For author "Kenneth H. Thompson," childhood was anything but idyllic. In his memoir, he chronicles his life story and the lessons he learned in the process. Born in Brooklyn, New York, he grew up with two brothers and two sisters, but he suffered abuse at the hands of his step-father.

Hoping for a better life for her son, Thompson's mother adopted him out to another family. The joy was short-lived, as his adoptive mother was a saint by day and a devil by night, due to her drinking. In this memoir, he tells of his miserable childhood and the circumstances that led him to drug use, crime, and an eventual prison stay at Rikers Island.

This autobiography details Thompson's journey through the storms and the darkness in life, but it also narrates how God came to help and instilled light in his mind and his soul and facilitated a complete spiritual balance.

Perhaps no aspect of social relations has stirred more academic controversy than the subject of race and ethnicity. Theories that explain the persistence and vitality of the "ethnic phenomenon"--as well as commentaries on these theories--abound in sociological and anthropological literature. This study is the first, however, to critique the field as a whole. Thompson offers systematic comparisons of current theories, testing both their internal consistency and their adequacy as analytical tools. Thompson's study focuses the debate on ethnicity in a constructive and original fashion. Thompson devotes a chapter to each of the major theoretical traditions that now dominate the field of ethnicity: sociobiology, primordialism, assimilationism, world-system theory, and neo-Marxism. He describes the basic tenets of each theory and demonstrates that the "facts" they seek to explain are embedded within their theoretical assumptions. He attributes disagreements among the theories less to differences over facts than to the way they are interpreted within different worldviews arising from divergent philosophical and scientific presuppositions. He shows that it is not possible to critique any theory using the assumptions of another theory, arguing that theories can be internally critiqued based on the relationship between their adequacy as theories and the framework they offer for making normative choices. Thompson's study focuses the debate on ethnicity in a constructive and original fashion. The book will be of interest to scholars, teachers, and students working the areas of race and ethnic relations or theoretical criticism.

This book is about being human. Poetry is human. It is a look into the soul, daily living, and poetic presece of daily life. Every passion and pain of my own world has been turned into poetry, a story revealed. A book filled with beauty and surprise, unexpected gifts. This book is about the solitary moments in life, things that you have done and experienced and discovered that you've actually found them to be meaningful.

In 2008, the economic relationship between the United States and China almost collapsed due to a crisis at two American mortgage corporations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This book explains how that crisis came about, and analyzes the consequences and implications.

In the very last year of the seventeenth century a ten-year-old boy in the city of Lucerne, Switzerland, announced to his parents that he wanted to become a Jesuit missionary and save souls in faraway lands. Philipp Segesser got his wish when he was sent to northwestern Mexico in 1731. For the next thirty years he carried on an active correspondence with his family and religious affiliates. His letters home, translated and edited in this fascinating book, provide a frank and intimate view of missionary life on the remote northwestern frontier of New Spain. The editor's introduction sets the letters in biographical and historical context.

This professional book for labor arbitrators, mediators, administrative law judges, practitioners in the field of labor relations representing either management or labor (or both), and others involved in labor relations and dispute resolution provides insight into the elements of an arbitrator's decision-making process in disputes involving employee discharge. Drawing on his own extensive background in the field, the author uses his own advisory letters of opinion, written to the parties of a dispute, to outline issues involved and the reasoning processes used in making decisions. These letters are from real-life dispute situations and provide sample case studies in a variety of settings and fact situations allowing the reader inside the arbitral resolution process.

The work sets forth the factors that an arbitrator will likely consider to be important in his or her determination of when an action by the employer should be sustained (judged fair and right) or overturned (judged to be wrongful). The work takes the process of dispute resolution out of the unpredictable, moving it instead to the methodical search for basic elements that have been considered by the Courts to be fair and supportable. Legal terminology is used within the context of particular cases, but is not so excessive as to create a problem for the average labor relations practitioner.

