New Releases by David Gordon

For generations, Hollywood has attracted all sorts of dreamers—and then has slowly crushed their aspirations. Elliott Gross is one such case; fresh out of college, he moved west from New York with hopes of writing for the silver screen and living a life of fame and fortune. A couple of years later, he's writing for an adult magazine and living in a garage. The year is 1994 and, with the rise of the internet, the era of print pornography is in its twilight, but Raunchy's owner has enough "catch-and-kill" secrets in the vault to ensure that his power will persist as long as his silence remains valuable. When Gross is sent to write a profile on the company's newest starlet, he discovers that she has vanished seemingly without a trace. To find her, he embarks on a twisted journey through a business both seedy and carnivalesque. Rumors of a sensitive VHS tape held in the vault, which may hold the secret to Crystal's whereabouts, stir around Elliott and he stumbles into a corpse. Before his search can be concluded, a shadow of suspicion falls on Gross and his position is terminated. Then he washes up at a celebrity-anchored New Age wellness brand and discovers a world far darker and more cruel than the porn industry. Combining David Gordon's trademark humor with a stylish, unflinching, and unpredictable plot, Behind Sunset is a comic and noir-tinged tour through Tinseltown that uncovers darkness and lightness, in equal measure, from the most unexpected of sources.

Joe the Bouncer seeks the killer of NYC’s most desirable call girls in the newest caper in “a unique and worthwhile series” (CrimeReads) Expulsed Harvard student and ex-Special Forces operative suffering post-traumatic stress syndrome so severe that it turned him to drug and alcohol abuse, Joe Brody is getting his life back together, living with his grandmother in Queens and taking what should be a simple job as a bouncer at a strip club where he can spend most of his night reading the classics. The only catch is that his childhood friend Gio Caprisi, now head of New York’s Italian Mafia, relies on Joe’s extra-legal expertise when things get particularly nasty on the streets — where, in an agreement between Gio and the rest of the city’s biggest crime syndicates, it’s understood that Joe is the sheriff for an industry that doesn’t call the cops. Most recently, New York’s criminal underworld has been shaken by the disappearance of its most successful and desirable call girls, vanishing one by one from the brothels where they’re employed. As a pattern emerges, what might otherwise appear to be a choice to pursue a new life comes to resemble something more troublesome — the work of a serial kidnapper — and when a woman turns up dead, the hunt for the predator behind it all becomes even more urgent. To find the killer, Joe will have to plunge into the seediest fringes of Manhattan and its surrounding boroughs, populated with memorable characters that add humor and heart to this fast-paced caper. There is still sleaze behind the pristine veneer of 21st century New York, and Gordon, whose writing is often compared to Donald E. Westlake and Elmore Leonard, knows all the best places to find it.

This book offers an alternative to perspectives of distributive justice which fail to resolve economic inequality and exacerbate social problems by ignoring the real causes of inequality. The main impact of the book is to highlight the importance of self-ownership and private property, showing how market participation advances liberty and prosperity. The idea that we should pay reparations to disadvantaged racial groups as compensation for historical injustice is deeply contested. The debates often focus on the practical implications of paying reparations, but overlook more fundamental questions about the meaning of justice. What is justice? What are the implications of wealth redistribution for individual liberty and the rule of law? This book answers these questions through an analysis of classical liberal perspectives in law, philosophy and economics. The book questions whether economic inequality stems from historical injustice, and explores the wider implications of attempting to create equal outcomes through legislative mandates. The book argues that free markets, resting on libertarian rights, are the best way to help disadvantaged members of society and to create the conditions more likely to advance economic equality. The book will be of interest to researchers and students of economics, law, politics and philosophy.

Joe the Bouncer seeks the killer of NYC’s most desirable call girls in the newest caper in “a unique and worthwhile series” (CrimeReads) Expulsed Harvard student and ex-Special Forces operative suffering post-traumatic stress syndrome so severe that it turned him to drug and alcohol abuse, Joe Brody is getting his life back together, living with his grandmother in Queens and taking what should be a simple job as a bouncer at a strip club where he can spend most of his night reading the classics. The only catch is that his childhood friend Gio Caprisi, now head of New York’s Italian Mafia, relies on Joe’s extra-legal expertise when things get particularly nasty on the streets — where, in an agreement between Gio and the rest of the city’s biggest crime syndicates, it’s understood that Joe is the sheriff for an industry that doesn’t call the cops. Most recently, New York’s criminal underworld has been shaken by the disappearance of its most successful and desirable call girls, vanishing one by one from the brothels where they’re employed. As a pattern emerges, what might otherwise appear to be a choice to pursue a new life comes to resemble something more troublesome — the work of a serial kidnapper — and when a woman turns up dead, the hunt for the predator behind it all becomes even more urgent. To find the killer, Joe will have to plunge into the seediest fringes of Manhattan and its surrounding boroughs, populated with memorable characters that add humor and heart to this fast-paced caper. There is still sleaze behind the pristine veneer of 21st century New York, and Gordon, whose writing is often compared to Donald E. Westlake and Elmore Leonard, knows all the best places to find it.

As Americans and citizens of other industrializing countries began to enjoy lives of increasing affluence and ease during the first half of the 20th century, a rising tide of heart attacks and strokes displaced infectious diseases as the leading cause of death, killing millions in the United States and throughout the world. Although cardiovascular disease remains serious and widespread, the significant decline of per capita deaths is one of the greatest accomplishments of modern public health and medicine. Death rates from heart attack and stroke have fallen dramatically by 80% in the past 50 years -- the progress has been hard won by a combination of basic and applied laboratory research, broad and far-reaching epidemiological studies by physicians, scientists, and public health experts. Cardiovascular disease is no longer viewed as an as an inevitable feature of the natural course of aging, and complacency has given way to hope. This book focuses on developments that influenced the rise and decline of cardiovascular mortality since 1900, but also includes insider insights from the author, a 42-year NIH employee.

White retraces the strange and circuitous journey of Patanjali's Yoga Sutra from its ancient origins to today, bringing to life the improbable cast of characters whose interpretations and misappropriations led to its revered place in contemporary popular culture.

Introducing Joe the Bouncer in "a tour-de-force, ranging from underworld crime to a unique caper and a terrorist plot . . . an outstanding new voice" (Robert Crais, #1 New York Times bestselling author). In David Gordon's diabolically imaginative thriller, The Bouncer, nothing and no one is as expected—from a vial of yellow fragrance to a gangster who moonlights in women's clothes. Joe Brody is just your average Dostoevsky-reading, Harvard-expelled strip club bouncer who has a highly classified military history and whose best friend from Catholic school happens to be head mafioso Gio Caprisi. FBI agent Donna Zamora, the best shot in her class at Quantico, is a single mother stuck at a desk manning the hotline. Their storylines intersect over a tip from a cokehead that leads to a crackdown on Gio's strip joint in Queens and Joe's arrest—just one piece of a city-wide sweep aimed at flushing out anyone who might have a lead on the various terrorists whose photos are hanging on the wall under Most Wanted. Outside the jailhouse, the Fed and the bouncer lock eyes, as Gordon launches them both headlong into a nonstop plot that goes from back-road gun show intervention to high-stakes perfume heist and manages to touch everyone from the CIA to the Flushing Triads. Beneath it all lurks a sinister criminal mastermind whose manipulations could cause chaos on a massively violent scale. "A brilliantly goofy caper novel in the grand tradition of Donald E. Westlake."— The New York Times Book Review "[An] impressive crime novel . . . Gordon's sharply drawn supporting cast adds a nice balance to all the action."— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Despoilers of the Golden Empire is a science fiction novelette by Randall Garrett, originally published in Astounding Science Fiction in March 1959 under the pseudonym David Gordon.The story appears to be about an expedition through space to a planet inhabited by a civilized but technologically backward people, whom the expedition conquer. However, in the last line it is revealed to be anything but that.

