Author: Ron Fritsch
Publisher: Asymmetrical Worlds
ISBN: 0615567290
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Book Description
In Ron Fritsch’s four Promised Valley novels, prehistoric farmers inhabit a fertile river valley they believe their gods promised them in return for their good behavior and obedience. Their enemies, hunters roaming the mostly barren hills beyond the mountains enclosing the valley, believe their gods gave it to them. In the first book in the series, Promised Valley Rebellion, one farmer, who has just come of age and wishes to “go with” another man, secretly meets a young hunter who goes with men. They become lovers. Both peoples are pleased that men who go with men, as well as women who go with women, live among them. Since they don’t have children of their own, they can contribute their time and efforts to the betterment of their people in other ways, such as parenting orphans and abandoned children, remembering and retelling the stories handed down to them by their gods and ancestors, hearing disputes in place of the king, and fighting in the front ranks in their armies. Both peoples also, though, view consorting with an enemy as high treason. In Promised Valley War, the second book in the series, the youthful farmer and hunter who knowingly commit treason every moment they spend together, along with others among their peoples most curious about their “eternal” enemies and most willing to treat them as their equals, nevertheless set the stage for what they’ve feared more than anything else: another horrifying war. Joseph Yurt for Reader Views says: “It is the story’s prehistoric setting that provides the basis for the intellectual question which binds the Promised Valley books together: ‘Could civilization and history, with their countless heaven-sanctioned wars and genocides, have begun differently?’ With that as his touchstone, Fritsch thoughtfully and compassionately offers answers through the story and its characters. “In writing this multi-faceted novel, Fritch masterfully layers and blends several literary devices—intellectual twists and turns, enigma, allegory and parable—to create a story rendered in both intricate detail and simple wisdom. Even through the vivid telling of epic war and death, Fritsch employs both fantasy and genuineness to connect with and uplift the reader. “While Promised Valley War is an adventurous tale on its surface, it is not what it seems to be; it is much more. For me it was a book of revelations. For anyone who has never lost their child’s heart and imagination, Promised Valley War will compel them to consider all that the book has to say to them. That’s what unforgettable books do.” Kirkus says: “The author’s well-rendered descriptions of the creeping onslaught of war and winter give the reader a visceral feel for the endangered paradise that can occur despite the best intentions of the best people, and readers will be surprised by the twists he gives his tale. Alongside the careful plotting and natural-sounding dialogue, there’s a refreshing amount of deeper resonances in the Promised Valley series, a steady undercurrent of commentary of the present day. The treatment of the young hero Blue Sky’s attraction to other men, for instance, is straightforward but nonconfrontational, and characters at several points grapple with their society’s primitive theology. ‘Could gods who were good-hearted … allow humans to go to war with one another?’ the narrative at one point asks. ‘[I]f they, like humans, had no choice in the matter, why did humans call them gods?’ The novel will leave readers eager to find out what happens next in Promised Valley. Luckily, Fritsch has plans to add two more volumes to the series. A captivating novel that will transport readers back to prehistory times—while reminding them of their own.” Promised Valley War is the first-place winner in the Gay/Lesbian Fiction category of the 2011 Reader Views literary awards competition. Promised Valley War is the winner of the bronze medal in the Literary Fiction category of the 2011 eLit Book Awards competition. Promised Valley War is the winner of a finalist medal in Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender Fiction category of the 2012 Next Generation Indie Book Awards competition. Promised Valley War is the winner of the silver medal in the Action Fiction category of the 2012 Readers Favorite Award competition. Promised Valley War is a finalist in the Gay & Lesbian & Transgender Fiction category of the 2012 National Indie Excellence Awards competition.
Author: Ron Fritsch
Publisher: Ron Fritsch
ISBN: 1311952152
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 309
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Book Description
Promised Valley Peace is the fourth and last novel in Ron Fritsch’s Promised Valley series. Blue Sky and Wandering Star and the other conspirators and their allies from the first three novels give up on the gods, whose existence many of them doubt, and discover how to use horses in warfare. They prepare to employ them in a last battle against the diehards led by the brutal War Cloud. The purpose of the allies is to bring the prehistoric enemy hunters and farmers together as one people in a “new kingdom” and end warfare between them forever.