A sweeping, policy-oriented account of the private and public management of the world's essential natural resource. Governments dominated water management throughout the twentieth century. Tasked with ensuring a public supply of clean, safe, reliable, and affordable water, governmental agencies controlled water administration in most of the world. They built the dams, reservoirs, and aqueducts that store water when available and move that water to areas with increasing populations and economies. Private businesses sometimes played a part in managing water, but typically in a supporting position as consultants or contractors. Today, given the global need for innovative new technologies, institutions, and financing to solve the freshwater crisis, private businesses and markets are playing a rapidly expanding role, bringing both new approaches and new challenges to a historically public field. In Liquid Asset, Barton H. Thompson, Jr. examines the growing position of the private sector in the "business of water." Thompson seeks to understand the private sector's involvement in meeting the water needs of both humans and the environment, looks at the potential risks that growing private involvement poses to the public interest in water, and considers the obstacles that private organizations face in trying to participate in a traditionally governmental sector. Thompson provides a richly detailed analysis to foster both improved public policy and responsible business behavior. As the book demonstrates, the story of private businesses and water offers a window into the serious challenges facing freshwater today, and their potential solutions.

In the midst of the American Civil War, Rita Goldstein, a beautiful, young cornetist, is abandoned in Cairo, Illinois by her faithless fiance Butch Lassiter, but she is a fierce and determined young woman who is not easily rejected and not easily discouraged. She sets out at once to bring him back and follows The Army of the Cumberland across Tennessee to find him. She is pursued by her heart-broken father, Ira, who wants to bring her home again. On their separate journeys, Ira and Rita are caught up in the hatred and destructiveness of two huge armies, one from the North and one from the South. However, both Ira and Rita find consolation in the power of music.

Until recently, older men were not a social phenomenon commanding great attention. Older men are a distinct minority among men, accounting for 15 percent of the adult male population. Among elders, older men are still outnumbered by older women three to two, and there are only two men for every five women over age 85. However, the importance of gender to age, and age to gender, is being acknowledged by gerontologists as well as gender scholars. This work is the first thorough study of the research examining older men as men.

Thompson was able to locate more than 750 articles, which are organized by subject (Gendered Aging, Health and Well-Being, Sexuality, Suicide and Alcohol, Religiosity and Spirituality, Stereotypes and Social Constructions, Relationships and Social Life, Family Relations, Caregiving, Economics and Retirement, Living Arrangements, and Resources and Needs) and selectively annotated. Access is also aided by extensive subject and author indexes. This groundbreaking volume will be of great interest to gerontologists, sociologists, and all researchers concerned with gender issues.

Men, Masculinities, and Aging introduces readers to the gendered nature of aging men's lives. Edward H. Thompson, noted for his work on men and aging, explores the intersections of ethnicities, class, geographies, generations, and masculinities. The book offers a fresh perspective on men's experiences with bodily aging, growing older in an ageist society, and navigating the virtual absence of cultural guidelines for being an aging man. The book also provides a sociological theory framework on how men navigate their social aging as they experience later life and very late life. Turning points such as grandfathering, the changeover from work to retirement, and the onset of health problems or becoming a career are discussed at length as Thompson frames these natural occurrences as now ordinary experiences as aging masculinities are no longer rarities. The book will provide educators, students, researchers, and practitioners a means to question standard assumptions about aging men and discuss what underlies most later-life masculinities.

