Alison Acer's third birthday was filled with love and laughter, but the night brings a darkness that changes everything. Now as a newly single-mother, Ms. Laken must face the reality of her ex-husband's mental illness and how his illness is impacting their young daughter. Paul Acer's illness becomes so dangerous that she must take legal action against him, and while she is a lawyer, she has zero power in what happens to her child. Over the course of three years, this mother will face suicide attempts, domestic violence, and kidnappings.
The most captivating and intriguing 19th-century murders from around the world are re-examined in this disquieting volume, which takes readers on a perilous journey around the worlds most benighted regions. In each area, murders are charted with increasing specificity: beginning with city- or region-wide overviews, drilling down to street-level diagrams and zooming-in to detailed floor plans. All the elements of each crime are meticulously replotted on archival maps, from the prior movements of both killer and victim to the eventual location of the body. <br/> <br/> The murders revisited range from the French Ripper Joseph Vacher, who roamed the French countryside brutally murdering and mutilating over twenty shepherds and shepherdesses, to H.H. Holmes, who built a hotel in Chicago to entrap, murder and dispose of its many guests. Crime expert Dr Drew Gray illuminates the details of each case, recounting both the horrifying particulars of the crimes themselves and the ingenious detective work that led to the eventual capture of the murderers. He highlights the development of police methods and technology: from the introduction of the police whistle to the standardization of the mugshot and from the invention of fingerprinting to the use of radio telegraphy to capture criminals. Disturbing crime-scene photographs by pioneers of policework, such as Alphonse Bertillon, and contemporary illustrations from the sensationalist magazines of the day, including the Illustrated Police News and the Petit Journal, complete the macabre picture.
This book employs Heidegger’s work of the 1920s and early 1930s to develop distinctively Heideggerian accounts of agency, freedom, and responsibility, making the case that Heidegger’s thought provides a compelling alternative to the mainstream philosophical accounts of these concepts. Hans Pedersen demonstrates that Heidegger’s thought can be fruitfully used to develop a plausible alternative understanding of agency that avoids the metaphysical commitments that give rise to the standard free-will debate. The first several chapters are devoted to working out an account of the ontological structure of human agency, specifically focusing on the Heideggerian understanding of the role of mental states, causal explanations, and deliberation in human agency, arguing that action need not be understood in terms of the causal efficacy of mental states. In the following chapters, building on the prior account of agency, Pedersen develops Heideggerian accounts of freedom and responsibility. Having shown that action need not be understood causally, the Heideggerian view thereby avoids the conflict between free will and determinism that gives rise to the problem of free will and the correlative problem of responsibility.
Why do we watch movies? If we read in search of more life, as Harold Bloom is fond of saying, then we watch movies, this book proposes, in search of wonder. We watch movies in search of awe-inspiring visions, transformative experiences, and moments of emotional transcendence and spiritual sublimity. We watch movies for many of the same reasons that we engage in religion: to fill our ordinary evenings and weekends with something of the extraordinary; to connect our isolated, individual selves to something that is greater than ourselves; and because we yearn for something that is ineffable but absolutely indispensable. This book, through an exploration of some of the most intriguing films of the past two decades, illustrates how movies are partners with religion in inspiring, conveying, and helping us experience what Abraham Joshua Heschel refers to as "radical amazement": the sense that our material universe and our ordinary lives are filled with more wonders than we can ever imagine, and that it takes spiritually—as well as cinematically—trained eyes to uncover these ever-present ocular gems. In addition to illustrating how films utilize religious themes and theological motifs to convey a sense of wonder, this book offers new interpretations of key films from canonical American directors such as Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, Richard Linklater, Wes Anderson, and the Coen brothers.
Contemporary citizenship is haunted by the ghost of imperialism. Yet conceptions of European citizenship fail to explain issues that are inclusive of the impact of empire today, and are integral to the reality of citizenship; from the notion of ‘minorities’ to the assertion of citizenship rights by migrants and the withdrawal of fundamental rights from particular groups. The Uses of Imperial Citizenship examines the ways in which ideas of citizenship and subjecthood were applied in societies under imperial rule in order to expand our understanding of these concepts. Taking examples from the experience of the British and French empires, the book examines the ways in which claims to the rights and obligations of imperial subjects by otherwise marginalised people – from women activists to ‘native’ newspaper editors – shaped the history of British and French concepts of citizenship. Through extensive analysis of colonial and diplomatic archives, parliamentary debates and commissions, journalism and contemporary works on colonial administration, the book explores how governments and people in colonial societies saw themselves within, on the frontiers of, and outside of imperial notions of citizenship and subjecthood.