A conflict of loyalties between Gene and his fearless friend, Phineas, leads to tragedy.

"Echoes of the past: On his way to finding the secret of the universe, Burke takes us to the Buddhist tea ceremony, ties it to international spies and Lincoln's assassination."--Container. "Photo finish: The Le Mans 24-hour race is the backdrop for linking photography and bullets, relativity and blimps."--Container. "Separate ways: Two trails split over slavery in the 18th century. One leads to the Wild West and Brooklyn Bridge, the other coining...

"Through much of the twentieth century Afghanistan seemed to be a distant concern in the U.S. "Afghanistanism" used to be journalistic shorthand for stories about distant places that editors dismissed as irrelevant. Afghanistan's territory does include some remote, barely accessible regions, but it also includes ancient metropolises such as Balkh, Herat, Kabul, and Kandahar that through much of history were crossroads for commerce and the spread of...

"I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "utopian" artisan, and even the deluded . . . from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through...

"There are issues, and there are issues-love, loss, success, failure, hope, regret, life, death. How can we even begin to think clearly about dilemmas so universally confounding? Phil Stutz has spent his life pondering the big challenges that we all face, and this profound book puts the conclusions he's reached at your fingertips. Stutz has been writing these remarkably insightful short essays since the late 1990s, and they are collected here for...

"'Meticulously researched and beautifully written, the true story of a Japanese American family that found itself on opposite sides during World War II--an epic tale of family, separation, divided loyalties, love, reconciliation, loss, and redemption this is a riveting chronicle of U.S.-Japan relations and the Japanese experience in America. After their father's death, Harry, Frank, and Pierce Fukuhara--all born and raised in the Pacific Northwest--moved...

Winner, best foreign feature, the 2005 Sundance Film Festival The Hero (O Heroi) is the story of Angola, a nation torn apart by forty years of uninterrupted war, and now trying imperfectly but courageously to piece itself back together. It is also the story of a city, Luanda, like so many in the Third World, trying to absorb the millions of people displaced by civil strife and global economic change. After a thirteen year national liberation struggle...

Documentary film follows Mark Johnson and Jonathan Walls from post-apartheid South Africa, through the ancient sites of the Middle East, to the remote beauty of the Himalayas and beyond. They filmed and recorded more than 100 musicians, largely outdoors in parks, plazas and promenades, in doorways, on cobblestone streets and amid hilly pueblos. Each captured performance creates a new mix in which essentially the artists are all performing together,...