About this product: Now, let the record show that Amazon.com is not, in fact, for dummies. It's good to see that Amazon.com for Dummies has finally arrived on our virtual shelves. This book will introduce even experienced Amazon.com customers to some of the less obvious features of the online emporium, such as corporate accounts, travel services, and the super-fun Friends & Favorites area. Read and learn from Mara Friedman how Amazon.com can provide you with information and (through zShops and the Associates program) make you money.
Friedman briefly covers Amazon's collection of Web Services, which are utilities available to programmers who want to embed Amazon.com functionality (like book searches and popularity monitoring) in their own applications. What's here is clear and stylish (and sometimes funny), and will certainly make you aware of features you don't know about yet. Amazon.com is unusual as a business in that it rewards exploration and study. This book acts as your guide through the electronic aisles. --David Wall
Topics covered: How to locate and buy the things you want. How to advertise and sell the things you have. How to meet people and have fun on Amazon.com.
About this product: Readers who associate "Amazon" primarily with a South American River or an online retailer are in for a big surprise. In On the Trail of the Women Warriors, Lyn Webster Wilde investigates the original Amazons, independent women warriors who lived without men. First mentioned by Homer, who considered them "women the equal of men," Amazon women fought bravely and ruthlessly in the Bronze and Iron Ages (2000 BC-300 BC), and sought out masculine society only once a year to conceive.
Webster Wilde concentrates her study on the Amazons of Greek mythology, and with clarity, wit, and detail, she examines various possibilities as to what the source of their images and myth may have been. Unlike most scholars, she examined--firsthand--Amazon remains: she traveled to the Ukraine, Russia, and the shores of the Black Sea to investigate graves of Scythian women warriors and the lost city of Themiscyra. Her findings reveal fascinating information about not only the Amazons and the societies that validated their myth, but also "our understanding of what women and men are, and what they can be, if we remove our ideas of what they should be." For example, in Classical Greece, women were utterly suppressed and misogyny was rife, while democracy ironically evolved. In the powerful myth of the Amazon and the subliminal recognition of female power as expressed in religious rites, however, women experienced the liberation denied them by society at large.
A glossary, maps, footnotes, photos, and timeline make her already accessible results even more relevant and coherent. So, did the Amazons exist as portrayed in Greek mythology? Probably not, the author concludes, but all the components of the myth most likely existed in different times and places, and "pieced together, they make an image close to the Amazon archetype." On the Trail of the Women Warriors allows readers to draw their own conclusions. --Bertina Loeffler Sedlack
About this product: For thousands of years, in the jungles of the Amazon, shamans have passed their wisdom of the medicinal values of rain forest plants from one generation to the next. The Shaman's Apprentice tells the story of a Tirio Indian boy who dreams of one day being the tribal shaman, and how he and his people learn the importance of their own knowledge about the healing properties of the rain forest.
About this product: Thalassa, the young and brave princess of the tribe of Lemnos, sees her civilization’s future threatened and her world completely shaken by the arrival in her island of Elephthera, an audacious Amazon from Aretias, who seeks help for her tribe and the whole nation of warrior women after a ravaging attack of Sarmatian nomads.
With the aid of their fellow sisters, they will embark on a thrilling mythological journey to save their own lives and their entire race. It will take them from Greek waters to Fezzan in the heart of the Sahara desert, and back to Aretias to face a final decisive battle that will define the course of their culture’s fate. Theirs will not only be a physical, but also a spiritual quest, through which Thalassa’s dark secret, hidden in her mysterious eyes, will be revealed, and an unbreakable bond will be created between these two courageous women.
About this product: The Modern Amazons: Warrior Women on Screen documents the public's seemingly insatiable fascination with the warrior woman archetype in film and on television. The book examines the cautious beginnings of new roles for women in the late fifties, the rapid development of female action leads during the burgeoning second-wave feminist movement in the late sixties and seventies, and the present-day onslaught of female action characters now leaping from page to screen. The book itself is organized into chapters that group women warriors into sub-genres, e.g., classic Amazons like Xena Warrior Princess and the women of the Conan films; superheroes and their archenemies such as Wonder Woman, Batgirl, and Catwoman; revenge films such as the Kill Bill movies; Sexploitation and Blaxploitation films such as Coffy and the Ilsa trilogy; Hong Kong cinema and warriors like Angela Mao, Cynthia Rothrock, and Zhang Ziyi; sci-fi warriors from Star Trek, Blade Runner, and Star Wars! ; supersleuths and spies like the Avengers and Charlie's Angels; and gothic warriors such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Kate Beckinsale in Underworld and Van Helsing. In addition, the book is lavishly illustrated with over 400 photos of these popular-culture icons in action, interesting articles and sidebars about themes, trends, weapons, style, and trivia, as well as a complete filmography of more than 150 titles.
