Hell With The Lid Off

In the East End of Pittsburgh, a photographer and a hustler collide head on with their darkest demons, as events in and beyond their control begin to take shape...

Hell with the Lid Off looks at the ferocious five-year war waged by Pittsburgh and Oakland for NFL supremacy during the turbulent seventies. The roots of their rivalry dated back to the 1972 playoff game in Pittsburgh that ended with the “Immaculate Reception,” Franco Harris’s stunning touchdown that led the Steelers to a win over the Raiders in their first postseason meeting. That famous game ignited a fiery rivalry for NFL supremacy. Between 1972 and 1977, the Steelers and the Raiders—between them boasting an incredible twenty-six Pro Football Hall of Famers—collided in the playoffs five straight seasons and in the AFC title game three consecutive years. Both teams favored force over finesse and had players whose forte was intimidation. Pittsburgh’s Steel Curtain defense featured Mean Joe Greene, Jack Lambert, Jack Ham, and Mel Blount, the latter’s heavy hits forcing an NFL rule in his name. The Raiders countered with “The Assassin,” Jack Tatum, Skip Thomas (aka “Dr. Death”), George Atkinson, and Willie Brown in their memorable secondary. Each of their championships crowned the eventual Super Bowl winner, and their bloodcurdling encounters became so violent and vicious that they transcended the NFL and had to be settled in a U.S. district court. With its account of classic games, legendary owners, coaches, and players with larger-than-life personalities, Hell with the Lid Off is a story of turbulent football and one of the game’s best-known rivalries.

Writing a War of Words is the first exploration of the war-time quest by Andrew Clark - a writer, historian, and volunteer on the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary - to document changes in the English language from the start of the First World War up to 1919. Clark's unique series of lexical scrapbooks, replete with clippings, annotations, and real-time definitions, reveals a desire to put living language history to the fore, and to create a record of often fleeting popular use. The rise of trench warfare, the Zeppelinophobia of total war, and descriptions of shellshock (and raid shock on the Home Front) all drew his attentive gaze. The archive includes examples from a range of sources, such as advertising, newspapers, and letters from the Front, as well as documenting social issues such as the shifting forms of representation as women 'did their bit' on the Home Front. Lynda's Mugglestone's fascinating investigation of this valuable archive reassesses the conventional accounts of language history during this period, recuperates Clark himself as another 'forgotten lexicographer', challenges the received wisdom on the inexpressibilities of war, and examines the role of language as an interdisciplinary lens on history.

"An illustrated analytical study, Words and the First World War considers the situation at home, at war, and under categories such as race, gender and class to give a many-sided picture of language used during the conflict." The Spectator First World War expert Julian Walker looks at how the conflict shaped English and its relationship with other languages. He considers language in relation to mediation and authenticity, as well as the limitations and potential of different kinds of verbal communication. Walker also examines: - How language changed, and why changed language was used in communications - Language used at the Front and how the 'language of the war' was commercially exploited on the Home Front - The relationship between language, soldiers and class - The idea of the 'indescribability' of the war and the linguistic codes used to convey the experience 'Languages of the front' became linguistic souvenirs of the war, abandoned by soldiers but taken up by academics, memoir writers and commentators, leaving an indelible mark on the words we use even today.

When last we saw the boy Papa in The Devil’s Backbone, he had finally learned the fate of his missing Momma and his vicious daddy, Old Karl. But hardly has he concluded that quest before another one is upon him. Now a white-haired man with a hangman’s noose around his neck and death in his eye—o’Pelo Blanco—is coming. And he means to hang Papa. In The Devil’s Sinkhole, the master storyteller Bill Wittliff takes us on another enthralling journey through wild and woolly Central Texas in the 1880s. When Papa and his o’amigo Calley Pearsall confront Pelo Blanco before he can ambush Papa, the encounter sets them on a pursuit with a promise of true love at the end, if only they can stay alive long enough for Calley to win the beautiful Pela Rosa, the captive/companion of Pelo Blanco. But before they can even hope to be united with Pela and Annie Oster, Papa’s plucky sweetheart, Papa and Calley have to defeat not only Pelo Blanco but also the evil, murdering Arlon Clavic and deliver Little Missey, the mysterious Wild Woman a’the Navidad, to the safe haven of the Choat farm. With dangers and emergencies around every bend, it’s a rough ride to the Devil’s Sinkhole, where this world and the next come together, bringing Papa and Calley, Pelo Blanco and Arlon to a climax that will leave readers clamoring for the next adventure.

