Pacific Rims

A young man's journey through the Philippines' most unlikely obsession: basketball. In Pacific Rims, Rafe Bartholemew, journalist, New Yorker, and veteran baller, ventures through the Philippines to investigate the country's love of basketball. From street corners where diehards fashion hoops out of old car parts to the professional league where politicians exploit team loyalties to win elections, Pacific Rims gets the story-and gets in the game.

Analyzing the economic, strategic, and cultural elements that shape the attraction--and the friction--between the Pacific and Atlantic communities, this book integrates European perspectives into a discussion that has traditionally been dominated by Asian and U.S. voices. The authors take as their theme the uncertainty created by the Pacific Rim’s new role in shifting the international balances of political and economic power. Economic uncertainty has been fueled by Asia’s trade surpluses with Western Europe and the United States, with the West viewing its system of free world trade as working to the greater advantage of the Asia Pacific. Strategic uncertainty pivots on the U.S.-USSR superpower rivalry and on the growing influence of Japan and the PRC on the strategic balance in the Pacific Basin. A more subtle and powerful constraint surfaces in the realm of culture--in differing perceptions among the people of the Asia Pacific and the West concerning liberal values and the liberal underpinnings of the present system of world trade.

The series is aimed specifically at publishing peer reviewed reviews and contributions presented at workshops and conferences. Each volume is associated with a particular conference, symposium or workshop. These events cover various topics within pure and applied mathematics and provide up-to-date coverage of new developments, methods and applications.

Publisher description

"A survey of the economy of the Pacific Rim region"--

Once dismissed as a fading genre with little to say to contemporary audiences, the giant monster movie roared back to life in the new millennium. In one of modern cinema's most surprising turnarounds, a wave of 21st-century kaiju films has delivered exciting and thought-provoking viewing to global audiences. In a variety of works that range from action-packed CGI spectacles to more personal, introspective productions commenting on real-world issues of the day, the new millennium has witnessed some of the most intriguing films in any genre, including movies from such acclaimed directors such as Guillermo del Toro, Bong Joon-ho and Peter Jackson. This book takes a sober, multidimensional look at the new class of giant monster movies. It examines the making of these films and their sometimes-obscure meanings. It also covers efforts to reinvent storied kaiju characters from the past, including Godzilla and King Kong, and to transform the genre with movies such as Cloverfield, The Mist, Colossal, and Pacific Rim that feature all-new creatures.

With a series of rich case studies focused on mobile laborers, this book demonstrates how the regional migrations of the early modern era came to be connected, contributing to the creation of an increasingly integrated nineteenth-century world.