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Set in 1968 Leipzig, Christoph Hein's novel is the story of Dallow, an apolitical academic who has just returned to civilian life after serving twenty-one months in prison. His crime: he was the substitute piano player in a student cabaret in which seditious verses were sung. Dallow returns to a life in of loveless sex, police harassment, and brutality, revealing how a corrupt system perverts all human interaction, and how lives are ruined by malicious caprice.

Set in Salt Lake City at the height of the Great Depression, Linda Sillitoe’s last novel opens with three little girls, eleven-year-old triplets, skipping in front of their house at 1300 South, across from Liberty Park. They giggle lightly as they chant: 

Prin-cess Al-ice in Liberty Park
Munch-es ba-nan-as ’til way after dark.

Princess Alice is an elephant the children of Utah purchased by donating nickels and dimes to a circus. The girls don’t know this, but her handler takes the mammoth princess out on late-night strolls around the park when the moon is out. What they do know is that the elephant sometimes escapes and goes on a rampage, crashing through front-yard fences and collecting collars of clothesline laundry around her neck, a persistent train of barking dogs following behind. The girls’ father is a police officer who is investigating a boy’s disappearance. As the case unfolds, the perception of the park, with its eighty acres of trees and grass, will change from the epitome of freedom to a place to be avoided, even as Princess Alice moves to a secure confinement at a new zoo at the mouth of Emigration Canyon. The story is loosely based on the exploits of a real live elephant that lived in Liberty Park a decade before Sillitoe’s childhood in the neighborhood.  

In this book, renowned anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff make a startling but absolutely convincing claim about our modern era: it is not by our arts, our politics, or our science that we understand ourselves—it is by our crimes. Surveying an astonishing range of forms of crime and policing—from petty thefts to the multibillion-dollar scams of too-big-to-fail financial institutions to the collateral damage of war—they take readers into the disorder of the late modern world. Looking at recent transformations in the triangulation of capital, the state, and governance that have led to an era where crime and policing are ever more complicit, they offer a powerful meditation on the new forms of sovereignty, citizenship, class, race, law, and political economy of representation that have arisen.
           
To do so, the Comaroffs draw on their vast knowledge of South Africa, especially, and its struggle to build a democracy founded on the rule of law out of the wreckage of long years of violence and oppression. There they explore everything from the fascination with the supernatural in policing to the extreme measures people take to prevent home invasion, drawing illuminating comparisons to the United States and United Kingdom. Going beyond South Africa, they offer a global criminal anthropology that attests to criminality as the constitutive fact of contemporary life, the vernacular by which politics are conducted, moral panics voiced, and populations ruled.  
           
The result is a disturbing but necessary portrait of the modern era, one that asks critical new questions about how we see ourselves, how we think about morality, and how we are going to proceed as a global society.

An exceptionally clever, cozy mystery that will thrill all fans of Judge Dee, whom the Los Angeles Times ranked with Sherlock Holmes 

Judge Dee has been appointed emergency governor of the plague- and drought-ridden Imperial City. As his guards help the city fend off a popular uprising, an aristocrat from one of the oldest families in China suffers an "accident" in a deserted mansion.

In The Willow Pattern, the illustrious judge uses his trademark expertise to unravel the mysteries of the nobleman, a shattered vase, and a dead bondmaid. Along the way he encounters a woman who fights with loaded sleeves, a nearly drowned courtesan, and an elaborate trap set for a murderer. Packed with suspense, violence, and romance, The Willow Pattern won’t disappoint Judge Dee’s legions of loyal fans.

Alaska’s perch at the geographic corner of civilization isn’t all wilderness and reality TV. There’s a darker side too. Above the 49th parallel some of the nation’s highest rates of alcoholism, suicide, and violent crime can be found. While it can easy to write off or even romanticize these statistics as the product of a lingering Wild West culture, talking with real Alaskans reveals a different story.

Journalist Mary Kudenov set out to find the true stories behind this “end-of-the-road” culture. Through her essays, we meet Alaskans who live outside the common adventurer narrative: a recent graduate of a court-sponsored sobriety program, a long-timer in the Hiland Mountain Correctional Center for women, a slum-landlord’s emancipated teenage daughter, and even a post-rampage spree killer. Her subjects struggle with poverty and middle-class aspirations, education and minimum wage work, God and psychology. The result is a raw and startling collection of direct, ground-level reporting that will leave you deeply moved.

Crime is one of the major challenges to any new democracy. Violence often increases after the lifting of authoritarian control, or in the aftermath of regime change. But how can a fledgling democracy fight crime without violating the fragile rights of its citizens? In Transformation and Trouble, accomplished theorist and criminal justice scholar Diana Gordon critically examines South Africa's efforts to strike the perilous balance between democratic participation and social control.
South Africa has made great progress in pursuing the Western ideals of participatory justice and due process. Yet Gordon finds that popular concerns about crime have fostered the growth of a punitive criminal justice system that undermines the country's rights-oriented political culture. Transformation and Trouble calls for South Africa to reaffirm its commitment to public empowerment by reforming its criminal justice system-an approach, she argues, that would strengthen the country's new democracy.

"An eloquent, critical, but ultimately optimistic, analysis of the democratization of crime and justice in post-apartheid South Africa."
--Bill Dixon, School of Criminology, Education, Sociology and Social Work, Keele University

"A must read for understanding contemporary South Africa's agonizing dilemmas as it struggles to reconcile crime control with democratic values."
--Jerome H. Skolnick, New York University School of Law

"Gordon's vast experience with criminal justice illuminates her cautionary tale of the search for a new way in south Africa."
--Paul Chevigny, New York University


Diana Gordon is Professor Emerita of Political Science and Senior Research Scholar, City University of New York.

A bestselling European psychological thriller set around the Italian lakes Gabriel Tretjak is a fixer, hired by rich clients to fix their lives, to change fate on their behalf. He does so without moral limitations or scruples. His methods draw on experimental psychology and the latest research into the human brain. His fees are high, but his clients are always willing to pay. No matter how desperate their situation, they want a happy ending. But happy for whom? Soon the body of a famous brain surgeon is discovered in a horsebox: a murder made all the more gruesome by the fact that the victim's eyes have been removed by something resembling an ice-cream scoop. The surgeon is the first victim of a murderer who leaves tantalising clues behind, all pointing to Tretjak. While Tretjak tries to stay in control, a feeling begins to take hold, a feeling that he normally uses to his advantage when working on behalf of a client. That feeling is fear. It slowly dawns on him - and soon the police - that these murders are all linked to his past. The one thing he cannot fix.