Before Winston Churchill made history, he made news. To a great extent, the news made him too. If it was his own efforts that made him a hero, it was the media that made him a celebrity - and it has been considerably responsible for perpetuating his memory and shaping his reputation in the years since his death. Churchill first made his name via writing and journalism in the years before 1900, the money he earned helping to support his political career (at a time when MPs did not get salaries). Journalistic activities were also important to him later, as he struggled in the interwar years to find the wherewithal to run and maintain Chartwell, his country house in Kent. Moreover, not only was journalism an important aspect of Churchill's political persona, but he himself was a news-obsessive throughout his life. The story of Churchill and the news is, on one level, a tale of tight deadlines, off-the-record briefings and smoke-filled newsrooms, of wartime summits that were turned into stage-managed global media events, and of often tense interactions with journalists and powerful press proprietors, such as Lords Northcliffe, Rothermere, and Beaverbrook. Uncovering the symbiotic relationship between Churchill's political life and his media life, and the ways in which these were connected to his personal life, Richard Toye asks if there was a 'public Churchill' whose image was at odds with the behind-the-scenes reality, or whether, in fact, his private and public selves became seamlessly blended as he adjusted to living in the constant glare of the media spotlight. On a wider level, this is also the story of a rapidly evolving media and news culture in the first half of the twentieth century, and of what the contemporary reporting of Churchill's life (including by himself) can tell us about the development of this culture, over a period spanning from the Victorian era through to the space age.

It is no exaggeration to claim that 46th North Midland Divisions action on 29 September 1918 was the hammer blow that shattered the will of the German High Command.Painting the strategic picture from early 1918 and the dark weeks following the Germans March offensive, the Author lays the ground for the Allied counter-strike. Ahead of them was the mighty Hindenburg Line, the Kaisers formidable defensive obstacle given added strength by the St Quentin Canal.Undaunted the Allies attacked using American, Australian and British formations. Led by Major General Boyd, 46 Division stormed the Canal and, thanks to a combination of sound planning and determined courageous fighting, seized their Hindenburg Line objective by the end of the day.The psychological damage to the German will, already weakened by the failure of the Spring offensive, is demonstrate by Ludendorffs collapse and opening of negotiations that led five weeks later to the Armistice.

Mass for Shut-Ins is a dreamwork distilling the conflicting cultures, languages, and religions that have made Mary-Alice Daniel the writer she is "Against humans creating hell on earth, Daniel draws on animistic, Islamic, and syncretic Christian traditions from her native Nigeria to unleash potent incantations, rituals and spells, electric as St. Elmo's fire. Buckle up."--Rae Armantrout, judge Mary-Alice Daniel is a poet of place. Venturing through landscapes, dreamscapes, and hellscapes, the poems in Mass for Shut-Ins express controlled chaos. They perform cultural excavations and conduct unexpected experiments reflecting idiosyncratic identity. Daniel confronts a tricontinental heritage, engaging the mythos of her nomadic Fulani tribe alongside the Evangelical propaganda and American mass media she was raised on. Charged by a collision of influences, fevered images map an estranged native Nigeria onto an adopted, uneasy America. Animated by African and Western mythic traditions, her poetry conceives an original cosmology. As she investigates her curious placement in many worlds, straying into invisible fields of spiritual warfare, her poems naturally encounter supernatural systems. Wayward spirits haunt an utterly odd universe marked by superstition and the speculative--where it is always nighttime. The poet invites the unreal inside. Her voice is a vortex, a force pulling together something unconventional, otherworldly, intrusively ominous. This collection was selected by award-winning poet Rae Armantrout to become the 117th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets.