Death In The Desert

Instantly recognisable from their music and visual style, spaghetti westerns are a magnificently popular cult film genre. Through home media, they've stayed alive and available to an avid audience, enjoying remarkable influence and lasting success. In over 500 detailed film reviews covering 20 years of westerns in Europe, genre expert Howard Hughes takes a fascinating snapshot of European western films and filmmaking during their frenzied, popular heyday. He narrates the spaghetti western story from the genre's early, tentative days to its explosive golden era following the success of A Fistful of Dollars and the mass-produced scramble of films that swamped cinemas in the late 1960s, before the gradual falling off of enchantment with the genre. Death in the Desert also looks at other westerns made in Europe in the 1960s and '70s: the early West German 'Winnetou' westerns, swashbuckling Spanish 'Zorro' movies, kung-fu westerns, German musical and comedy westerns, American and British westerns filmed in Spain, and the then East Germany. This essential read for cinephiles, collectors and completists, is fully illustrated with rare posters and stills.

The author covers conflicts from 1837 through 1886 in Arizona, New Mexico, and California. Important chiefs covered include Mangas Coloradas, Cochise, Victorio, Geronimo, and Captain Jack. Army officers covered include George Crook and Nelson Miles.

In the late fourth century, the world of Christianity was torn apart by debate over the teachings of the third-century theologian Origen and his positions on the incorporeality of God. In the year 400, Archbishop Theophilus of Alexandria convened a council declaring Origen's later followers as heretics. Shortly thereafter, Theophilus banished the so-called Tall Brothers, four Origenist monks who led monastic communities in the western Egyptian desert, along with hundreds of their brethren. In some accounts, Theophilus leads a violent group of drunken youths and enslaved Ethiopians in sacking and desecrating the monastery; in others, he justly exercises his episcopal duties. In some versions, Theophilus' violent actions effectively bring the Golden Age of desert monasticism to an end; in others, he has shown proper respect for the desert fathers, whose life of asceticism is subsequently destroyed by bands of barbarian marauders. For some, the desert came to be inextricably connected to violence and trauma, while for others, it became a site of nostalgic recollection. Which of these narratives subsequent generations believed depended in good part on the sources they were reading. In Death of the Desert, Christine Luckritz Marquis offers a fresh examination of this critical juncture in Christian history and brings into dialogue narrative strands that have largely been separated in the scholarly tradition. She takes the violence perpetrated by Theophilus as a turning point for desert monasticism and considers how monks became involved in acts of violence and how that violence came back to haunt them. More broadly, her careful attention to the dynamic relations between memory practices, the rhetorical constructions of place, racialized discourse, and language and deeds of violence speak to us in our own time.

This book is set to be a timebomb under the British military presence in Afghanistan, criticising tactics, strategy, implementation, equipment and the wisdom behind the operation.

Experience the sweltering heat of California's Death Valley and learn about the different species of plants and animals that are able to survive on almost no water. Readers will make language arts connections as they practice vocabulary related to desert climates and their characteristics.

Migrant Deaths in the Arizona Desert addresses the tragic results of government policies on immigration. The book's central question is why are migrants dying on our border? The authors constitute a multidisciplinary group reflecting on the issues of death, migration, and policy.

Death in a Red Desert, a ground breaking case in animal DNA forensic investigation, was featured on the television network Animal Planet. The manuscript chronicles the unusual triangle between a woman, her lover and his transvestite partner, and the events leading up to the disappearance and murder of Elizabeth Langhorst-Ballard. The authors based the work on depositions, trial transcripts and tapes, and on interviews with the detectives, officials in the district attorney's office, the victim's parents and with Charles Martinez, one of the two convicted murderers. Some of the information, using as a guide court documentation and letters written by the other defendant Chris Faviell, is related in a conversational manner to enhance the flow of the story. Names of a few minor figures were changed. Many of the events and the trials are viewed through the eyes of the lead detective, Wolfgang Born, who was an invaluable resource in writing the account, as was the lead prosecutor Canon Stevens. After Born's dogged search for the victim's body in thousands of square miles of red desert in the Tularosa Basin of Otero County, New Mexico, yielded success, the persistence of the late Jim Biggs, a Ruidoso detective, led to Dr. Joy Halverson, whose DNA work on the case made history and was highlighted on the Animal Witness series in 2008. Canines played key roles in solving the crime from the pit bull pet of one of the killers to desert coyotes and a cadaver dog on his last assignment before retirement.

The ferocious Taklamakan desert in Central Asia, one of the largest sandy deserts in the world and the harshest on earth, is known by the Chinese as the "desert of death" or the "place of no return." Its unknown depths are said to be haunted by demons and spirits and legend has it that ancient cities filled with treasure lie lost and buried beneath its dunes. The only certainty is that no human being in history had ever crossed it from end to end. But, after five years of planning, in 1993, Charles Blackmore together with a team of British, Chinese and Uyghurs and a caravan of thirty camels, set out to accomplish the seemingly impossible: they would cross the Taklamakan, west to east, directly through its unmapped, untrodden centre. Conquering the Desert of Death is at once a deeply personal journey and the story of an adventure that will go down in history as one of the great achievements of exploration.