The last two decades have seen Marxism's academic renascence. In fields as diverse as law, literary criticism, history, and philosophy, Marxism once again captivates no small number of scholars. In part, this reassessment is driven by the efforts of a group of philosophers and economists to reconstruct Marx from the ground up on a more rigorous basis. The work of these "Analytical Marxists" — who include G.A. Cohen, Jon Elster, and John Roemer — is given a sustained examination and critique in David Gordon's Resurrecting Marx. The charge of the Analytical Marxists that capitalism is inherently exploitative and unjust is the primary subject of Gordon's book. Gordon takes issue with that contention; he argues that the Analytical Marxists' withering criticism of classical Marxism is essentially correct, but that they fail to replace it with a superior theoretical edifice. Gordon also analyzes the Analytical Marxists' reformulation of the Marxian notion of exploitation, the implications of their rejection of the labor theory of value, their differences over what rights people have, and their arguments for the compatibility of markets with socialism.

There is music in metaphors, in the chords of individual perception played upon the patterns of human experience."Therapeutic metaphors" (stories intended to address a specific personal need) provide a depth of association and potential for insight that is often not available through more direct approaches. Metaphors do this by creating a shared language between therapist and client (or between co-workers, or between friends), a shared world within which communication about a problem and how to resolve it becomes easier and more impactful. Furthermore, once created, that metaphorical world can become one in which the person discovers his or her own resolution to the problem. Like other expressions of art, a metaphor derives its ability to affect and influence us because of its underlying structure. The masterful storyteller thinks in ways that naturally create the parallels, connections, and discoveries that become utterly compelling to the listener. "Therapeutic Metaphors: Helping Others Through the Looking Glass" provides you with that structure, an explicit and practical format for creating impactful stories for change.

The second edition of a comprehensive textbook that introduces turbomachinery and gas turbines through design methods and examples. This comprehensive textbook is unique in its design-focused approach to turbomachinery and gas turbines. It offers students and practicing engineers methods for configuring these machines to perform with the highest possible efficiency. Examples and problems are based on the actual design of turbomachinery and turbines. After an introductory chapter that outlines the goals of the book and provides definitions of terms and parts, the book offers a brief review of the basic principles of thermodynamics and efficiency definitions. The rest of the book is devoted to the analysis and design of real turbomachinery configurations and gas turbines, based on a consistent application of thermodynamic theory and a more empirical treatment of fluid dynamics that relies on the extensive use of design charts. Topics include turbine power cycles, diffusion and diffusers, the analysis and design of three-dimensional free-stream flow, and combustion systems and combustion calculations. The second edition updates every chapter, adding material on subjects that include flow correlations, energy transfer in turbomachines, and three-dimensional design. A solutions manual is available for instructors. This new MIT Press edition makes a popular text available again, with corrections and some updates, to a wide audience of students, professors, and professionals.

Life. It wears many different faces throughout time. Sometimes the faces are happy, sometimes sad, sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes indifferent. The faces change constantly. The faces are very important. Sometimes they show up to help us grow. Sometimes they are there to teach us a lesson. Sometimes they are there to encourage us. Sometimes they punish us for bad deeds we do and reward us for the good we do. Sometimes, the faces are gorgeous, sometimes, not so much.. The faces make life what it is. Love comes in many forms. It can be a newborn baby, a fresh springtime rain, a cute little puppy dog, or many different forms. It could be the birds chirping at a park or a raging waterfall. There are many different variations of love as well, for example you could say "I love my jeans and I love my wife. Love is constant. It is everywhere. It is all around you, you just may not recognize what it is. When life and love come together, you get faces of the waterfall. Then theres the Light. The omnipotent, all-seeing, all-knowing Light. The Light holds everything together and brings order to a somewhat chaotic world. Some call it a "higher power, some call it The man upstairs, while others, like myself, simply call it God. When life and love get out of whack, the Light brings them together so everything can go on. The Light brightens an otherwise dark world. The poems contained in this book will show the many different faces of life. The lighter side of life and the dark. They will show different forms of love as it comes in many different shapes and sizes. And they will introduce you to the Light of the World as He weaves the threads and brings it all together. I hope you enjoy each and every poem in the book. Thanks for your support.

