In the tradition of Isabel Allende, a family saga that explores the lives touched by the tragedies of Chile's vibrant history Imprisoned and tortured in the aftermath of the 1973 coup while her love, Manuel, is savagely murdered, Eugenia Aldunate is a rare survivor of the countless "disappeared" that would haunt Chile's collective memory for decades. While still in prison, Eugenia discovers she is pregnant and is exiled to Mexico, then the United States to raise her daughter alone, forbidden to return. She builds a quiet life for herself, but the scars on her arms to do not fade. Horrific nightmares plague Eugenia each night, while each morning she aches for her homeland. Nearly twenty years after her exile, Eugenia is called back to Chile to testify in Manuel's murder and seek justice for the others who disappeared. A rare living witness to these "camps," Eugenia must come to grips with the legacy of violence and trauma inflicted by Pinochet's dictatorship and find truth and solace in the stories of those she left behind. In the tradition of Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss and Julia Alvarez's In the Time of Butterflies, Beyond the Ties of Blood is a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit and the transcendence of family.

Human diversity is a rich tapestry that goes far beyond the superficial distinctions of race. Our shared humanity transcends the boundaries that society has imposed on us. By reducing individuals to mere categories based on external factors, we overlook the intricate web of connections that binds us all together. When we acknowledge the profound interconnectedness of humanity, we begin to appreciate the beauty of our shared heritage. Our blood carries within it the stories of countless generations, weaving a common thread that binds us all together. Through this shared ancestry, we find a sense of unity that transcends the artificial barriers of race and ethnicity. Blood, the life force that pulses through our veins, serves as a powerful symbol of our shared humanity. It is a tangible reminder that beneath the surface, we are all connected by a common bond that transcends societal divisions. Regardless of our differences in wealth, power, or social status, our blood flows with the same life-giving vitality, indifferent to the external labels that seek to define us. In its purest form, blood knows no prejudice or bias. It does not discriminate based on race, gender, or background. It simply fulfills its essential purpose of nourishing and sustaining every individual with equal strength and determination. This unifying force of nature underscores the fundamental equality that exists among all human beings, reminding us that we are more alike than we are different. The universal nature of blood serves as a powerful metaphor for the interconnectedness of humanity. Just as our blood circulates throughout our bodies, carrying oxygen and nutrients to every cell, so too does our shared humanity bind us together in a web of mutual dependence and support. In times of crisis or need, it is this shared life force that unites us, inspiring acts of compassion, solidarity, and kindness that transcend the artificial barriers that divide us. By recognising the unifying power of our blood type, we can strive to build a more inclusive and compassionate world. We can embrace our shared humanity and work together to create a more just and equitable society, where the life-giving force that flows through our veins serves as a reminder of our inherent interconnectedness and shared responsibility to one another. Our blood is a powerful emblem of harmony, that goes beyond its mere medical significance. It signifies a shared bond that unites us all, regardless of race or ethnicity. Fundamentally, it is our shared blood that paves the way for a future where connections run deeper than the constraints of race. Our blood holds the key to our future—a future, where blood ties extend far beyond the realm of our respective race, and where the fallacies of racial disparities are finally laid to rest.

The Victorians were passionate about family. While Queen Victoria's supporters argued that her intense commitment to her private life made her the more fit to mother her people, her critics charged that it distracted her from her public responsibilities. Here, Nelson focuses particularly on the conflicting and powerful images of family life that Victorians produced in their fiction and nonfiction—that is, on how the Victorians themselves conceived of family, which continues both to influence and to help explain visions of family today. Drawing upon a wide variety of 19th-century fiction and nonfiction, Nelson examines the English Victorian family both as it was imagined and as it was experienced. For many Victorians, family was exalted to the status of secular religion, endowed with the power of fighting the contamination of unchecked commercialism or sexuality and holding out the promise of reforming humankind. Although in practice this ideal might have proven unattainable, the many detailed 19th-century descriptions of the outlook and behavior appropriate to fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and other family members illustrate the extent of the pressure felt by members of this society to try to live up to the expectations of their culture. Defining family to include the extended family, the foster or adoptive family, and the stepfamily, Nelson considers different roles within the Victorian household in order to gauge the ambivalence and the social anxieties surrounding them—many of which continue to influence our notions of family today.

The genealogical model has a long-standing history in Western thought. The contributors to this volume consider the ways in which assumptions about the genealogical model--in particular, ideas concerning sequence, essence, and transmission--structure other modes of practice and knowledge-making in domains well beyond what is normally labeled "kinship." The detailed ethnographic work and analysis included in this text explores how these assumptions have been built into our understandings of race, personhood, ethnicity, property relations, and the relationship between human beings and non-human species. The authors explore the influences of the genealogical model of kinship in wider social theory and examine anthropology's ability to provide a unique framework capable of bridging the "social" and "natural" sciences. In doing so, this volume brings fresh new perspectives to bear on contemporary theories concerning biotechnology and its effect upon social life.

