Maathai lays bare the complex and multi-layered culture of the continent of Africa offering optimistic yet feasible ways to improve the quality of life that literally start from the ground up. Maathai analyzes the major impediments to development at three key levels-- international, national, and individual. By stressing personal responsibility, Maathai focuses on what Africans can do for themselves to empower individual change at the community level....

"A sweeping yet intimate portrait of modern China told through the lives of four ordinary women striving for a better future in a highly unequal society"--

With visually stunning landscapes and immersive sound, GODS OF MEXICO is a poetic survey of the vast landscapes and rich diversity of several communities of rural Mexico. Using richly saturated color and hypnotic black-and-white interludes, filmmaker Helmut Dosantos takes viewers through salt pans, deserts, highlands, jungle, and underground mines—paying tribute to those who fight to preserve their cultural identity amidst the shadows of modernization....

Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. Forced to take a back-breaking job at Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he discovers that his fellow miners are ill, hungry, and in debt, unable to feed and clothe their families. When conditions in the mining community deteriorate even further, Lantier finds himself leading a strike that could mean starvation or salvation for all....

Examines women's public and private lives, roles, activities, and influences and their social, economic, legal, political, and literary status in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, from the late Bronze Age to the death of Constantine.

A Tragic Accident. 1866: at an exclusive school in Victorian England, a schoolboy drowns in a mysterious accident. His death and its aftermath will have repercussions for decades to come... A Fierce Rivalry. There on that fateful day were Hugh Pilaster and his older cousin Edward, heirs of a powerful banking dynasty with connections that reach from London to far-afield colonies. A Lethal Secret. The cousins find themselves locked in a vicious competition...

Acclaimed fiction writer Ali Hosseini's debut short-story collection in English explores Iran's landscape, its culture, and the undercurrent of change affecting its people-both in Iran and the United States--

A beautiful new clothbound edition of Alexandre Dumas's classic novel of wrongful imprisonment, adventure and revenge. Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of the Château d'If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and becomes determined not only to escape but to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible...