yet crucial period in Einstein's life.

My Life Planning Guide is organized in seven steps that will help you discover your passions, values, dreams, and goals. This provides an easy way to design your action and daily action plans for reaching those goals. The seven steps include: Step 1 - My Passions List - Passions are what give you the drive, enthusiasm, and desire for life; Step 2 - My Values List - Values determine how you attach meaning, worth, and importance in life; Step 3 - My Dreams List - Dreams are your destinations in life; Step 4 - My Goals List - Goals are your milestone of accomplishments that map out your road to your dreams; Step 5 - My Action Plans - Action plans are the steps to reaching your goals; Step 6 - My Daily Action Plans - Daily action plans break down each action into daily plan items to achieve your goals; Step 7 - My Accountability Partner - A partner is a person you can share your goals with.

For the desire of money, murder, love, sex, and power, a Caucasian pimp stops at nothing to succeed on the mean streets of Hollywood CA. This unique story has strong fascinating characters not stereotypes.

Growing up in Compton Dollar Bill is an ambitious child always trying to make a dollar by any mean necessary by age eleven he is a look - out man for a drug dealer quickly graduating to selling drugs, and by the age thirteen becoming the richest kid in the neighborhood but despite his hard work it all comes to an abrupt end when his house was raided by cops and he is sentenced to five years in prison.

Back on the streets as a young man he crosses paths with a beautiful mixed African American woman who introduces him to the underworld of prostitution drug deals and murder on the streets of Sunset Blvd. In Hollywood California.

Frustration with our political leaders is at an all-time high. The American people are at a loss as to why children are shooting their classmates. They can't understand why single-parent families are now the landscape of the land as divorce rates climb higher than 50 percent. They seem baffled for an explanation as to why kids are becoming addicts to sex, drugs, and alcohol. In "God's Truth or the Liberal Lie: American at the Crossroads," Shawn Smith gives brutally honest answers that illustrate how liberalism is destroying our country and our leaders and stealing the innocence of our children in the process. He exposes how our country's walk away from God is leading society down the path of judgment--like so many other advanced civilizations--and how the pattern has repeated itself countless times since that fateful day in the Garden of Eden. Smith's goal in writing this book was to give people sound biblical truth and help them find the God-given tools they possess to fight the spiritual battle that is being waged in the homes, boardrooms, schools, and political arenas of this country. Once a liberal who now calls himself a "Benedict Arnold of the best kind," Smith deftly exposes the hypocrisy, hatred, and intolerance in America's supposedly caring, compassionate, and tolerant movement while encouraging readers to take a stand against liberalism. He believes that if we do not turn back the satanic tide of humanism, relativism, and secularism that is sweeping our country today, there will be a steep price to pay for turning our backs on God.