A Land Without Time

For the first time, the story of Afghanistan prior to, and during, the communist coup of 1979 is told from the perspective of an American working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Afghanistan.

In this theoretically innovative study of maldevelopment and power relations among the Nahuas of southern Veracruz, Chevalier and Buckles explore the impact of Mexico's cattle ranching and petrochemical industries on milpa agriculture and rainforest environment. They also examine how national politics and economics affect native patterns of patrimonial culture and social organization. In the concluding chapter, an ascetic worldview illustrated through corn god mythology points to meaningful ways of countering current trends of social and ecological impoverishment. This major work of scholarship tackles key issues in ecology and development, theories of the state, gender analysis and symbolic anthropology. Against rigid conceptions of capitalism and native society, the authors apply their own theory of process to the orderly and contradictory features of social history. Established ways of doing things - a mode of government, a way of livelihood, a kinship and narrative tradition - are shown to reflect the imposition of a ruling order, an unequal distribution of the proceeds of society, and the confrontation of classes and parties, genders and age-groups, spirits and humans struggling for power.

In a world of snow and ice, Cara is alone. Different from the people in her life; she longs to find somewhere she can belong. Knowing that her ancestors came from a warmer place, Cara embarks on journey that leads her across the frozen world of Arc to find the land without snow. Along the way, she finds love and a new respect for herself; something she'd never had before. With danger lurking in every direction, Cara must make a decision: to stay with the man of her dreams or to find the place that she can truly belong.

The gentle Karen, a tribe in Burma's eastern regions, call their country a land without evil. They number between four and five million, and have been fighting for half a century to keep their land and identity. Many - at least 40 per cent - are Christians, and have suffered particularly harsh treatment. Burma today, and Karen State in particular, is a land torn apart by evil. It is a land ruled by a regime which took power by force, ignored the will of the people in an election, and survives by creating a climate of fear. It is a land terrorised by a military regime which to this day perpetrates a catalogue of crimes against humanity. It takes people for forced labour, uses villagers as human minesweepers, captures children and forces them to become soldiers, systematically rapes ethnic minority women, and burns down villages and crops. It is a regime which has killed thousands of people in the ethnic minority areas. This compassionate but unflinching account of the Karen's predicament is an important step in galvanising Western opinion about this ongoing act of genocide.

Thomas K. Murphy explores the shifting history of European attitudes toward America, utilizing British and French writing from the late eighteenth through the middle of the nineteenth centuries. Murphy studies a rich collage of literary, philosophical, and political writing by Europeans during this era. The book covers four stages in the development of European attitudes: traditional theories and their modification in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the influence of early American diplomacy on European attitudes, the cultural iconography of the French Revolution and of England during this same period, and the genre of the travel journal. Murphy has created an interesting historiography that augments our understanding of American history, but also illuminates the role that these imaginative texts about the New World played in the formation of significant social and political developments in modern European history.

"At last we have a wonderful book which makes us privy to these Chinese images of the West and lets us see how they were formed and how they changed over the last century and a half."—Orville Schell, author of Discos and Democracy

One of Publishers Weekly's Best Summer Books 2013 "In A Land Without Sin Paula Huston has written a novel that's wise and wry, tragic and tender, and altogether thrilling. Both moved and enthralled, I couldn't stop reading." --Robert Clark Author of In the Deep Midwinter and Love Among the Ruins "Huston treads where few writers dare, jumping fearlessly into the roiling cauldron of factious Central American politics, class, culture, and religions. No doubt it would have been easier to write a mere gloss, a panoramic report describing the horror of war, revolution, grinding poverty, and the inevitable human carnage. However, the lens through which Huston sees penetrates far deeper than a perusal of these surface wounds to examine the limits of family loyalty, faith, and the causes and cure of hatred. A Land Without Sin is a compelling narrative that leaves me both haunted and hungry for more." --Gina Ochsner Author of People I Wanted to Be and The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight "With some of the sheer excitement of H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines and the depth of soulful inquiry of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, Paula Huston's A Land Without Sin is a savvy look at the violent struggles in southern Mexico over the last quarter century and a vivid perspective on the hopes and perils of liberation theology. It is a poignant and splendid book." --Ron Hansen Author of Mariette in Ecstasy and Atticus