James Gilbert

Trouble always seems to find Amanda Pennyworth, the American consul to the resort city of Puerto Vallarta. First on a romantic outing to a secluded cove along the Mexican coast where the beautiful Danielle Maglin is found bludgeoned to death; and then at an elegant dinner party thousands of miles away only days later with the killer surely present, Amanda finds herself drawn into the search to find the culprit's identity. When Danielle's close friend Terrence Blanchard is found dead from an apparent suicide, Amanda is convinced that the killer has struck again. But there are too many possible suspects and just the usual list of motives: jealousy, greed, sex, money, and hatred. Nothing seems to make sense. Working with the police first in Mexico and then in the United States, Amanda is sure that the killer was among the group of friends on an excursion to Puerto Vallarta from the small city near Chicago. But which one? The police are stymied when their forensic investigation leads nowhere. It is up to Amanda to find out why Danielle and Terrence had to die.

Murder at Amapas Beach

Mohanbir Sawhney

Robert Kaplan

Michael Porter

Orit Gadiesh

Peter Tufano

Kathy Eisenhardt

Don Sull

Harvard Business Review on Advances in Strategy

Tales of Little Egypt is a fictional account of small town America and the peculiar, ordinary, eccentric, sturdy, cunning, and contented characters who created it. Set in the years between the Civil War and the great Influenza Plague of 1918, this is a pageant of imaginary people--the narratives of a score of men, women, and children whose lives illustrate the immense changes and challenges of that turbulent era. This was a period of great events and outsized personalities: splendid World's Fairs attended by millions, radical new inventions, devastating wars and violent revolutions; leaders like Theodore Roosevelt. But underneath were the people whose stories are as fascinating, troubled, compelling and triumphant as anything that has occupied the attention of historians. There was the town doctor, the local sheriff, the jeweler, the self-appointed matron of morality, a young black girl and her mother, a boy who ran off to the circus and many others: lovers, criminals, teachers, ministers, and odd characters. As a community, their lives and ambitions, their failures and tragedies--sometimes at their own making--and their small successes intersected and became a part of each other. Marion, Illinois is both a real place and the imaginary location for these stories. Set in the center of Little Egypt, Marion is a county seat in the middle of this unique area, a river delta wedged between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. These two great highways of American immigration and trade sent millions of settlers North and South, East and West and back. The few who stopped off to make it their home created something distinctive. Theirs was a society that reflected the crossroads it occupied and the mix of cultures and sections that it represented. It was both nowhere and everywhere. Therefore their struggles to make sense of this world exemplify the tale and the memory of modern America in the making.

Tales of Little Egypt

Set amid a reclusive community of aging yachts in mid-Atlantic, The Admiral is a swashbuckling tale of people riding out the holocaust on land caused by a risen sea, the effects of climate change and social collapse. The changes are still happening and Aqual, the scarred, tenacious granddaughter of The Admiral, founder of Akkadia, believes her people are becoming too complacent, too comfortable with their lives despite the ominous signs around them. When she breaks all Akkadian law and custom and rescues the crew of a small sloop under attack by pirates, she sets in motion a chain of events that change forever her view of the world, and perhaps the course of human history. Accused of treason, she escapes her captivity to lead her tiny, outnumbered Akkadian navy in a furious sea-battle against a pirate armada. Her vindication ultimately comes, not from her extraordinary victory, but from the revelations of the sloop's rescued crew about new perils from ongoing climate change. And she learns The Admiral had long ago foreseen the role she would play in his vision to rebuild a saner, wiser civilization atop the ruins of the old world. - See more at: http: //christophermatthewspub.com/admiral/#sthash.PAJUN6lG.dpu

The Admiral

Peter J. Kuznick

This anthology of essays questions many widespread assumptions about the culture of postwar America. Illuminating the origins and development of the many threads that constituted American culture during the Cold War, the contributors challenge the existence of a monolithic culture during the 1950s and thereafter. They demonstrate instead that there was more to American society than conformity, political conservatism, consumerism, and middle-class values. By examining popular culture, politics, economics, gender relations, and civil rights, the contributors contend that, while there was little fundamentally new about American culture in the Cold War era, the Cold War shaped and distorted virtually every aspect of American life. Interacting with long-term historical trends related to demographics, technological change, and economic cycles, four new elements dramatically influenced American politics and culture: the threat of nuclear annihilation, the use of surrogate and covert warfare, the intensification of anticommunist ideology, and the rise of a powerful military-industrial complex. This provocative dialogue by leading historians promises to reshape readers' understanding of America during the Cold War, revealing a complex interplay of historical norms and political influences.