In the 1990s, Anne Meyer, David Rose, and their colleagues at CAST introduced universal design for learning (UDL), a framework to improve teaching and learning. Based on new insights from the learning sciences and creative uses of digital technologies. UDL can help educators improve and optimize learning experiences for all individuals. In this book, Meyer and Rose, along with David Gordon, provide the first comprehensive presentations of UDL principles and practices since 2002. This new look at UDL includes contributions from CAST's research and implementation teams, as well as their collaborators in schools, universities, and research settings. Universal Design for Learning: Theory & Practice includes: * New insights from research on learner differences and how human variability plays out in learning environments * Research-based discussions of what it means to become expert at learning * First-hand accounts and exemplars of how to implement UDL at all levels and across subjects using the UDL Guidelines * "Dig Deeper" segments that enrich the main content * Dozens of original illustrations and access to videos and other online features at http://udltheorypractice.cast.org * Opportunities to participate in a UDL community

Noveller. A collection of thirteen short stories which explores themes of art, the supernatural, madness, and the extremes of sexuality

American Despots

Amazing low sale price in defense of authentic freedom as versus the presidency that betrayed it!

Everyone seems to agree that brutal dictators and despotic rulers deserve scorn and worse. But why have historians been so willing to overlook the despotic actions of the United States' own presidents? You can scour libraries from one end to the other and encounter precious few criticisms of America's worst despots.

The founders imagined that the president would be a collegial leader with precious little power who constantly faced the threat of impeachment. Today, however, the president orders thousands of young men and women to danger and death in foreign lands, rubber stamps regulations that throw enterprises into upheaval, controls the composition of the powerful Federal Reserve, and manages the priorities millions of swarms of bureaucrats that vex the citizenry in every way.

It is not too much of a stretch to say that the president embodies the Leviathan state as we know it. Or, more precisely, it is not an individual president so much as the very institution of the presidency that has been the major impediment of liberty. The presidency as the founders imagined it has been displaced by democratically ratified serial despotism. And, for that reason, it must be stopped.

Every American president seems to strive to make the historians' A-list by doing big and dramatic things—wars, occupations, massive programs, tyrannies large and small—in hopes of being considered among the "greats" such as Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR. They always imagine themselves as honored by future generations: the worse their crimes, the more the accolades.

Well, the free ride ends with Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom, edited by John Denson.

This remarkable volume (825 pages including index and bibliography) is the first full-scale revision of the official history of the U.S. executive state. It traces the progression of power exercised by American presidents from the early American Republic up to the eventual reality of the power-hungry Caesars which later appear as president in American history. Contributors examine the usual judgments of the historical profession to show the ugly side of supposed presidential greatness.

The mission inherent in this undertaking is to determine how the presidency degenerated into the office of American Caesar. Did the character of the man who held the office corrupt it, or did the power of the office, as it evolved, corrupt the man? Or was it a combination of the two? Was there too much latent power in the original creation of the office as the Anti-Federalists claimed? Or was the power externally created and added to the position by corrupt or misguided men?

There's never been a better guide to everything awful about American presidents. No, you won't get the civics text approach of see no evil. Essay after essay details depredations that will shock you, and wonder how American liberty could have ever survived in light of the rule of these people.

