New Releases by Peter Gross

When Constantine teams up with a skeptical policewoman Angela Dodson to solve the mysterious suicide of her twin sister, their investigation takes them through the world of demons and angels that exists just beneath the landscape of contemporary Los Angeles.

Collects issues twenty-nine through thirty-five of "Lucifer" comics in which the retired Lord of Hell, having built a new Creation, populated it, and defended it from those who wished to take it from him, must now answer the challenge of combat with an angel of the Host and repay his debt to the half-angel Belloc.

This thesis concerns itself with pictorial representations of Jewish subjects in the period between the Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition on 1887 and the Twentieth Century Art Exhibition at the Whitechapel in 1914, on the eve of the First World War. It is organised in two parts. Its beginning and end, so the introductory first chapter argues, can be glimpsed in Barraud''s celebratory painting of Lord Lionel Rothschild being sworn into parliament (painted 1872,25 years after the event) and the alienated Jewish subjects of the East End hauntingly captured by Mark Gertler in the years immediately preceding World War I. The first part is devoted to the analysis of what the author identifies as an Anglo-Jewish artistic discourse. Its defining characteristics emerge, so the author argues, in the Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition held in honour of Queen Victoria''s golden jubilee at the Albert Hall in 1887. These characteristics include a deliberate attempt to visualise the Jewish community as a well-integrated part of middle / upper-class English society, sharing with the latter a past, a present and a future. This present and future include also the civilising mission of empire. By contrast, the immigrant East End of London is emphatically not part of this discourse. After a detailed reading of the Exhibition, two case studies are presented in this part of the thesis: the painters Solomon J. Solomon and John Singer Sargent, the former being an observant yet acculturated London Jew and the latter being a non-Jewish American painter then resident in London. Their works discussed here span the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. The chapter on Solomon J. Solomon is presented with a focus on a number of paintings that can be seen to thematise an Anglo-Jewish discourse. Among these are single and group portraits that show Jewish sitters as successful members of English society. Especially noteworthy are "mixed" groups that show Jewish and Gentile sitters together in a semi-neutral space of middle and upperclass sociability and civic ritual. Solomon''s monumentally sized Allegory of the relationship between the Old and the New Testament, while offering an ostensibly harmonising vision, is perhaps Solomon''s more daring and problematic work, since it re-inscribes the supersession of Judaism by Christianity. The chapter on Sargent''s portraits of Jewish sitters revisits the thesis that Sargent''s images encode anti-Semitic stereotypes. The author proposes to read these paintings from the point of view of their contemporary reception. The documents adduced are interpreted to show that while some of Sargent''s paintings did sometimes play to deeply embedded anti-Semitic stereotypes among his critics, they were just as often openly admired as masterpieces of character depiction. Thus emerges a style of heightened characterisation that could stop short of caricature in some cases, but that could also capture qualities that the painter admired in sitters some of whom, such as the Wertheimers, he considered friends. The second part of the thesis is titled An Offer of Integration. In parallel to the first part, it begins with a detailed reading of an exhibition, the Exhibition of Jewish Arts and Antiquities held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1906. The author argues that this show, with its significant location now in the heart of the East End, represented an offer of integration towards the immigrant communities of the East End. At the same time, it could be seen as a response to the Aliens Act of 1905 which brought immigration from Eastern Europe largely to an end. The author argues that the show constituted a part of an active programme of, as the author names it, Anglification: a cultural and educational project aimed at transforming immigrants into Englishmen (and -women). In relation to this programme, the author places three chapters on three modernist painters who painted scenes in the East End in the first and second decades of the 20th century: William Rothenstein, Alfred Wolmark and Mark Gertler. Rothenstein "discovered" the "aliens" of the East End in ca. 1905 and produced several paintings of religious subjects over the next two years, culminating in Carrying the Law. The author posits that Rothenstein, an acculturated Jewish man of German-Jewish background from Bradford, painted scenes of Jewish prayer and study in a broadly Rembrandtesque, late impressionist mode and sought to foreground their spiritual depth and nobility, rejecting the picturesque and anecdotal genre established in more conservative painters such as Pilichowski. Especially in Jews mourning in synagogue, almost all narrative detail (synagogue furniture, scrolls, books) have been eliminated and the painting relies for it''s a/effect entirely on the antique effect of the full-length prayershawls (typical of Eastern European Jews - Anglo-Jews preferred the scarf shaped small prayershawls) on the interiority of the praying men. The emphasis on interiority and spirituality, and the exploitation of the archaic black-and white aesthetic of the full-length prayershawl, was to set a precedent for a number of modernist painters engaging with Jewish subjects, such as Jacob Kramer. By contrast with Rothenstein, so the author argues, Alfred Wolmark took a different position towards his "Jewish paintings". Again, this represents a relatively short phase in his oeuvre, preceding his colourist phase. In The Last Days of Rabbi Ben Ezra (1903), Wolm?rk undertook to translate Robert Browning''s well-known poem into the artistic idiom of a Rembrandtesque Eastern European Jewry. As a conclusion, the epilogue revisits the 1956 Tercentenary Exhibition to trace how enduring the Anglo-Jewish discourse was.

Lucifer Morningstar continues work on his magnum opus a new universe outside of the strictures of our own.

The revolutions of 1989 swept away Eastern Europe''s communist governments and created expectations on the part of many observers that post-communist media would lead the liberated societies in establishing and embracing democratic political cultures. Peter Gross finds that it was utopian to hold such expectations of the media in societies in transition. On the one hand, those countries'' media professionals had all learned their jobs under the communist regimes and could not instantly transform themselves into guides for a politically enabled populace, Gross argues. On the other hand, newcomers to the media world, even those who were notable literary figures, viewed themselves as social and political leaders rather than mere informers and facilitators of the resocialization required to form new democracies. The news media have remained highly politicized and partisan. So how are the media, civil society, and political culture related in societies in transition? And can changes in these relationships be anticipated? To address these questions, Entangled Evolutions examines media in post-1989 Eastern Europe. It studies the effects of privatization of the media, journalists'' relations to political figures, institutional structures such as media laws, professional journalistic culture, and the media''s relation to their market. Sources include interviews with journalists and politicians, sociological and political data from national surveys, and media audience studies.

Lucifer''s quest takes him to the Japanese afterworld of Izanami, and to the terrible House of Windowless Rooms, in search of his lost wings. Leaving his immortality and power at the door, he walks into a labyrinth of traps and treachery where the only thing more dangerous than failure is success.

Tim Hunter''s voyage of discovery across America''s mystical landscape and beyond continues, with a way-out trip to the wild, Wild West, and a pioneering leap into the unknown.

The saga of Timothy Hunter, master Mage-in training, continues in this sixth collection of the popular series. Originally created by Neil Gaiman and John Bolton, the Eisner-award nominated The Books of Magic continue to unlock new, previously unexplored, realms of fantasy and mysticism.

Examines the nature and influence of the news media in Romania before, during, and after the December 1989 revolution, concentrating on print and broadcast news media and their struggle to remake themselves and remake society. Covers the precommunist legacy, foreign mass media as a spark for the revolution, media laws in the noncommunist era, neutrality and objectivity in journalism, and news media in the presidential and parliamentary elections of the 1990s. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR