Without the Banya We Would Perish

Without the Banya We Would Perish
Author: Ethan Pollock
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2019
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0195395484

The first history of the banya, this book offers a sweeping cultural history of an institution that is emblematic of Russian identity.

Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars

Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars
Author: Ethan Pollock
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2006
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780691124674

Introduction: Stalin, science, and politics after the Second World War -- "A Marxist should not write like that": the crisis on the "philosophical front" -- "The future belongs to Michurin": the agricultural academy session of 1948 -- "We can always shoot them later": physics, politics, and the atomic bomb -- "Battles of opinions and open criticism": Stalin intervenes in linguistics -- "Attack the detractors with certainty of total success": the Pavlov session of 1950 -- "Everyone is waiting": Stalin and the economic problems of communism -- Conclusion: science and the fate of the Stalinist system.

Russia Without Putin

Russia Without Putin
Author: Tony Wood
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2020-04-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1788731255

How the West’s obsession with Vladimir Putin prevents it from understanding Russia It is impossible to think of Russia today without thinking of Vladimir Putin. More than any other major national leader, he personifies his country in the eyes of the world, and dominates Western media coverage. In Russia itself, he is likewise the centre of attention both for his supporters and his detractors. But, as Tony Wood argues, this focus on Russia’s president gets in the way of any real understanding of the country. The West needs to shake off its obsession with Putin and look beyond the Kremlin walls. In this timely and provocative analysis, Wood explores the profound changes Russia has undergone since 1991. In the process, he challenges several common assumptions made about contemporary Russia. Against the idea that Putin represents a return to Soviet authoritarianism, Wood argues that his rule should be seen as a continuation of Yeltsin’s in the 1990s. The core features of Putinism—a predatory elite presiding over a vastly unequal society—are in fact integral to the system set in place after the fall of Communism. Wood also overturns the standard view of Russia’s foreign policy, identifying the fundamental loss of power and influence that has underpinned recent clashes with the West. Russia without Putin concludes by assessing the current regime’s prospects, and looks ahead to what the future may hold for the country.

Shooting Digital

Shooting Digital
Author: Mikkel Aaland
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2007-02-12
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9780470119730

A unique, full-color guide to the art of taking amazing photos with a digital camera Aimed at photographers of all levels and ranges of interest, this new edition of Aaland's popular guide takes readers beyond the technology of the latest cameras and equipment to teach them the unique aesthetics of the digital image. Helpful examples explain how to take full advantage of RAW file formats, JPEG 2000, panorama automation, and more. Mikkel Aaland (San Francisco, CA) is an award-winning photographer and author whose photography has been published in magazines and exhibited around the world.

Places of Tenderness and Heat

Places of Tenderness and Heat
Author: Olga Petri
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2022-06-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501763784

Places of Tenderness and Heat is a ground-level exploration of queer St. Petersburg at the fin-de-siècle. Olga Petri takes us through busy shopping arcades, bathhouses, and public urinals to show how queer men routinely met and socialized. She reconstructs the milieu that enabled them to navigate a city full of risk and opportunity. Focusing on a non-Western, unexplored, and fragile form of urban modernity, Petri reconstructs a broad picture of queer sociability. In addition to drawing on explicitly recorded incidents that led to prosecution or medical treatment, she investigates the many encounters that escaped bureaucratic surveillance and suppression. Her work reveals how queer men's lives were conditioned by developing urban infrastructure, weather, light and lighting, and the informal constraints on enforcing law and moral order in the city's public spaces. Places of Tenderness and Heat is an ambitious record of the dynamic negotiation of illicit male homosexual sex, friendship, and cruising and uncovers a historically fascinating urban milieu in which efforts to manage the moral landscape often unintentionally facilitated queer encounters.

