Michael Bishop

In a clearing of the great forest of the planet Bosk Veld, a strange, ape-like species of alien, the Asadi, act out their almost-incomprehensible rituals, rainbow eyes flashing, spinning like pinwheels. Egon Chaney, in his anthropological study, 'Death and Designation Among the Asadi' has shown how their life-style has apparently degenerated from a level of complex technological sophistication and devolved to a primal simplicity. Long after his disappearance in the forest, his daughter, Elegy Cather, comes to Bosk Veld to carry on his studies of the Asadi where he left off. With her is an intelligent ape, Kretzoi, physically adapted to resemble the aliens. Together with Thomas Benedict, Chaney's old partner, Elegy begins to unravel the enigma of the Asadi. As Kretzoi insinuates himself into their rituals, so we are drawn into what is perhaps the most convincing portrayal of the alien yet.

This is a story about Brooklyn-about a young man who grew up in a neighborhood called Crown Heights. It is a story of an ordinary kid who fell in love with music; first the music he heard at home, then with the music of the streets. This street music had been bubbling up around the city for nearly 10 years before the kid discovered it at a block party one summer evening. It was loud, infectious, and alive. The crazy thing was this music was really familiar but different at the same time. This crazy new kind of music grabbed the boy's attention and lit a fire in him that would never be put out. This music didn't have a name but later became known as Hip Hop.

This is a story about Brooklyn-about a young man who grew up in a neighborhood called Crown Heights. It is a story of an ordinary kid who fell in love with music; first the music he heard at home, then with the music of the streets. This street music had been bubbling up around the city for nearly 10 years before the kid discovered it at a block party one summer evening. It was loud, infectious, and alive. The crazy thing was this music was really familiar but different at the same time. This crazy new kind of music grabbed the boy's attention and lit a fire in him that would never be put out. This music didn't have a name but later became known as Hip Hop.

This retrospective Michael Bishop collection of fifty short pieces (thirty-four stories, fifteen poems or prose-poems, and one amusing Moon-based play about writing SF, "The Grape Jelly and Mustard Method") spans the author's entire career, from "Asytages's Dream," written while Bishop was a college student, to "Yahweh's Hour," an acerbic but moving work of science-fantasy political satire composed in 2020. The collection's most distinctive attribute, however, lies in the fact that no contribution is longer than 3,000 words and most are shorter, a kind of Palm-of-the-Hand Stories for lovers of short fiction, heartfelt pieces that afford the reader as much meat as they do flash."A Few Last Words for the Late Immortals," set on Saturn's largest moon, Titan, embodies a requiem for the entire human species. "Philip K. Dick is dead, a lass" memorializes in verse science fiction's preeminent bard of the reality breakdown." "Love's Heresy" and "The Library of Babble" appear to be channeling the labyrinthine mind of Jorge Luis Borges, albeit with surprising jinks all their own. And the list of narrative explorations grows and grows . . .Humor and horror, music and whimsy, primates and pathology, mice and men, religion and rebellion: these stories and poems cover the waterfront of human experience while acknowledging the singularity of each human life.

In Earth and Mind : Dreaming, Writing, Being Michael Bishop examines the very recent work of nine major contemporary French and Francophone writers : Yves Bonnefoy, Jacqueline Risset, Salah Stétié, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Tahar Ben Jelloun, André Velter, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Jean-Claude Pinson and Jacques Dupin. The issue of writing’s complex relation to the experience of the earth is of central pertinence, involving questions of dreaming, voice, figurativity, emotion, desire, revolt, metaphysics, meaning, poiein and being. Discussion entails close reading of works as well as broad contextualisation and a sensitivity to interrelevancies from writer to writer. Bishop’s book is intended as a companion to his 2014 Dystopie et poïein, agnose et reconnaissance. Seize études sur la poésie française et francophone contemporaine.