This text collates and examines the jurisprudence that currently exists in respect of blood-tied genetic connection, arguing that the right to identity often rests upon the ability to identify biological ancestors, which in turn requires an absence of adult-centric veto norms. It looks firstly to the nature and purpose of the blood-tie as a unique item of birthright heritage, whose socio-cultural value perhaps lies mainly in preventing, or perhaps engendering, a feared or revered sense of ‘otherness.’ It then traces the evolution of the various policies on ‘telling’ and accessing truth, tying these to the diverse body of psychological theories on the need for unbroken attachments and the harms of being origin deprived. The ‘law’ of the blood-tie comprises of several overlapping and sometimes conflicting strands: the international law provisions and UNCRC Country Reports on the child’s right to identity, recent Strasbourg case law, and domestic case law from a number of jurisdictions on issues such as legal parentage, vetoes on post-adoption contact, court-delegated decision-making, overturned placements and the best interests of the relinquished child. The text also suggests a means of preventing the discriminatory effects of denied ancestry, calling upon domestic jurists, legislators, policy-makers and parents to be mindful of the long-term effects of genetic ‘kinlessness’ upon origin deprived persons, especially where they have been tasked with protecting this vulnerable section of the population.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. This book examines, through a multi-disciplinary lens, the possibilities offered by relationships and family forms that challenge the nuclear family ideal, and some of the arguments that recommend or disqualify these as legitimate units in our societies.That children should be conceived naturally, born to and raised by their two young, heterosexual, married to each other, genetic parents; that this relationship between parents is also the ideal relationship between romantic or sexual partners; and that romance and sexual intimacy ought to be at the core of our closest personal relationships - all these elements converge towards the ideal of the nuclear family. The authors consider a range of relationship and family structures that depart from this ideal: polyamory and polygamy, single and polyparenting, parenting by gay and lesbian couples, as well as families created through assisted human reproduction.

Rwanda, this small country located in the center of Africa, was filled with human blood in 1994. Extremist Rwandans killed about 1 million people in only one hundred days, about 3 million fled Rwanda into exile in Democratic Republic of Congo ( ex-Zaire) where they would be killed by the Rwandan Patriotic Army from 1996 until 1998. This book is about a testimony of two boys who survived these massacres in which they had lost both their parents who were killed in the forests of the Congo. The older boy, 7 years old at that time, had to take care of his little brother, a newborn whose mother was killed only a couple hours after his birth. Miraculously, they both traveled the entire country of the Congo and came back to Rwanda. Once in their home country of Rwanda, in their own home village, the neighbours, who wanted to keep their inheritance, accused them of committing genocide in 1994. But at the time of this heinous crime, the older brother was only 5 years old, and his little brother was not born yet. To survive the attacks, harassment, and terror of these neighbours, ancient refugees from Uganda, they became "street kids" where I met them.

We thought we had gone through the topic in the first volume, those two games opened new pists of reflexions. The in-depth analysis of Hidetaka Miyazaki's Dark Souls saga continues with this volume 2, decoding the Bloodborne and Dark Souls III episodes. An indinspensale ebook for all the fans of the game Dark Souls ! EXTRACT "The project, christened Project Beast, began soon after the Astorias of the Abyss DLC was released in August 2012. At the time, FromSoftware was also beginning to build Dark Souls II, its cash cow. Miyazaki kept his distance from this sequel, which was handed off to Tomohiro Shibuya and Yui Tanimura, with support from the FromSoftware president and creator of King’s Field, Naotoshi Zin, who supervised the game system. On his end, Hidetaka Miyazaki formed a trusted team of regular collaborators, such as lead programmer Jun Itô (who had already filled this role for Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls), composer and lead sound designer Tsukasa Saitô (Armored Core games), and most of his regular artists: Daisuke Satake, Masanori Waragai and Hiroshi Nakamura. The success of Demon’s Souls, and the even greater success of Dark Souls, allowed FromSoftware to grow its ranks significantly. In total, no fewer than fifty programmers participated in the project, along with around twenty game system designers and fifty people working on visual creation (animation, scenery, characters, etc.). Thanks to financial support from Sony, many Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese studios were sub-contracted during the production to help with graphics and visuals." ABOUT THE AUTHORS Passionate about films and video games, Damien Mecheri joined the writers team of Gameplay RPG in 2004, writing several articles for the second special edition on the Final Fantasy saga. He continued his work with the team in another publication called Background, before continuing the online adventure in 2008 with the site Gameweb.fr. Since 2011, he has come aboard Third Éditions with Mehdi El Kanafi and Nicolas Courcier, the publisher’s two founders. Damien is also the author of the book Video Game Music: a History of Gaming Music. For Third Éditions, he is actively working on the “Level Up” and “Année jeu vidéo” collections. He has also written or co-written several works from the same publisher: The Legend of Final Fantasy X, Welcome to Silent Hill: a journey into Hell, The Works of Fumito Ueda: a Different Perspective on Video Games and, of course, the first volume of Dark Souls: Beyond the Grave. Curious by nature, a dreamer against the grain and a chronic ranter, Sylvain Romieu is also a passionate traveler of the real and the unreal, the world and the virtual universes, always in search of enriching discoveries and varied cultures. A developer by trade, he took up his modest pen several years ago to study the characteristics and richness of the marvelously creative world of video games. He writes for a French video game site called Chroniques-Ludiques, particularly on the topic of RPGs, his preferred genre.

My first Sire had risen from the dead. My current Sire had two assassins tailing him. And the only thing that could stand in the way of all this chaos was me. Carrie Ames settled comfortably enough into her life as a vampireuntil the night when, without warning, her Sire, Nathan–snarling, deranged and blood splattered–sought to massacre her. Just as suddenly, Nathan had fled from his occult bookshop, out into the darkness like a man possessed. Carrie knew then it was a point of no return: their blood tie, and her love for him, were screaming to her to get him back. But even with the aid of the more vampiric Max, finding–and saving–Nathan would be no simple task. His disappearance was just one element in a sinister underworld plot that stretched way beyond that momentary madness; their only clue a cryptic, mystical prophecy. Will it come true? Centuries–old vampire lore will be challenged, unspeakable horrors of treachery and retribution will be recounted, mortality and immortality threatened, and the darkest of occult forces will be invoked before the answer is known. And even then, Carrie will have to decide where her loyalties lie