Contributors include George Bittlingmayer, John V. Denson, Marshall L. DeRosa, Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Lowell Gallaway, Richard M. Gamble, David Gordon, Paul Gottfried, Randall G. Holcombe, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Michael Levin, Yuri N. Maltsev, William Marina, Ralph Raico, Joseph Salerno, Barry Simpson, Joseph Stromberg, H. Arthur Scott Trask, Richard Vedder, and Clyde Wilson.

An analysis of the Anglo-American Spiritualist movement which provides a new definition of shamanism based on a pattern of apprenticeship unique to traditional shamanisms.

Since the 1960s, yoga has become a billion-dollar industry in the West, attracting housewives and hipsters, New Agers and the old-aged. But our modern conception of yoga derives much from nineteenth-century European spirituality, and the true story of yoga’s origins in South Asia is far richer, stranger, and more entertaining than most of us realize. To uncover this history, David Gordon White focuses on yoga’s practitioners. Combing through millennia of South Asia’s vast and diverse literature, he discovers that yogis are usually portrayed as wonder-workers or sorcerers who use their dangerous supernatural abilities—which can include raising the dead, possession, and levitation—to acquire power, wealth, and sexual gratification. As White shows, even those yogis who aren’t downright villainous bear little resemblance to Western assumptions about them. At turns rollicking and sophisticated, Sinister Yogis tears down the image of yogis as detached, contemplative teachers, finally placing them in their proper context.

A DARK AND STYLISH PAGE-TURNER FROM A BOLD NEW VOICE IN FICTION Harry Bloch is a struggling writer who pumps out pulpy serial novels—from vampire books to detective stories—under various pseudonyms. But his life begins to imitate his fiction when he agrees to ghostwrite the memoir of Darian Clay, New York City’s infamous Photo Killer. Soon, three young women turn up dead, each one murdered in the Photo Killer’s gruesome signature style, and Harry must play detective in a real-life murder plot as he struggles to avoid becoming the killer’s next victim. Witty, irreverent, and original, The Serialist is a love letter to books—from poetry to pornography—and proof that truth really can be stranger than fiction.

Offers information on reproductive medicine. This handbook includes tables, figures and flowcharts.

This book paints a broad picture of musical life in Britain over the last three centuries, charting the rise of the celebrity composer, the opening of public halls and growth of music festivals, the rapid influx of composers, and new musical forms.

David Gordon White excavates and seeks to centre within its broader Indian context the lost tradition of the medieval Siddhas. This comprehensive study draws upon the ancient Sanskrit and medieval Hindu materials and asserts medieval traditions of Hindu alchemy and hatha yoga were practiced by one and the same people, and that they can only be understood when viewed together.

As David White explains in the Introduction to Tantra in Practice, Tantra is an Asian body of beliefs and practices that seeks to channel the divine energy that grounds the universe, in creative and liberating ways. The subsequent chapters reflect the wide geographical and temporal scope of Tantra by examining thirty-six texts from China, India, Japan, Nepal, and Tibet, ranging from the seventh century to the present day, and representing the full range of Tantric experience--Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, and even Islamic. Each text has been chosen and translated, often for the first time, by an international expert in the field who also provides detailed background material. Students of Asian religions and general readers alike will find the book rich and informative. The book includes plays, transcribed interviews, poetry, parodies, inscriptions, instructional texts, scriptures, philosophical conjectures, dreams, and astronomical speculations, each text illustrating one of the diverse traditions and practices of Tantra. Thus, the nineteenth-century Indian Buddhist Garland of Gems, a series of songs, warns against the illusion of appearance by referring to bees, yogurt, and the fire of Malaya Mountain; while fourteenth-century Chinese Buddhist manuscripts detail how to prosper through the Seven Stars of the Northern Dipper by burning incense, making offerings to scriptures, and chanting incantations. In a transcribed conversation, a modern Hindu priest in Bengal candidly explains how he serves the black Goddess Kali and feeds temple skulls lentils, wine, or rice; a seventeenth-century Nepalese Hindu praise-poem hammered into the golden doors to the temple of the Goddess Taleju lists a king's faults and begs her forgiveness and grace. An introduction accompanies each text, identifying its period and genre, discussing the history and influence of the work, and identifying points of particular interest or difficulty. The first book to bring together texts from the entire range of Tantric phenomena, Tantra in Practice continues the Princeton Readings in Religions series. The breadth of work included, geographic areas spanned, and expert scholarship highlighting each piece serve to expand our understanding of what it means to practice Tantra.