A private citizen discovers compelling evidence that a decades-old murder in Nashville was not committed by the man who went to prison for the crime but was the result of a conspiracy involving elite members of Nashville society. Nashville 1964. Eighteen-year-old babysitter Paula Herring is murdered in her home while her six-year-old brother apparently sleeps through the grisly event. A few months later a judge's son is convicted of the crime. Decades after the slaying, Michael Bishop, a private citizen,stumbles upon a secret file related to the case and with the help of some of the world's top forensic experts--including forensic psychologist Richard Walter (aka "the living Sherlock Holmes")--he uncovers the truth. What really happened is completely different from what the public was led to believe. Now, for the very first time, Bishop reveals the true story. In this true-crime page-turner, the author lays out compelling evidence that a circle of powerful citizens were key participants in the crime and the subsequent cover-up. The ne'er-do-well judge's son, who was falsely accused and sent to prison, proved to be the perfect setup man. The perpetrators used his checkered history to conceal the real facts for over half a century. Including interviews with the original defense attorney and a murder confession elicited from a nursing-home resident, the information presented here will change Nashville history forever.

Philosophers defend theories of what well-being is but ignore what psychologists have learned about it, while psychologists learn about well-being but lack a theory of what it is. In The Good Life, Michael Bishop brings together these complementary investigations and proposes a powerful, new theory for understanding well-being. The network theory holds that to have well-being is to be "stuck" in a self-perpetuating cycle of positive emotions, attitudes, traits and accomplishments. For someone with well-being, these states -- states such as joy and contentment, optimism and adventurousness, extraversion and perseverance, strong relationships, professional success and good health -- build upon and foster each other. They form a kind of positive causal network (PCN), so that a person high in well-being finds herself in a positive cycle or "groove." A person with a lesser degree of well-being might possess only fragments of such a network -- some positive feelings, attitudes, traits or successes, but not enough to kick start a full-blown, self-perpetuating network. Although recent years have seen an explosion of psychological research into well-being, this discipline, often called Positive Psychology, has no consensus definition. The network theory provides a new framework for understanding Positive Psychology. When psychologists investigate correlations and causal connections among positive emotions, attitudes, traits, and accomplishments, they are studying the structure of PCNs. And when they identify states that establish, strengthen or extinguish PCNs, they are studying the dynamics of PCNs. Positive Psychology, then, is the study of the structure and dynamics of positive causal networks. The Good Life represents a new, inclusive approach to the study of well-being, an approach committed to the proposition that discovering the nature of well-being requires the knowledge and skills of both the philosopher in her armchair and the scientist in her lab. The resulting theory provides a powerful, unified foundation for future scientific and philosophical investigations into well-being and the good life.

The NEBULA AWARD-winning novel of time travel and the nature of humanity.

Since the Second World War, dignity has increasingly been recognized as an important moral and legal value. Although important examples of dignity-based arguments can be found in western European and North American case law and legal theory, the dignity jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court of South African is widely considered to be the most sweeping in the world. In part, this is related to the unique provisions of the South African Constitution in areas such as socioeconomic rights and allowing dignity to be taken into the sphere of economic justice as well as that of human rights. This book brings together the first sixteen years of constitutional jurisprudence addressing the meaning, role, and reach of dignity in the law of South Africa as a multiracial democracy. The case law is coupled with analysis from a range of selected contributors. The book will therefore be a crucial source for anyone seeking to evaluate dignity, whether in law or in human life more broadly.

The British Land Rover 4x4 has grown from 1948 to become one of the world's leading automotive brands. Exactly how it all came together back in the late 1940's and early 50's has been the topic of interest and debate for many years. This was until two Australian enthusiasts, Michael Bishop and Alex Massey quite literally stumbled across senior member of the original Land Rover development team, Arthur Goddard living in Brisbane, Australia in 2009. The discovery led to many of the myths and tales surrounding the early vehicles to be heard as it happened from Arthur's point of view. Then to a trip by Arthur to visit his old work place in Solihull and to the vehicle that he helped bring to life back in 1948. The book contains both a technical and human side to this incredible story as well as a great reunion between Arthur and his old colleague Spen King who went onto design the Range Rover in the 1960's. This is truly a unique story from the time of post War World two Britain to modern day Australia and how the iconic 4x4 grew up so quickly in the 1950's to become the world leader that it is today.

