Alaska, 1987. In a world where Alaska is still a Russian possession, charter captain Grigoriy Grigorievich has a stained past—as a major in the Czar’s Troika Guard he was cashiered for disobeying a direct order. Now, ten years later, Grisha charters out to a Cossack and discovers his past has not only caught up with him, but is about to violently change his future, and the future of all nine of the nations of North America as well. Revolution against an oppressor, continent-wide alliances, and an epic struggle of a people to be free–spanning Alaska from the Southeastern Inside Passage to the frozen Yukon river, this is an epic tale of one man’s journey of redemption and courage to face old fears, new challenges, and help birth a new nation.

Noted German architect photographed American cityscapes in the 20s. New York's Times Square, Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn Bridge, Trinity Church, many other sites. Chicago's Michigan Avenue, Tribune Building, Federal Reserve Bank. Also buildings and locales in Buffalo and Detroit. Striking, dramatic views by trained observer. Newly translated introduction and captions. Reprinted from rare original edition.

For half of the twentieth century, there were two superpowers in the world and a gulf of silence between them. Knowledge of Russian culture was based on propaganda and rumour, and their knowledge of the West was no better. When the Soviet Union fell, Russians began to travel to America more regularly, and what they discovered was a very different place to the one they had imagined, but, at the same time, not exactly the one that Americans think they know. This collection of beautifully written and entertaining literary essays by a wide range of Russian writers - young and old, funny and sombre, angry and celebratory, many being translated for the first time - offers readers a unique chance to see Americans in a whole new light, to question how the American dream stands up to the American reality, and to experience the wit and generosity of today's Russian writers.

From the beginning of the American Occupation in 1945 to the post-bubble period of the early 1990s, popular music provided Japanese listeners with a much-needed release, channeling their desires, fears, and frustrations into a pleasurable and fluid art. Pop music allowed Japanese artists and audiences to assume various identities, reflecting the country's uncomfortable position under American hegemony and its uncertainty within ever-shifting geopolitical realities. In the first English-language study of this phenomenon, Michael K. Bourdaghs considers genres as diverse as boogie-woogie, rockabilly, enka, 1960s rock and roll, 1970s new music, folk, and techno-pop. Reading these forms and their cultural import through music, literary, and cultural theory, he introduces readers to the sensual moods and meanings of modern Japan. As he unpacks the complexities of popular music production and consumption, Bourdaghs interprets Japan as it worked through (or tried to forget) its imperial past. These efforts grew even murkier as Japanese pop migrated to the nation's former colonies. In postwar Japan, pop music both accelerated and protested the commodification of everyday life, challenged and reproduced gender hierarchies, and insisted on the uniqueness of a national culture, even as it participated in an increasingly integrated global marketplace. Each chapter in Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon examines a single genre through a particular theoretical lens: the relation of music to liberation; the influence of cultural mapping on musical appreciation; the role of translation in transmitting musical genres around the globe; the place of noise in music and its relation to historical change; the tenuous connection between ideologies of authenticity and imitation; the link between commercial success and artistic integrity; and the function of melodrama. Bourdaghs concludes with a look at recent Japanese pop music culture.

The deadliest parasite in the world's history threatens to make the human race extinct.

Reproduction of the original: Carl Scharnhorst, Abenteuer eines deutschen Knaben in Amerika by Armand