Studies on the influence of the middle ages, and in particular the Arthurian legends, on the culture of North America. Fifteen essays trace North America's enthusiastic engagement with the middle ages from the Revolution to Disney. There are eight studies of the American reception of Arthur: in art (Abbey, Rosenthal), literature (Canadian writers,John Ciardi), scholarship (R.S. Loomis), politics (JFK), and popular culture (Arthurian youth groups, Disneyland, the Excalibur Casino). Other topics include Tom Paine, Elbertus Hubbard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, C.B. DeMille, popular treatments of Villon, the roots of the New Mexican cuento, and the rhetoric of the Gulf War. Contributors: ROGER WOOD, KYMBERLEY N. PINDER, ERICA E. HIRSHLER, ALAN LUPACK, CHARLOTTE OBERG, RAYMOND H. THOMPSON,STAN GALLOWAY, ROBIN BLAETZ, ROBERT D. PECKHAM, JEFF RIDER, KLAUS P. JANKOFSKY, MARY MORSE, PAMELA S. MORGAN, SUSAN ARONSTEIN, NANCY COINER, JONATHAN M. ELUKIN

Written by an international team of over 130 authorities, no other work approaches this A-Z guide to the legends of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table for breadth and depth of coverage. It is the ultimate resource for reliable information on topics as diverse as the Grail, Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guenevere, Arthurian operas, the historicity of Arthur and much more.

Selection of the latest research in Arthurian studies. The essays in this volume present the most recent fruits of Arthurian scholarship, on texts from Perlesvaus to Albrecht's Jüngerer Titurel and the Prose BrutChronicle, together with a detailed examination of the role of Micheau Gonnot's Arthuriad in the evolution of Arthurian romance. The volume also includes an investigation of Arthurian prophecy and the deposition of Richard II. It is completed with an encyclopaedic treatment of Arthurian literature, art and film produced between 1999 and 2004, acting as a continuing update to The New Arthurian Encyclopedia. Contributors: BEN RAMM, FANNI BOGDANOW, ANNETTE VOLFING, HELEN FULTON, JULIA MARVIN, RAYMOND H. THOMPSON, NORRIS J. LACY

First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Our landscapes have never failed to entice and capture the imagination of writers, painters and philosophers a " and in turn their work has influenced our landscapes for centuries.

This carefully selected collection of readings and commentary expertly guides you through the aesthetic, social, cultural and environmental foundations of our thinking about landscape, and explores the key writings which shaped the field in its emergence and maturity.

Provoking thought and discussion, this book does not provide answers, and will not conclude with an infallible theory of landscape. But with a range of readings from Vitruvius to Jellicoe, from Burke to Berlin to Berleant, from the Picturesque to Phenomenology, every reader will find something here to set them thinking.

Our landscapes have never failed to entice and capture the imagination of writers, painters and philosophers a " and in turn their work has influenced our landscapes for centuries.

This carefully selected collection of readings and commentary expertly guides you through the aesthetic, social, cultural and environmental foundations of our thinking about landscape, and explores the key writings which shaped the field in its emergence and maturity.

Provoking thought and discussion, this book does not provide answers, and will not conclude with an infallible theory of landscape. But with a range of readings from Vitruvius to Jellicoe, from Burke to Berlin to Berleant, from the Picturesque to Phenomenology, every reader will find something here to set them thinking.

Epitomises what is best in Arthurian scholarship today. ZEITSCHRIFT FUER ROMANISCHE PHILOLOGIE This latest issue of Arthurian Literaturecontinues the tradition of the journal, combining critical studies with editions of primary Arthurian texts. Varied in their linguistic and chronological coverage, the articles dealwith major areas of Arthurian studies, from early French romance through late medieval English chronicle to contemporary fiction. Topics include Beroul's Tristan, Tristan de Nanteuil, the Anglo-Norman Brut, and the Morte, while an edition of the text of an extrait of Chretien's Erec et Enide prepared by the eighteenth-century scholar La Curne de Sainte-Palaye offers important insights into both scholarship on Chretien, and our understanding of the Enlightenment. The volume is completed with an encyclopaedic treatment of Arthurian literature, art and film produced between 1995 and 1995, acting as an update to The New Arthurian Encyclopedia.Contributors: RICHARD ILLINGWORTH, JANE TAYLOR, CARLETON CARROLL, MARIA COLOMBO TIMELLI, RALUCA RADULESCU, JULIA MARVIN, NORRIS LACY, RAYMOND THOMPSON.