The Storm Blitz

In the year 2030, a cluster of astral diamonds came to earth from the depths of the universe and gave all life on earth elemental spirit power manipulation. But this great gift cost the human race everything they had built so far. Fifty-one years later, Dante Saint will attempt to rebuild a fallen rebellion his parents had formed seventeen years ago. The hellfire rebellion was formed to overthrow a powerful force lord of the world's richest city-7-Nations. This city is the last city of pure humans and the city that controls the world's resources. With the last of his family and a fiery storm of elemental power, Dante will try to bring equality to the world, but the death of his parents and the Hellfire Clan weigh heavy on his heart. Dante must look deep within and use the power of elemental ascension to do the impossible. Ascension-the art of mastering mind, body, and spirit by absorbing new levels of elemental power; an awakened one can unlock the power of the higher mind and walk the earth as the highest potential. Will Dante do it? Story told by Karma's Dream...

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita made landfall less than four weeks apart in 2005. Months later, much of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast remained in tatters. As the region faded from national headlines, its residents faced a dire future. Emmanuel David chronicles how one activist group confronted the crisis. Founded by a few elite white women in New Orleans, Women of the Storm quickly formed a broad coalition that sought to represent Louisiana's diverse population. From its early lobbying of Congress through its response to the 2010 BP oil spill, David shows how members' actions were shaped by gender, race, class, and geography. Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnographic observation, and archival research, David tells a compelling story of collective action and personal transformation that expands our understanding of the aftermath of an historic American catastrophe.

For those interested in learning more about the personal impact of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, Narrating the Storm serves as an essential read. This important and timeless volume is a compilation of sixteen narratives that address the experiences of Gulf Coast residents, faculty, and graduate students who were caught up in the largest (not so) natural disaster in United States history. Each contributor deploys storytelling sociology as a methodological approach in order to illustrate how “personal” experiences with disaster are not so personal, but rather reflect and are informed by larger social phenomena related to issues including race, class, gender, age, bureaucracy, risk, collective memory, the blasé, and more. The narratives in this volume exemplify how inequality and injustice are unveiled, exacerbated, and created by the occurrence of disaster; and reveal the sociological in everyday and not-so-everyday experiences.

When fire meets ice, the storm flames out of control. Smokejumper and former refugee Wilson Dex takes the latest in a long line of risks, a mission to quell the firestorm on planet E'terra. Equipment from his transport ship malfunctions, forcing by-the-book Commander Samantha Varde dirtside to help Dex though she suffers from landsickness. While fighting the ill-timed and against-code heat between them, they have hours to reprogram a torpedo, fly into a tornado, and chute into a firestorm, all to save the colony before the storm flames out of control.

We build infrastructure and everything else for a purpose, which enables a service, activity, or capability. All infrastructure has a purpose. When we protect against harm, it is the purpose that we are protecting. When we know how to protect that purpose, we know what we require of our infrastructure and can incorporate our protection approach and measures directly into the design. When protection is inherent to the design of a system, it is inherent to the service, activity, or capability. This more closely reflects how people behave and is more efficient than imposing security measures on system design. Protection and resilience go hand in hand, with the same foundation in risk analysis. When we understand this relationship, we can forecast protection requirements over the life of the capability and design accordingly. We can protect against the unknown by focusing on how failure affects the operations that we can control. Join Marianne as she builds on her developing understanding of infrastructure risk and resilience, and explores the protection and security of assets and capabilities, encounters diverse perspectives, and learns the meaning of social licence. The threats she faces are not only project-based and she must deal with real-world challenges from colleagues and clients. Through her journey, we learn the value of evidence-based planning, focusing on those aspects that we can control, and spending the time to really understand why, as much as what is being protected. Before the Storm builds on the principles and concepts introduced in After the Flood. It is a clear and engaging exploration of protection planning for students, industry practitioners, or anyone interested in infrastructure, business continuity, security integration, and emergency and risk management.

On 2 August 1944, in the wake of the complete destruction of the German Army Group Centre in Belorussia, Winston Churchill mocked Adolf Hitler in the House of Commons by the rank he had reached in the First World War. 'Russian success has been somewhat aided by the strategy of Herr Hitler, of Corporal Hitler,' Churchill jibed. 'Even military idiots find it difficult not to see some faults in his actions.' Andrew Roberts's previous book Masters and Commanders studied the creation of Allied grand strategy; Beating Corporal Hitler now analyses how Axis strategy evolved. Examining the Second World War on every front, Roberts asks whether, with a different decision-making process and a different strategy, the Axis might even have won. Were those German generals who blamed everything on Hitler after the war correct, or were they merely scapegoating their former Führer once he was safely beyond defending himself? In researching this uniquely vivid history of the Second World War Roberts has walked many of the key battlefield and wartime sites of Russia, France, Italy, Germany and the Far East. The book is full of illuminating sidelights on the principle actors that bring their characters and the ways in which they reached decisions into fresh focus.

Stéphane Mosès explores in Displacements the poetry of Paul Celan and the work of major German-Jewish thinkers in the context of his distinction between normative and critical modernity. The first part contains a translation of his book Approches de Paul Celan, the third part a translation of his lecture series Figures philosophiques de la modernité juive, and the central section contains, alongside a text on Freud, essays on Goethe and Büchner that extend his analysis beyond the Jewish sphere while engaging with the questions of tradition and its fragmentation that he raises there. Edited, translated, and with an Introduction by Ashraf Noor.