About this product: Colored Amazons is a groundbreaking historical analysis of the crimes, prosecution, and incarceration of black women in Philadelphia at the turn of the twentieth century. Kali N. Gross reconstructs black women’s crimes and their representations in popular press accounts and within the discourses of urban and penal reform. Most importantly, she considers what these crimes signified about the experiences, ambitions, and frustrations of the marginalized women who committed them. Gross argues that the perpetrators and the state jointly constructed black female crime. For some women, crime functioned as a means to attain personal and social autonomy. For the state, black female crime and its representations effectively galvanized and justified a host of urban reform initiatives that reaffirmed white, middle-class authority.
Gross draws on prison records, trial transcripts, news accounts, and rare mug shot photographs. Providing an overview of Philadelphia’s black women criminals, she describes the women’s work, housing, and leisure activities and their social position in relation to the city’s native-born whites, European immigrants, and elite and middle-class African Americans. She relates how news accounts exaggerated black female crime, trading in sensationalistic portraits of threatening “colored Amazons,” and she considers criminologists’ interpretations of the women’s criminal acts, interpretations largely based on notions of hereditary criminality. Ultimately, Gross contends that the history of black female criminals is in many ways a history of the rift between the political rhetoric of democracy and the legal and social realities of those marginalized by its shortcomings.
About this product: Artist and musician, Joel Harris, should have been satisfied living his dreams. But he found himself feeling distracted and unsatisfied by modern American life. He wanted those elusive answers to life's questions - answers he had been looking for his whole life - from his childhood as a Latter Day Saint, through his service in the Marine Corps, and through his travels to Europe and Asia. Above all else - he wanted to find TRUTH. His book is a personal narrative of his search for truth. It is an account of a journey that took him into a small Shipibo village in Peru on the edge of the Amazon Rain Forest. There he worked with plant medicines and shamanic healers, encountered his deepest fears, looked into the darkest corners of his being and discovered TRUTH.
About this product: Wonder Woman has been a member of DC's Big Three heroes ever since she, Superman and Batman were the three icons to continue publication in the long night between the end of the Golden Age proper circa 1949 and the beginning of the Silver Age of superhero comics in the late 1950s. However, while Diana has always had iconic value, she has never been anywhere near as popular as her alleged co-equals, and much of her popularity rests on a campy 1970s TV show that is about as good as representation of the character as Adam West is of Batman. Even in comics, she has always struggled in the sales department. In 2006, however, her title was safe in the hands of Greg Rucka, arguably the best Wonder Woman writer ever. So, of course, DC bounced him, bringing in Allan Heinberg for a revamp that horribly regressed the character to her terrible Silver Age status quo, and, aided by the normally more-than-competent Geoff Johns on "Infinite Crisis", horribly misrepresented the character's post-Crisis history. And then DC unleashed "Amazons Attack", which I believe to be the worst crossover in comics history, even worse than Marvel's "The Crossing", which eventually had to be written off as a deliberate attempt by a villain to confuse the heroes.
One could spend hours cataloguing all of the problems with this crossover, but I will endeavour to be brief:
1) The structure; major events take place in "Wonder Woman", not included in this collection (which also results in Jodi Picoult's collected edition ending on a cliffhanger, necessitating that readers buy another book; my advice: save your money), and there's no clear reading order for the issues (normally, publication order would give a good indication, but that doesn't work here, and, anyway, these are collected editions, not monthly comics).
2) The wholesale rape of the Amazons; as if Hercules wasn't bad enough, Diana's people, once held up as paragons of wisdom who had found a better way to live, are now shown to be a clutch of barbarian murderers who blindly do what their resurrected former Queen tells them to do, even when a known enemy was responsible for her resurrection. Diana's mom Hippolyta gets at least a partial out in this story, but she is written as a raving lunatic (and everyone seems to have forgotten that she wasn't queen anymore when she died).
3) The portrayal of Diana and all the other heroes as a bunch of pathetic morons who refuse to fight the Amazons, basically because if they actually engaged them they would wipe the floor with them; we're told that their first priority is "rescue", rather than confronting the invaders, when logic would dictate that getting rid of them would eliminate the need for rescue. The heroes fail at every turn in this story, and, what's more, act superior about it (Black Canary, at one point, proclaims that the cavalry has arrived, having arrived too late to stop a USAF pilot from being executed by Amazons; generally, Dinah, the cavalry saves people).
4) The ending, which I won't get into here, because it hurts to think about; sufficed to say that it has already attained reputation as legendarily nonsensical among comics fans.
2007 was hands-down the worst year in Wonder Woman's 66-year-history, and this story was a huge part of it. Avoid this at all costs.
About this product: I have heard talk about the desire to canonize Pope John Paul II. I would like to suggest that we canonize this lovely and courageous woman. She certainly radiated the love of Jesus to the very end.
About this product: Inspired by Penguin’s innovative Great Ideas series, our new Great Journeys series presents the most incredible tours, voyages, treks, expeditions, and travels ever written—from Isabella Bird’s exaltation in the dangers of grizzlies, rattlesnakes, and cowboys in the Rocky Mountains to Marco Polo’s mystified reports of a giant bird that eats elephants during his voyage along the coasts of India. Each beautifully packaged volume offers a way to see the world anew, to rediscover great civilizations and legends, vast deserts and unspoiled mountain ranges, unusual flora and strange new creatures, and much more.
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