Ben Vautier, Niki De Saint Phalle, François Morellet, Louise Bourgeois, Alexandre Hollan, Claude Viallat, Sophie Calle, Bernard Pagès, Jean-Pierre Pincemin, Annette Messager, Gérard Titus-Carmel: eleven major French artists of the last forty years or so, examined in the light of their uniqueness and their rootedness, the specificities of their differing and at times overlapping plastic practices and the swirling and often highly hybridised conceptions entertained in regard to such practices. Thus does analysis range from discussion of the feisty, Fluxus-inspired, free-spirited funkiness of Ben Vautier’s work to the various modes of transcendence of trauma and haunting fear generated by the exceptional gestures of Niki de Saint Phalle and Louise Bourgeois, to the alyrical formalism yet imbued with irony and ludicity of François Morellet, through to the serene intensities of Alexandre Hollan’s vies silencieuses, the infinite a-signatures of Claude Viallat’s adventure in the sheer joy of a poiein of self-reflexive coloration, the powerfully elegant and muscular disarticulations of Bernard Pagès’ sculpture, the great sweep through art’s history implied by Jean-Pierre Pincemin’s chameleon-like gestures, the vast swirling programme of socio-psychological analysis the arts of Annette Messager and Sophie Calle offer in their radically distinctive manners, the obsessively serialised oeuvre of Gérard Titus-Carmel allowing a burrowing deep into the opaque logic of a real though dubious ‘presence to the world’.

The Endless Theory of Days: The Art and Poetry of Gérard Titus-Carmel seeks to set forth the case for the special, multiple genius of a man who, despite the experience of a biting melancholy resulting from loss, despite an ‘indefectible feeling of estrangement from the world’, despite, too, the corrosive sense of art’s, of languages’s, deceptiveness, has never lost sight of a curious duty to the shadows that haunt and that, with now a strangeness that smiles, yet beckon toward ‘the very place, finally clarified and recognised, of pure evidence. [The place,] that is, where beauty is named’. This place, Gérard Titus-Carmel may feel, lies no doubt impossibly beyond the strict locus of his art and his writing, but it is a place he has struggled with dignity and unceasingly deployed energy to bring to a semblance of incarnation in a vast plastic and poetical oeuvre that has stirred, and will continue to stir, the minds and hearts of all those – from Derrida and Bonnefoy, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Pascal Quignard to Jacques Dupin and Marie-Claire Bancquart, and countless others – who have witnessed its exquisitely solemn unfolding over, today, more than forty years.

Significant advances in geomatics and geomorphology are changing the way in which scientists study complex mountain environments. This book provides a critical treatment and evaluation of these recent developments. With the advent of advanced satellite sensors, high resolution satellite imagery and digital elevation, models now make possible quantitative analysis and modelling of the landscape. So it is becoming ever more important for geoscientists to integrate geomatics into their scientific investigation. This book is a "must" for any researcher actively working in geomatics, geomorphology and mountain systems. It will also be valuable to geologists and resource planners interested in the role of surface processes in complex orogens and resource assessment and sustainable development. From the reviews: "...edited by two active and well-respected researchers in the field of geomorphology, surveys a broad range of quantitative approaches to the analysis ofmountain systems. This book provides a critical treatment and evaluation of recent developments. This well-written and wide-ranging material provides valuable insights into the use of specialized GIScience techniques across the broad spectrum of mountain geomorphic research. This book is a welcome addition for advanced students and researchers actively working on the study of geomorphology in mountain systems. The text also will be valuable to a range of scientists interested in the role of surface processes in mountainous regions, and to planners interested in resource assessment and sustainable development." (Louis A. Scuderi, EOS, December 2004)