School of Europeanness

School of Europeanness
Author: Dace Dzenovska
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2018-04-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501716859

In School of Europeanness, Dace Dzenovska argues that Europe’s political landscape is shaped by a fundamental tension between the need to exclude and the requirement to profess and institutionalize the value of inclusion. Nowhere, Dzenovska writes, is this tension more glaring than in the former Soviet Republics. Using Latvia as a representative case, School of Europeanness is a historical ethnography of the tolerance work undertaken in that country as part of postsocialist democratization efforts. Dzenovska contends that the collapse of socialism and the resurgence of Latvian nationalism gave this Europe-wide logic new life, simultaneously reproducing and challenging it. Her work makes explicit what is only implied in the 1977 Kraftwerk song, "Europe Endless": hierarchies prevail in European public and political life even as tolerance is touted by politicians and pundits as one of Europe’s chief virtues. School of Europeanness shows how post–Cold War liberalization projects in Latvia contributed to the current crisis of political liberalism in Europe, providing deep ethnographic analysis of the power relations in Latvia and the rest of Europe, and identifying the tension between exclusive polities and inclusive values as foundational of Europe’s political landscape.

Shadow and Bone

Shadow and Bone
Author: Leigh Bardugo
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2013-05-07
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1250027438

The Grishaverse will be coming to Netflix soon with Shadow and Bone, an original series Enter the Grishaverse with Book One of the Shadow and Bone Trilogy by the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom. Soldier. Summoner. Saint. Orphaned and expendable, Alina Starkov is a soldier who knows she may not survive her first trek across the Shadow Fold--a swath of unnatural darkness crawling with monsters. But when her regiment is attacked, Alina unleashes dormant magic not even she knew she possessed. Now Alina will enter a lavish world of royalty and intrigue as she trains with the Grisha, her country's magical military elite--and falls under the spell of their notorious leader, the Darkling. He believes Alina can summon a force capable of destroying the Shadow Fold and reuniting their war-ravaged country, but only if she can master her untamed gift. As the threat to the kingdom mounts and Alina unlocks the secrets of her past, she will make a dangerous discovery that could threaten all she loves and the very future of a nation. Welcome to Ravka . . . a world of science and superstition where nothing is what it seems. A New York Times Bestseller A Los Angeles Times Bestseller An Indie Next List Book This title has Common Core connections. Praise for the Grishaverse "A master of fantasy." --The Huffington Post "Utterly, extremely bewitching." --The Guardian "The best magic universe since Harry Potter." --Bustle "This is what fantasy is for." --The New York Times Book Review " A] world that feels real enough to have its own passport stamp." --NPR "The darker it gets for the good guys, the better." --Entertainment Weekly "Sultry, sweeping and picturesque. . . . Impossible to put down." --USA Today "There's a level of emotional and historical sophistication within Bardugo's original epic fantasy that sets it apart." --Vanity Fair "Unlike anything I've ever read." --Veronica Roth, bestselling author of Divergent "Bardugo crafts a first-rate adventure, a poignant romance, and an intriguing mystery " --Rick Riordan, bestselling author of the Percy Jackson series "This is a great choice for teenage fans of George R.R. Martin and J.R.R. Tolkien." --RT Book Reviews Read all the books in the Grishaverse The Shadow and Bone Trilogy (previously published as The Grisha Trilogy) Shadow and Bone Siege and Storm Ruin and Rising The Six of Crows Duology Six of Crows Crooked Kingdom King of Scars The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic

Putin's World

Putin's World
Author: Angela Stent
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 495
Release: 2019-02-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1455533017

In this revised version that includes an exclusive new chapter on the Russia-Ukraine war, renowned foreign policy expert Angela Stent examines how Putin created a paranoid and polarized world—and increased Russia's status on the global stage. How did Russia manage to emerge resurgent on the world stage and play a weak hand so effectively? Is it because Putin is a brilliant strategist? Or has Russia stepped into a vacuum created by the West's distraction with its own domestic problems and US ambivalence about whether it still wants to act as a superpower? Putin's World examines the country's turbulent past, how it has influenced Putin, the Russians' understanding of their position on the global stage and their future ambitions—and their conviction that the West has tried to deny them a seat at the table of great powers since the USSR collapsed. This book looks at Russia's key relationships—its downward spiral with the United States, Europe, and NATO; its ties to China, Japan, the Middle East; and with its neighbors, particularly the fraught relationship with Ukraine. Putin's World will help Americans understand how and why the post-Cold War era has given way to a new, more dangerous world, one in which Russia poses a challenge to the United States in every corner of the globe—and one in which Russia has become a toxic and divisive subject in US politics.