Canada has received significant attention of late for initiating a government-sponsored medical marijuana program and for its flirtation with marijuana decriminalization. At best, these initiatives have contributed to Canada being seen as a reluctant ally by Washington, and, at worst, as a potential threat. The result of this impression is increasing American pressure to adopt more robust domestic security policies. At the same time, the Canadian public sees itself as holding unique values that differ from those held by its neighbour to the south. Supposedly these values are best reflected by a distinctive security outlook which produces reasonable responses to potential threats, a sharp contrast to the manic actions of the United States. Chasing Dragons challenges these presumptions of difference and exposes the security politics and policy that they make possible. Focusing on the issues surrounding illicit drugs, Kyle Grayson examines how discourses and practices of security policy actually contribute to the construction of Canadian national and cultural identity. This analysis is also relevant beyond Canada. Crucially, this book identifies the dangers of underestimating the centrality of race and geopolitics to civic conceptions of nationality in liberal societies. Chasing Dragons reconsiders the meaning of security. Additionally, it discusses avenues for resisting the insecurity produced by liberal states in the post-9/11 world. This critical approach reveals the pervasiveness of power in contemporary Canadian society, how this power is hidden, and the consequences for progressive social politics.

Gwen is a jumper, able to move spaceships through giant wyrmholes left in space. Her captain is obsessed with finding a space wyrm. But jumping is hard work and Gwen's captain pushes her to the brink.

Until it was pulled down, the Walled City was Hong Kong's most foreboding territory. It was a lawless place, dominated by the Triads, and which the police hesitated to enter. Strangers were unwelcome. Drug smuggling and heroin addiction flourished, as did prostitution and pornography, extortion and fear. When Jackie Pullinger set sail from England in 1966 she had no idea that God was calling her to the Walled City. Yet, as she spoke of Jesus Christ, brutal Triad gangsters were converted, prostitutes quit, and Jackie discovered a new treatment for drug addiction: baptism in the Holy Spirit.

Centuries ago, St. George fought and killed a dragon--or so the legend goes. The truth is somewhat different. George failed in his mission, and the Dragon still walks the Earth, protected by an undead army, hiding in the shadows and slaughtering men, women, and children for its prey. Each of George's descendants through time has been tasked with killing the Dragon, and each has failed. Twenty-five-year-old Georgia Quincey is the last of the line--the last, best hope for defeating the Dragon once and for all. But Georgia is also an addict, driven to the warm embrace of the needle by the weight of her responsibility and the loss of everything and everyone she has ever loved. Tracking her nemesis to the small town of Buckshot Hill, New Mexico for their final showdown, Georgia is about to discover the truth about the Dragon, a terrible secret that could put all life on Earth in peril.

On a very usual day, on a very usual school trip to Hampton Court Maze, there is a very unusually named girl called Victoriana Elizabeth Alice Royal. At least she can concentrate on history today and learn new facts as she wanders the maze. But little does Victoriana know that history will come alive for her in a way it never has before...

With Chasing the Dragon, Domenic Stansberry--the acclaimed writer of modern noir--introduces a new hardboiled series set in San Francisco. In this, the series opener, Stansberry tells a story written in clear homage to the masters of the genre, yet with an original, breathtaking voice all his own. A complicated, shadowy man in disgrace, Dante Mancuso leads a double life. Lately, though, the line he walks has become razor thin. Dante works for The Company, a nebulous security organization operating just this side of the law. Dante wants out, but it's a hard life to leave behind-rich with its own seductions, its own dark attractions. His latest assignment sends him back to his old North Beach neighborhood in San Francisco. First rendezvous? His estranged father's funeral in the dying heart of Little Italy. Here Dante picks up the strands of his old life and soon finds himself playing an even more elaborate game, a game that involves not just his duplicitous family, but also his ex-fiancée and his former colleagues in the San Francisco Police Department. Adept as he is, Dante can not play this game forever, pursued by the laconic Frank Ying, a Chinese detective anxious to know the secrets Dante hides. Caught between the sinister imperatives of The Company and the ghosts of his own past, Dante treads a harrowing path to a confrontation more lethal-and more surprising-than he could have imagined.

The text introduces Dr Manaka's major clinical and theoretical accomplishments by describing how the 'X-signal system' is the foundation of human topography, function, and response. In essence, the X-signal system defines qi, yin-yang, and the five phases as clinical events, rather than as abstract theories. The text gives Western readers the first complete description of this treatment system.

Chasing the Dragon is the story of a Boston Herald reporter's journey into Burma/Myanmar to interview the mysterious drug lord, Khun Sa. The features desk of an American newspaper may seem an unlikely launchpad for a journey into one of the world's most remote and dangerous regions, but for journalist Christopher Cox, it was where the story began. It would end nearly three years later in the almost inaccessible mountain fastnesses of Shan State, Burma, as Cox brought off a journalistic coup even hard-bitten foreign correspondents might envy: a rare personal audience with General Khun Sa, the man U.S. law enforcement dubbed "The Prince of Death," the man thought to control a third of the world's supply of heroin. Accompanied by an obsessed Vietnam vet who had given up everything in his single-minded search for American POWs left behind in Southeast Asia and an eccentric expat with close personal ties to the general, Cox was going to cross forbidden borders to enter a region long off-limits to Westerners. And armed with little more than a backpack stuffed with vodka, porno tapes, and cigarettes, he was going to succeed. His journey would take him deep into the Golden Triangle, a shadowy zone of banditry, drug smuggling, and the ghost armies of past wars. He would begin in the red-light district of Bangkok, with its sex bars and soaring HIV rates, then head up into northern borderlands newly discovers by package-tour groups, and finally cross a jungled no-man's-land into the world of the Shan, where tough tribesmen trade opium and precious gemstones for the arms they need to fight the Burmese.