This book examines the heroic spirit of French industrial capitalism prior to World War I, and the role certain industrialists played in ensuring the success and stability of the country's economic and political order. It focuses in particular on the success of innovative manufacturers in France's chief industrial centers, the Nord, Loire, and Lorraine, where failing industrialists were saved through the introduction of new manufacturing techniques. It was only when Socialists abandoned revolutionary aims that they were able to successfully compete against their ^Iprogressiste^R rivals. Democratic politics forced the evolution of political life away from confrontation between capitalist and anti-capitalist parties.

Beginning in the fifth century A.D., various Indian mystics began to innovate a body of techniques with which to render themselves immortal. These people called themselves Siddhas, a term formerly reserved for a class of demigods, revered by Hindus and Buddhists alike, who were known to inhabit mountaintops or the atmospheric regions. Over the following five to eight hundred years, three types of Hindu Siddha orders emerged, each with its own specialized body of practice. These were the Siddha Kaula, whose adherents sought bodily immortality through erotico-mystical practices; the Rasa Siddhas, medieval India's alchemists, who sought to transmute their flesh-and-blood bodies into immortal bodies through the ingestion of the mineral equivalents of the sexual fluids of the god Siva and his consort, the Goddess; and the Nath Siddhas, whose practice of hatha yoga projected the sexual and laboratory practices of the Siddha Kaula and Rasa Siddhas upon the internal grid of the subtle body. For India's medieval Siddhas, these three conjoined types of practice led directly to bodily immortality, supernatural powers, and self-divinization; in a word, to the exalted status of the semidivine Siddhas of the older popular cults. In The Alchemical Body, David Gordon White excavates and centers within its broader Indian context this lost tradition of the medieval Siddhas. Working from a body of previously unexplored alchemical sources, he demonstrates for the first time that the medieval disciplines of Hindu alchemy and hatha yoga were practiced by one and the same people, and that they can only be understood when viewed together. Human sexual fluids and the structures of the subtle body aremicrocosmic equivalents of the substances and apparatus manipulated by the alchemist in his laboratory. With these insights, White opens the way to a new and more comprehensive understanding of the entire sweep of medieval Indian mysticism, within the broader context of south Asian Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Islam. This book is an essential reference for anyone interested in Indian yoga, alchemy, and the medieval beginnings of science.

The bicycle is almost unique among human-powered machines in that it uses human muscles in a near-optimum way. This new edition of the bible of bicycle builders and bicyclists provides just about everything you could want to know about the history of bicycles, how human beings propel them, what makes them go faster, and what keeps them from going even faster. The scientific and engineering information is of interest not only to designers and builders of bicycles and other human-powered vehicles but also to competitive cyclists, bicycle commuters, and recreational cyclists. The third edition begins with a brief history of bicycles and bicycling that demolishes many widespread myths. This edition includes information on recent experiments and achievements in human-powered transportation, including the "ultimate human- powered vehicle," in which a supine rider in a streamlined enclosure steers by looking at a television screen connected to a small camera in the nose, reaching speeds of around 80 miles per hour. It contains completely new chapters on aerodynamics, unusual human-powered machines for use on land and in water and air, human physiology, and the future of bicycling. This edition also provides updated information on rolling drag, transmission of power from rider to wheels, braking, heat management, steering and stability, power and speed, and materials. It contains many new illustrations.