The virus in Pete's computer hasn't been sent to crash it but to prepare it. His eighteenth birthday looms and he is about to discover that his genes are special - to the power of seven. The effect is magical, the stuff of myth and legend, but difficult to control and not welcome.

On March 31, 1929, seventy-seven men began an epic 3,554-mile footrace across America that pushed their bodies to the breaking point. Nicknamed the “Bunion Derby” by the press, this was the second and last of two trans-America footraces held in the late 1920s. The men averaged forty-six gut-busting miles a day during seventy-eight days of nonstop racing that took them from New York City to Los Angeles. Among this group, two brilliant runners, Johnny Salo of Passaic, New Jersey, and Pete Gavuzzi of England, emerged to battle for the $25,000 first prize along the mostly unpaved roads of 1929 America, with each man pushing the other to go faster as the lead switched back and forth between them. To pay the prize money, race director Charley Pyle cobbled together a traveling vaudeville company, complete with dancing debutantes, an all-girl band wearing pilot outfits, and blackface comedians, all housed under the massive show tent that Pyle hoped would pack in audiences. Kastner’s engrossing account, often told from the perspective of the participants, evokes the remarkable physical challenge the runners experienced and clearly bolsters the argument that the last Bunion Derby was the greatest long-distance footrace of all time.

Bats, baronets and Battle is more than just about cricket. This is a history full of colourful characters – eccentric baronets with a fondness for gambling, forthright women who wished to take their role and the game beyond an excuse to wear a pretty dress, and brothers from local villages who played the sport at the highest levels home and abroad. If Sussex was the 'cradle' for the earliest of cricket, the villages around Battle were there at the game's birth. From Georgian times and the murky world of 18th century politics, Tim Dudgeon traces Battle cricket's role from its role in 18th century Georgian gambling though the fear of 19th century rural unrest and the dawn of the professional game to the tragic impact of two world wars and into the modern era. The story he uncovers is an intriguing one that has local people and communities at its heart, but throws light on their links with events and forces that have shaped our world today.

Generally regarded as one of the most tragic tales in the history of rock music, the story of Badfinger makes for an impressively sombre Hollywood-style film script. A Welsh and Liverpudlian hybrid, the band were signed to Apple Records, became protégés of The Beatles and produced four global hit singles. Two of its members also co-wrote the now perennial pop standard ‘Without You’, covered most notably by Harry Nilsson. Yet Badfinger found themselves plagued by ruinous misfortune and through a combination of unscrupulous business management, record label neglect and just plain bad luck, the dream soon lay in tatters with the band’s story ultimately culminating in the suicides of two of its members, Pete Ham and Tom Evans. This book helps redress the band’s legacy and refocuses some much-needed attention on the brilliance of their music. It casts a keen critical eye over their entire musical output – albums and singles – recorded and released during their lifetime. This detailed and definitive guide not only examines and assesses the recordings but also provides valuable historical context for each album and while not ignoring the financial and legal issues that blighted the band, this book ultimately focuses on Badfinger’s considerable musical legacy. Robert Day-Webb graduated from the University of Birmingham and subsequently worked in the publishing industry for sixteen years, undertaking a wide variety of editorial and writing roles. A self-confessed music, movie and TV buff, Robert has also had several personal reflection essays published in a number of music and TV-related anthology books. He currently lives in Gloucester, UK, with his wife, Marie, their two children, Joshua and Lauren, and an extremely oversized CD collection.

From the late 1870s to mid-1880s, Tombstone, Arizona, enjoyed impressive growth and prosperity as a result of the discovery of major silver deposits nearby. As in many boomtowns in the American West, its sudden prosperity attracted businessmen, outlaws, grifters, gamblers, prostitutes, and preachers. It wasn’t long before there was a desperate need for lawmen and law enforcement. Outlaws like Johnny Ringo, Curly Bill Brocius, Buckskin Frank Leslie, Burt Alvord, and a handful of other lesser known criminals, all faced off with the legendary lawmen, including the Earp brothers—Wyatt, Virgil, Morgan, and Warren—who to one degree or another represented law enforcement in this wild, no-holds-barred town. In addition to Tombstone’s reputation as a setting for colorful outlaw-lawman confrontations, it is also associated with a number of compelling and baffling mysteries. Ghosts are reported to roam the old taverns, hotels, opera houses, and other buildings. Eerie and unexplainable sounds and sights have been associated with Boot Hill, the famous cemetery, as well as the New City Cemetery. Cold Case: The Tombstone Mysteries investigates the real stories behind the mysteries, including unsolved crimes that await a solution. These old west cold cases continue to attract researchers and investigators to the town too tough to die.

Literacy Practices in Transition explores the connections between local, situated literacy practices and global processes of mobility in the geographical space of the Nordic countries, an example of contemporary mobile societies. The detailed empirical analyses show how these connections affect individuals, practices and policies; how the global and local meet in discourses and practices and how people need to (re)negotiate their way in the complex and messy spaces in which they move. The volume challenges current trends in the global standardization of language and literacy education. Instead, it promotes the idea of literacy as a multiple, multilingual, multimodal and constantly contestable and negotiable phenomenon, which calls for the development of language and literacy education that is sensitive to the needs and experiences of the individual actors.