Meet Chick Best—a middle-aged self-absorbed, disaffected, California dot.com millionaire. Other than his house and high-priced foreign cars, Chick’s most expensive possession is his trophy wife. Evelyn is good at spending Chick’s money, money that has pretty much run out. Another problem is his drug-addled sixteen-year-old daughter, Melissa.

From inviting afghans and throws to a playful cozy for a French press and a mini sweater for a wine bottle, YarnPlay at Home gives you the perfect knitted accent piece for every room in your home. Dress up your bathroom with a super-soft bathmat or jazz up your dining table by slipping silverware into flirty little napkin skirts.

This book intends to give an introduction to harmonic maps between a surface and a symmetric manifold and constant mean curvature surfaces as completely integrable systems. The presentation is accessible to undergraduate and graduate students in mathematics but will also be useful to researchers. It is among the first textbooks about integrable systems, their interplay with harmonic maps and the use of loop groups, and it presents the theory, for the first time, from the point of view of a differential geometer.

Harmonic maps between Riemannian manifolds are solutions of systems of partial differential equations which appear in different contexts of differential geometry. They include holomorphic maps, minimal surfaces, delta-models in physics. Recently, they have become powerful tools in the study of global properties of Riemannian and Kahlerian manifolds. Standard references for this subject are two reports, published in 1978 and 1988 by James Eells and Luc Lemaire. This book presents these two reports in a single volume with a brief supplement reporting on some recent developments in the theory. It is both an introduction to the subject and a source of reference, providing an organized exposition of results spread throughout more than 800 papers.

This book examines Muslims in Singapore, analysing their habits, practices and dispositions towards everyday life, and also their role within the broader framework of the secularist Singapore state and the cultural dominance of its Chinese elite, who are predominantly Buddhist and Christian. Singapore has a highly unusual approach to issues of religious diversity and multiculturalism, adopting a policy of deliberately ‘managing religions’ - including Islam - in an attempt to achieve orderly and harmonious relations between different racial and religious groups.

When citizens take to the streets or pack assembly halls or share their ideas through the minority press, they often give voice to truths and logic that have otherwise been given little or no airing through the available institutional channels offered bydemocratic states. Such discourses offer new rhetorical strategies for the expression of citizen desires, needs and emotions that otherwise go unrecognized and unaddressed.

Human activities have dramatically changed the composition and organisation of soils. Industrial and urban wastes, agricultural application and also mining activities resulted in an increased concentration of heavy metals in soils. How plants and soil microorganisms cope with this situation and the sophisticated techniques developed for survival in contaminated soils is discussed in this volume.

What is an antonym? You'll find the answer inside this clever book. Author Brian P. Cleary and illustrator Brian Gable creatively clarify (not confuse) the concept of antonyms. Their clever (not foolish) rhymes and comical (not serious) illustrations combine to highlight key words. Each pair or group ofantonyms is printed in color for easy identification.

It is a widely held view that, since the end of the Cold War, attention has focused on Islam as a central force of disruption within a New World Order. Nothing has heightened this more than the assault on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and the reporting of these events. Reporting Islam is a timely contribution to this debate which looks at the ways in which Muslims are represented in the British news media. Elizabeth Poole examines the claim that Muslims are universally demonized in the British press and comes to some illuminating conclusions.Reporting Islam is of great value to students of media, cultural studies, Islamic studies and politics.

There is a growing concern about the social exclusion of a range of minority groups, including people with learning difficulties. Lifelong learning is seen as one of the central means of challenging the exclusion of this group, but also of enhancing their economic status. This book demonstrates that policy based on human capital premises has produced forms of lifelong learning which exacerbate the marginalisation of people with learning difficulties.

In this bold interpretation of U.S. history, Lisa Levenstein reframes highly charged debates over the origins of chronic African American poverty and the social policies and political struggles that led to the postwar urban crisis.

The phenomenon of bankonka – ‘postponement of marriage’ – is increasingly reported in contemporary Japanese media, clearly illustrating the changing patterns of modern lifestyles and attitudes towards marriage, personal obligation and ambition. This is the first book in recent years to explore the contemporary state of marriage in Japanese society. Setting out the different perceptions and expectations of marriage in today’s Japan, the book discusses how economic issues and the family impact on marital behaviour.

"This book came about because of my poor memory: it is amazing how quickly and easily an experienced electron microscopist/mineralogist can identify minerals with an Energy Dispersive Spectrometer (EDS). It is also amazing how long it takes someone who is not good at mineralogy to search through a mineralogy text, trying to match the peaks on their unknown spectrum with the chemical formula of some mineral.

This collection assesses the performance of Brazil’s Lula da Silva, the only working-class president in Latin American history, in his first term. The contributing scholars deal with Lula’s style of governance; the type of economic and social policies he adopted, in both their positive and negative aspects; the impact on regional inequalities; the administration’s treatment of agriculture and the environment; the nature of Lula’s foreign policy; and the Lula government’s place in the country’s long-term development. This volume is composed of renowned economists and regional scientists, as well as political scientists and historians.

Product Description: Drawing upon a wealth of journal writings and personal correspondence, Esther Leslie presents a uniquely intimate portrait of one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin. She sets his life in the context of his middle-class upbringing; explores the social, political, and economic upheaval in Germany during and after World War I; and recounts Benjamin’s eccentric love of toys, trick-books, travel, and ships.