God S Frontiersmen

The Ulster Scots came to the north of Ireland in the 17th century and today constitute the dominant strain among Ulster Protestants. They brought with them their Calvanist beliefs, a stern work ethic and a fiercely independent spirit. Religious discrimination led thousands of them to cross the Atlantic, where many became famous names in American history, including Davy Crockett, Kit Carson, Stonewall Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, the Gettys and Mellons.

Alex Voorman, a cerebral thirty-year-old archaeologist, is married to the woman of his dreams -- a beautiful, ambitious botanist named Isabel. When Isabel is killed by a reckless driver, Alex reluctantly consents to donate her heart. Janet Corcoran, a young, headstrong mother of two and an art teacher at an inner-city school in Chicago, is sick with heart disease. She is on the waiting list for a transplant, but her chances are slim. She watches the Weather Channel, secretly praying for foul weather and car accidents. The day Isabel dies, Janet gets her wish. Flash forward a year. Janet sends Alex a letter. She'd like to learn something about the woman who saved her life. But Alex isn't interested in talking to the recipient of his dead wife's heart. Since Isabel's accident, he's still grief-stricken. Meanwhile, a local blues musician named Jasper, the man responsible for Isabel's death, attempts to atone for his misdeed. Irreplaceable is the story of what happens after the transplant -- not only to Alex but within the concentric circles of family that spiral outward from him and from Janet. Stephen Lovely takes us vividly inside the lives of these characters to reveal their true intentions -- however misguided -- and gives us a stunning debut novel of loss and love.

'[This book]...is one of great importance and will have a profound effect upon the civilized world.'Ian Player (Director of the International Wilderness Leadership Foundation)'I was impressed...beautifully written.'Arthur Koestler'The book is an immensely ambitious one. It...should be read by every serious and thoughtful person.'Robert Molteno (Editor, Zed Books)In stark contrast to the usual view of human evolution as a progressive Ascent of Man from a primitive state to one of sophisticated and comfortable civilization, the book 'The Human Reality - A Reinterpretation of Our Origins and Evolution' views the development of Homo sapiens after the Mesolithic period (some 10-12,000 years BP) as a dangerous degeneration and effectual re-evolution into what, in reality, constitutes almost a different species. The author calls it Homo degener, and believes the change occurred as a result of the adaptation of certain hunter-gatherer peoples to a primitive agriculture, which transformed them from nomadic free-ranging peoples, living harmoniously in nature, to sedentary farmers waging perpetual war against nature. Their construction of stratified societies, 'pyramids of power' comprising controlling head, fighting arms and cultivating hands and feet, resembled giant human beings which, unlike Homo sapiens, had no ecological niche.This book traces the historical development and progress of these re-evolutionary (or anti-evolutionary) composite animals, throughout the world, spreading tyranny and exploitation across a wild environment itself conducive to freedom and freedom from exploitation. The author concludes that humanity is now on the verge of a self-made catastrophe - a retribution of affronted Nature - which can be avoided only if we begin to return the land to those few remaining hunter-gatherer peoples who alone are the true friends of the Earth, and seek to learn from them instead of arrogantly ignoring or destroying them in favour of our exotic kind.

The nature of warfare has changed! Like it or not, terrorism has established a firm foothold worldwide. Economics and environmental issues are inextricably entwined on a global basis and tied directly to national regional security. Although traditional threats remain, new, shadowy, and mercurial adversaries are emerging, and identifying and locating them is difficult. Future War, based on the hard-learned lessons of Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia, Panama, and many other trouble spots, provides part of the solution. Non-lethal weapons are a pragmatic application of force, not a peace movement. Ranging from old rubber bullets and tear gas to exotic advanced systems that can paralyze a country, they are essential for the preservation of peace and stability. Future War explains exactly how non-lethal electromagnetic and pulsed-power weapons, the laser and tazer, chemical systems, computer viruses, ultrasound and infrasound, and even biological entities will be used to stop enemies. These are the weapons of the future.

In Part 1 Wilson reconstructs the family circumstances and estate management of two landlords, Stephen Moore, third earl of Mount Cashell, and Major Robert Perceval Maxwell. Each owned several estates in Ireland and the estate known as Amherst Island in Ontario. She examines how the management of these estates changed over time and highlights the differences between management in the north and south of Ireland, particularly in Counties Down, Antrim, and Cork. She looks at the form the landlord-tenant relationship took in the New World to determine whether tenancy arrangements in the New World offered landlords an opportunity to start afresh or, instead, were influenced by the traditions and financial circumstances of their Irish estates. The second part of the study follows more than one hundred tenant families who, between 1820 and 1860, migrated from the Ards Peninsula in County Down to Amherst Island, where they rented land from Mount Cashell and, later, from Maxwell. Wilson reveals what life was like in the United Parish of St Andrews, why families emigrated and rented on Amherst Island, and what it meant socially and economically to be a tenant in the New World, where most farmers were freeholders. Wilson sets her study firmly in the framework of British, Irish, and American writing on land tenure, and in this comparative context opens the discussion of tenancy among Canadians more widely than anyone has done heretofore. She concludes that both landlords and tenants were more successful in the New World. Wealth and land ownership might be slow in materializing, but the opportunity, the choices, and the attainment of security were all greater than they had been in Ireland.

Figures from the Scots-Irish Andrew Jackson to the Caribbean-Irish Rihanna, as well as literature, film, caricature, and beauty discourse, convey how the Irish racially transformed multiple times: in the slave-holding Caribbean, on America's frontiers and antebellum plantations, and along its eastern seaboard. This cultural history of race and centuries of Irishness in the Americas examines the forcibly transported Irish, the eighteenth-century Presbyterian Ulster-Scots, and post-1845 Famine immigrants. Their racial transformations are indicated by the designations they acquired in the Americas: 'Redlegs,' 'Scots-Irish,' and 'black Irish.' In literature by Fitzgerald, O'Neill, Mitchell, Glasgow, and Yerby (an African-American author of Scots-Irish heritage), the Irish are both colluders and victims within America's racial structure. Depictions range from Irish encounters with Native and African Americans to competition within America's immigrant hierarchy between 'Saxon' Scots-Irish and 'Celtic' Irish Catholic. Irish-connected presidents feature, but attention to queer and multiracial authors, public women, beauty professionals, and performers complicates the 'Irish whitening' narrative. Thus, 'Irish Princess' Grace Kelly's globally-broadcast ascent to royalty paves the way for 'America's royals,' the Kennedys. The presidencies of the Scots-Irish Jackson and Catholic-Irish Kennedy signalled their respective cohorts' assimilation. Since Gothic literature particularly expresses the complicity that attaining power ('whiteness') entails, subgenres named 'Scots-Irish Gothic' and 'Kennedy Gothic' are identified: in Gothic by Brown, Poe, James, Faulkner, and Welty, the violence of the colonial Irish motherland is visited upon marginalized Americans, including, sometimes, other Irish groupings. History is Gothic in Irish-American narrative because the undead Irish past replays within America's contexts of race.

Drawing on ethno-anthropological fieldwork, this book considers issues of identity and belonging in Europe from a consciously emic perspective. The book explores issues such as borders, migration, economic organization, heritage, and the politics and practice of developing cultural understanding.