The Orkney Islands Sra Case

Explore the stories and themes that capture the imagination of young people today. A sampling of tales is organized into broad subject areas, such as contaminated food, threats to children, and satanic legends, and the tales are analyzed according to function, structure, and international variants. De Vos also discusses film and literary adaptions and offers suggestions for adapting tales for the junior high and high school curriculum. Explore the stories and themes that capture the imagination of young people today. After a fascinating overview and discussion of contemporary legends (commonly referred to as modern urban legends and often told as true), de Vos examines them in their relationship to rumors and gossip, ostension (acting out the legends), the role of the media in formulation and dissemination, and related tales (e.g., literary horror tales). A sampling of tales is organized into broad subject areas, such as contaminated food, threats to children, and satanic legends, and the legends are analyzed according to function, structure, and international variants. De Vos discusses some of the literary and visual adaptations in popular culture and offers suggestions for adapting tales for the junior high and high school curriculum. A fascinating professional book, this is a great resource to use with young adults.

State intervention in family life is an important and problematic political and social issue, and one which is surrounded by debates of a highly ideological nature. The central theme of this valuable book is that of 'family life' as an object of both social policy interest and welfare intervention. The author applies a sociological perspective on social control to a range of issues exciting public and political debate; amongst them, marriage conciliation, community care, lone parenthood and underclass status, and child abuse.

Because they are so often told as news, contemporary legends force us to reevaluate life as we know it. They confront us with macabre, fantastic, horrific, or hilarious characters and events that seem to come straight out of myths and folktales, but are presented as present day events. The difficulty is that it is not at all easy to decide whether these often disturbing stories should be treated as reliable or dismissed as fantasy. The legends explored in this book are some of the most bizarre, gruesome, and politically sensitive stories in the contemporary legend canon. At any moment a body may be invaded by noxious creatures, deliberately infected with deadly disease, or raided to provide donor organs for sick foreigners. These are "winter's tales," the stuff of nightmares. In this book Gillian Bennett traces the cultural history of six legends, well-known in Europe and America from medieval times to the present day. Appearing in broadsides, ballads, myths, ancient and modern legends, novels, plays, films, television shows, and stories told in the oral tradition, these legends are not just silly tales which can be dismissed as trivial and untrue. They reveal much about the concerns and fears of everyday life and demonstrate the limits of knowledge and power in the modern world.

The ritual abuse of children is the most controversial issue in the child maltreatment field, but much of what has been written about ritual abuse over the past twenty years is in the form of unpublished and endlessly reproduced “stuff”—a curious mixture of conjecture, folkloric and pop-culture representations of satanism, devil worship, occultism and witchcraft, and Christian Fundamentalist images of premillennarian evil. What remains after this “stuff” is excluded is an intriguing body of international literature that seriously examines the controversy. This annotated bibliography dissects the literature, objectively and thoroughly annotates published articles, books and reports, legal opinions, and occasionally, thought-provoking newspaper and magazine articles. Chapters deal with the definition of ritual abuse, ritual abuse cases in the United States, cases in American families and neighborhoods, cases in Canada, Europe and Australasia, clinical features of ritual abuse in children and adults, the controversy’s impact on professionals and systems, the controversy and American law, ritual abuse reports and narratives, and anthropological, folkloric and sociological perspectives.

The Assassination of JFK, 9/11, the Da Vinci Code, The Death of Diana, Men in Black, Pearl Harbor, The Illuminati, Protocols of Zion,Hess, The Bilderberg Group, New World Order, ElvisFluoridization, Martin Luther King's murder, Opus Dei, The Gemstone Files, John Paul I, Dead Sea Scrolls, Lockerbie bombing, Black helicopters... In other words everything 'they' never wanted you to know and were afraid you might ask! Jon E. Lewis explores the 100 most terrifying cover-ups of all time, from the invention of Jesus' divinity (pace the Da Vinci Code) to Bush's and Blair's real agenda in invading Iraq. Entertainingly written and closely documented, the book provides each cover-up with a plausibility rating. Uncover why the Titanic sank, ponder the sinister Vatican/Mafia network that plotted the assassination of liberal John Paul, find out why NASA 'lost' its files on Mars, read why no-one enters Area 51, and consider why medical supplies were already on site at Edgware Road before the 7/7 bombs detonated. Just because you are paranoid, it doesn't mean that they aren't out to conspire against you.