When Things Seem Odd

As you will discover by reading this book, the term "stranger danger" is not only misleading to children, it actually does more harm than good. By the constant reminder that a child encounters by media, adults and television programs about never talking to strangers, children are often left confused and powerless of how to deal with the many strangers they come across on a day to day bases. Secondly, this book aims to teach children to become aware of their instincts (feelings of uneasiness, suspicion or otherwise their apprehension) when it is appropriate and important to do so and when it comes to people and situations they encounter as they go about their lives. Not just people of whom they do not know (strangers), but also of people of whom they may already know. Finally, this book is in two parts: The first part are the three short stories of Polly, a fictional character, that describes in detail certain dilemmas she encounters when she becomes lost, first at a grocery store, next at the fair and then in the third story, the close encounter she experiences of nearly being abducted by a stranger. The stories go into detail about the positive aspects that Polly took each time to protect herself in each case scenario. The encounters are based on a realistic chain of circumstances. The second part of this book is aimed towards parents to look at self-protection strategies suggested by some of the world's most prestigious experts on the subject of child safety and the criminal mind.

On April 4, 1866, just as Alexander II stepped out of Saint Petersburg's Summer Garden and onto the boulevard, a young man named Dmitry Karakozov pulled out a pistol and shot at the tsar. He missed, but his "unheard-of act" changed the course of Russian history-and gave birth to the revolutionary political violence known as terrorism. Based on clues pulled out of the pockets of Karakozov's peasant disguise, investigators concluded that there had been a conspiracy so extensive as to have sprawled across the entirety of the Russian empire and the European continent. Karakozov was said to have been a member of "The Organization," a socialist network at the center of which sat a secret cell of suicide-assassins: "Hell." It is still unclear how much of this "conspiracy" theory was actually true, but of the thirty-six defendants who stood accused during what was Russia's first modern political trial, all but a few were exiled to Siberia, and Karakozov himself was publicly hanged on September 3, 1866. Because Karakozov was decidedly strange, sick, and suicidal, his failed act of political violence has long been relegated to a footnote of Russian history. In The Odd Man Karakozov, however, Claudia Verhoeven argues that it is precisely this neglected, exceptional case that sheds a new light on the origins of terrorism. The book not only demonstrates how the idea of terrorism first emerged from the reception of Karakozov's attack, but also, importantly, what was really at stake in this novel form of political violence, namely, the birth of a new, modern political subject. Along the way, in characterizing Karakozov's as an essentially modernist crime, Verhoeven traces how his act profoundly impacted Russian culture, including such touchstones as Repin's art and Dostoevsky's literature. By looking at the history that produced Karakozov and, in turn, the history that Karakozov produced, Verhoeven shows terrorism as a phenomenon inextricably linked to the foundations of the modern world: capitalism, enlightened law and scientific reason, ideology, technology, new media, and above all, people's participation in politics and in the making of history.

This single-volume selection of the letters of Margaret Fuller invites acquaintance with a great American thinker of the Transcendentalist circle.