Rethinking Cold War Culture

Storm Chaser: The Terry Law Story captures the remarkable life of Dr. Terry Law, whose 50 year career in Christian missions and humanitarian work has taken him from Soviet KGB interrogations to Moscow's evening news, and from Vatican concerts with Pope John Paul II to secret diplomatic missions in Iraq. More than a riveting adventure, Storm Chaser includes key principles to help readers go beyond surviving life's storms and discover that "in the eye of every storm lies the power of God to change your world."

The Terry Law Story

Storm Chaser

While the 1950s have been popularly portrayed-on television and in the movies and literature-as a conformist and conservative age, the decade is better understood as a revolutionary time for politics, economy, mass media, and family life. Magazines, films, newspapers, and television of the day scrutinized every aspect of this changing society, paying special attention to the lifestyles of the middle-class men and their families who were moving to the suburbs newly springing up outside American cities. Much of this attention focused on issues of masculinity, both to enforce accepted ideas and to understand serious departures from the norm. Neither a period of "male crisis" nor yet a time of free experimentation, the decade was marked by contradiction and a wide spectrum of role models. This was, in short, the age of Tennessee Williams as well as John Wayne. In Men in the Middle, James Gilbert uncovers a fascinating and extensive body of literature that confronts the problems and possibilities of expressing masculinity in the 1950s. Drawing on the biographies of men who explored manhood either in their writings or in their public personas, Gilbert examines the stories of several of the most important figures of the day-revivalist Billy Graham, playwright Tennessee Williams, sociologist David Riesman, sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, Playboy literary editor Auguste Comte Spectorsky, and TV-sitcom dad Ozzie Nelson-and allows us to see beyond the inherited stereotypes of the time. Each of these stories, in Gilbert's hands, adds crucial dimensions to our understanding of masculinity the 1950s. No longer will this era be seen solely in terms of the conformist man in the gray flannel suit or the Marlboro Man.

Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s

Men in the Middle

An American tourist is murdered in a Mexican gay sauna, and Amanda Pennyworth, the American consul to Puerto Vallarta, risks her career and her life to find the culprit. Amanda Pennyworth works with a junior officer of the Tourist Police in search of suspects in the secretive underworld of a beautiful resort. When a young Mexican boy is arrested on flimsy evidence, Amanda is convinced it is a terrible mistake. But no one is willing to listen to her: not the arrogant chief of police; not the boy's parents who seem to blame her for the murder; and not the cynical American Ambassador who only wants to avoid an international incident. It's up to her. In Murder in the Olympiad by James Gilbert, we travel to the popular resort city of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and follow Amanda as she is drawn into the search for the killer of a young American. When she finally identifies the killer, she also discovers some very unpleasant truths about the Foreign Service in which she serves.

Murder at the Olympiad

In this intriguing history, James Gilbert examines the confrontation between modern science and religion as these disparate, sometimes hostile modes of thought clashed in the arena of American culture. Beginning in 1925 with the infamous Scopes trial, Gilbert traces nearly forty years of competing attitudes toward science and religion. "Anyone seriously interested in the history of current controversies involving religion and science will find Gilbert's book invaluable."—Peter J. Causton, Boston Book Review "Redeeming Culture provides some fascinating background for understanding the interactions of science and religion in the United States. . . . Intriguing pictures of some of the highlights in this cultural exchange."—George Marsden, Nature "A solid and entertaining account of the obstacles to mutual understanding that science and religion are now warily overcoming."—Catholic News Service "[An] always fascinating look at the conversation between religion and science in America."—Publishers Weekly

American Religion in an Age of Science

Redeeming Culture

The youth culture is on everyone's lips today, as pressures build to ban controversial song lyrics, reintroduce school prayer, and prohibit teenagers' access to contraceptives. It's not the first time Americans have been outraged over the seuction of the innocent.. When James Dean and Marlon Brando donned their motorcycle jackets and adopted alienated poses in Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden, and The Wild One, in the 1950's, so did countless numbers of American teenagers. Or so it seemed to their parents. American teenagers were looking and acting like juvenile delinquents. By mid-decade, the nation had reached a pitch of near obsession with the harmful effects of film, radio, comic books, and television on American youth. Experts across the land denounced mass culture as depriving young people of their innocence and weakening their parents' hold on them. By the end of the decade, the obsession had ended, although the actual numbers of juvenile delinquents had apparently risen. A Cycle of Outrage explores the 1950's debate over the media and juvenile delinquency among parents, professionals, and the creators of mass culture themselves. In this groundbreaking study, James Gilbert sees the attempt to blame the media as part of a larger reaction of discomfort echoed in recent debates over censorship. The book examines how the central phenomena of the 1950's--the development of youth culture and the rise of a mass media society--became intertwined and confused and argues that young people ceased to be a threat as they were recognized to be a market.

America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s

A Cycle of Outrage

Discusses the utopian societies of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, the worker's community at Pullman, and Dwight Moody's World's Fair evangelical crusade

James Gilbert

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