Author: Ron Fritsch
Publisher: Asymmetric Worlds
ISBN: 0615739253
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
Promised Valley Conspiracy is the third novel in Ron Fritsch’s four-book prehistoric Promised Valley series. Fritsch continues to ask if history and civilization, which prehistory gave birth to, could’ve begun differently. US Review of Books: “There is a traditional, epic tone to the book that is reminiscent of Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey. It is a story whose firm, relentless action is the narrative drive of this novel. It fascinates with pages filled with excitement and drama. Fritsch’s world is one filled with wondrous surprises, where there are no damaging thoughts among the people toward same-sex unions. It’s refreshing to see the disappearance of negative cultural trappings found in today’s world.” Kirkus: Promised Valley Conspiracy “explores the ongoing conflict between the valley people, who are prosperous farmers occupying all the richest Promised Valley lands, and the hill people, who inhabit the sparser uplands and live bitterly, believing that their gods promised the valley and its comforts to them. Since the valley people have a similar belief about themselves, a state of dangerous friction exists between the two groups. Savage warfare and desperate diplomacy marked the well-orchestrated events of the first two books, and tensions continue to boil to the surface in this volume. These books continue to be an intelligent and involving look at the personal sacrifices of making war and keeping peace.” Reader Views: “The author’s creativity in writing a series such as this is to be admired. I noticed as the two different peoples learned to see similarities amongst their differences, it is the same in our world today. Lack of understanding of the beliefs of others creates a disconnection and fear among people. Learning to understand and respect the differences makes for a better world whether it is prehistoric or current. There are many valuable lessons to be learned in this story.” Feathered Quill: “I highly recommend the captivating and interesting Promised Valley series. Quill says: A thought-provoking tale of intrigue and ‘what ifs’ had life played out in Promised Valley fashion.”
Author: Ron Fritsch
Publisher: Asymmetric Worlds
ISBN: 0615464513
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
In Ron Fritsch’s four Promised Valley novels, prehistoric farmers inhabit a fertile river valley they believe their gods promised them in return for their good behavior and obedience. Their enemies, hunters roaming the mostly barren hills beyond the mountains enclosing the valley, believe their gods gave it to them. Promised Valley Rebellion, the first book in the Promised Valley series, is a story of forbidden love. The farmers’ king refuses to allow the marriage of the coming-of-age prince to the daughter of the farmer who saved the king’s life in the last war with the hunters. Her brother decides he has to help his sister and the prince, his boyhood friend, correct the flagrant injustice. That decision leads them and their allies into a youthful rebellion against the king and his officials, who rule the kingdom from their bluff-top town. The far more numerous farmers in the villages below, who despise the officials but not the king, and who admire the prince, are in a position to determine whether the rebels will succeed or face execution for treason. Kirkus says “the story encourages the reader to ponder the universal elements of the tale” and calls the prehistoric world of the novel a “strange, primitive world that feels winningly real.” The US Review of Books says the novel “is a good tale that feels real, with a strong promise and a good twist at the end,” and a “good book to read by the fire in wintertime.” Promised Valley Rebellion is the winner of the gold medal in the Literary Fiction category of the 2010 eLit Awards competition. Promised Valley Rebellion is the first-place winner in the Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Fiction category of the 2011 National Indie Excellence Awards competition. Promised Valley Rebellion is the winner of the silver medal in the Historical Fiction category, and a finalist in the General Fiction category, of the 2011 Readers Favorite awards competition.
Author: Ellen Schrecker
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022620099X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 632
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Book Description
The Lost Promise is a magisterial examination of the turmoil that rocked American universities in the 1960s, with a unique focus on the complex roles played by professors as well as students. The 1950s through the early 1970s are widely seen as American academia’s golden age, when universities—well-funded and viewed as essential for national security, economic growth, and social mobility—embraced an egalitarian mission. Swelling in size, schools attracted new types of students and professors, including radicals who challenged their institutions’ calcified traditions. But that halcyon moment soon came to a painful and confusing end, with consequences that still afflict the halls of ivy. In The Lost Promise, Ellen Schrecker—our foremost historian of both the McCarthy era and the modern American university—delivers a far-reaching examination of how and why it happened. Schrecker illuminates how US universities’ explosive growth intersected with the turmoil of the 1960s, fomenting an unprecedented crisis where dissent over racial inequality and the Vietnam War erupted into direct action. Torn by internal power struggles and demonized by conservative voices, higher education never fully recovered, resulting in decades of underfunding and today’s woefully inequitable system. As Schrecker’s magisterial history makes blazingly clear, the complex blend of troubles that disrupted the university in that pivotal period haunts the ivory tower to this day.
Author: Edward L. Ayers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195326881
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 592
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Book Description
A new history of the American South during Reconstruction shows how a complex blending of new ideas and old hatreds developed in the region following the Civil War. By the author of Vengeance and Justice.
Author: Kenneth L. Alford
Publisher: Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center
ISBN: 9780842528160
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 569
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Book Description
Collection of essays and articles about the US Civil War, with a focus on, but not limited to, people who were either members or later became members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Topics include historical facts about actual events, people, landmarks, and stories; most of which are connected to the US Civil War.
Author: Erin McElroy
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478059214
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176
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Book Description
In Silicon Valley Imperialism, Erin McElroy maps the processes of gentrification, racial dispossession, and economic predation that drove the development of Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area and how that logic has become manifest in postsocialist Romania. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Romania and the United States, McElroy exposes the mechanisms through which the appeal of Silicon Valley technocapitalism devours space and societies, displaces residents, and generates extreme income inequality in order to expand its reach. In Romania, dreams of privatization updated fascist and anti-Roma pasts and socialist-era underground computing practices. At the same time, McElroy accounts for the ways Romanians are resisting Silicon Valley capitalist logics, where anticapitalist and anti-imperialist activists and protesters build on socialist-era worldviews not to restore state socialism but rather to establish more just social formations. Attending to the violence of Silicon Valley imperialism, McElroy reveals technocapitalism as an ultimately unsustainable model of rapacious economic and geographic growth.
Author: John E. Thorson
Publisher: Development of Western Resources
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
Snaking 2,540 miles from Montana to the Mississippi River, the Missouri is the longest waterway in the nation. Its basin—stretching 530,000 square miles—extends broadly into ten states and twenty-five Indian reservations. For millions of years the river and its tributaries meandered untamed. But that irrevocably changed with the passage of the Pick-Sloan Plan, part of the Flood Control Act of 1944. In River of Promise, River of Peril, John Thorson takes the first comprehensive look at how and why the Missouri River basin-now with six major dams and hundreds of miles of navigation canals-has become one of the most significantly altered drainage systems in the country. He also looks at the consequences. The Pick-Sloan Plan, he argues, has not fared well over time, particularly in its failure to provide an effective blueprint for regional river management. Persistent conflicts over the river, he contends, illuminate important weaknesses of federalism in dealing with regional resources, the most glaring being the exclusion of any proactive role for Indian tribal governments. To support his argument, Thorson examines the physical, demographic, and political features of the river basin; analyzes the comprehensive river development that gave birth to the Pick-Sloan Plan; reveals why the original goals of the legislature were never achieved; explores the deep-seated and continuing tensions between basin governments; and investigates how Indian tribes, the river's ecology, and federalism have been damaged as the river has been developed. He also describes the various associations created and later abandoned from the sixties to the eighties and assesses their virtues and limitations. Thorson sees in the story of the Missouri River Basin the vertical and horizontal strains of federalism-the states chafing against federally mandated and controlled projects exacerbated by the lack of constitutional guidance for handling conflicts among neighboring states and with Indian nations. Not just bent on spotlighting problems, Thorson also evaluates different approaches for improved river system management and recommends a Missouri River management institution based on environmentally sensitive policies, a strong state role, and full participation by the basin's tribal governments.
Author: Nina Varela
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062823965
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 379
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Book Description
From debut author Nina Varela comes the first book in a richly imagined epic fantasy duology about an impossible love between two girls—one human, one Made—whose romance could be the beginning of a revolution. Perfect for fans of Marie Rutkoski’s The Winner’s Curse as well as Game of Thrones and Westworld. After the War of Kinds ravaged the kingdom of Rabu, the Automae, designed to be the playthings of royals, usurped their owners’ estates and bent the human race to their will. Now Ayla, a human servant rising in the ranks at the House of the Sovereign, dreams of avenging her family’s death…by killing the sovereign’s daughter, Lady Crier. Crier was Made to be beautiful, flawless, and to carry on her father’s legacy. But that was before her betrothal to the enigmatic Scyre Kinok, before she discovered her father isn’t the benevolent king she once admired, and most importantly, before she met Ayla. Now, with growing human unrest across the land, pressures from a foreign queen, and an evil new leader on the rise, Crier and Ayla find there may be only one path to love: war.
