This book is an overview of the ongoing revolution in tabletop gaming design and culture, which exploded to unprecedented levels of vitality in the 21st century, leading to new ways of creating, marketing, and experiencing a game. Designers have become superstars, publishers have improved quality control, and the community of players is expanding. Most importantly, new and old players have started engaging with the games in a more meaningful way. The book explores the reasons for these changes. It describes how games have begun to keep players engaged until the end. It analyzes the ways in which traditional mechanics have been reimagined to give them more variety and complexity, and reviews the unprecedented mechanics found and perfected. Very interesting is the exploration of how games have performed novel tasks such as reducing conflict, fostering cooperation, creating aesthetic experiences, and telling stories. The book is aimed at scholars, dedicated and aspiring fans, and game designers who want to expand their toolbox with the most up-to-date innovations in the profession.

The author of Carolans Farewell and The Last House of Ulster brings to the essay form the same restlessness and originality that marks his novels and non-fiction. Whether exploring the waterways of Thailand or the streets of his childhood in suburban Toronto, meditating on raising children in post-9/11 Asia or the music of good prose, Charles Forans writing is fresh, alert, and free of convention. In Join the Revolution, Comrade, a collection of twenty travel and literary essays, Foran visits places in Vietnam that have colonized by western war films. Charlie Dont Surf but you Can! reads a brochure offering an Apocalypse Now tour. He talks to Shanghai residents about their colossal city and commiserates with the people of Bali about the effects of terrorist bombs on their island. Karma teaches that all you can do is behave honourably in the incarnation you have been given, a waiter tells him. In Beijing he looks up old friends he had known back in 1989 during the days before and after the June 4th massacre. Join the revolution, Comrade, a friend had loved to say, quoting a line from a Bertolucci film. In a dozen literary essays, Foran also encounters Miguel de Cervantes and the Buddha of Compassion, the Irish trickster Flann OBrien and the pumped-up American Tom Wolfe. He maps the geography of Canadian literature and pinpoints the inner-Newfoundland of Wayne Johnston. He defends the novel against those who would tame it and uses an ancient Chinese philosopher to explain how one imagination his own works.

Written by two bestselling technical authors, Inside the PowerPC Revolution takes readers inside the design and development of the exciting PowerPC technology that promises to and entertainingly written to be read, enjoyed, and understood by non-technical as well as technical readers.

There is a new and exciting revolution coming. It will dramatically change our landscape, our environment, our economy, and our lives. It will provide each and every one of us with a truly unique sense of independence. It will mark the end of oil-influenced politics, and the beginning of a bright new millennium - a time in which we all will have our own unlimited sources of nonpolluting energy. However, it will not come without a struggle, as history has already shown. The Coming Energy Revolution provides us with an intriguing and insightful look at the forces behind the free-energy movement. The Coming Energy Revolution introduces us to some of the inventors, both past and present, who have insisted that we are surrounded by a sea of energy that we can tap once we have learned nature's secrets. Conventional science says that space is cold and still, and that what energy does exist cannot be put to useful work. The new-energy innovators say that conventional science is wrong, and that new-energy research is being suppressed by a combination of scientific inertia and corporate self-interest. But the suppression cannot last, as this book shows - there are simply too many inventors who are close to new-energy breakthroughs. The Coming Energy Revolution examines the technologies on which these inventors are working. There are magnets that can redirect the energy of space. There is a gentler form of nuclear energy that can take place on a table top. There is hydrogen, a clean, abundant fuel that can be produced wherever needed. There is a form of hydropower that does not rely on massive dams. And there are other forms of new energy. The Coming Energy Revolution looks at them all, and at thekinds of changes that will be needed to overcome the roadblocks between our old-energy present and our new-energy future.

"POWERFUL...STRIKING...In a series of sharp, spare stories, Norman Wong chronicles a family's escape from China to Macao, Hong Kong and, eventually, Hawaii." --The New York Times Book Review With rich images and subtle, beautiful prose, Cultural Revolution tells a classic story of immigrant family ties and coming of age in a unique new voice: that of a gay Chinese-American man. In eleven linked stories, Norman Wong observes the fragile world of the resilient Lau family through the eyes of their "number one son," Michael, who must bear the weight of the family name while hiding his desire for white men. Bold and evocative, Cultural Revolution heralds the arrival of a major new voice in American fiction. "A MOVING COLLECTION by a gifted new writer with the wit and sympathy to make four generations of family experience all sound like his own...[Cultural Revolution] recalls a number of fine debut volumes from writers like Maxine Hong Kingston, Gish Jen, Cynthia Kadohata, and David Wong Louie." --The Village Voice "COMPELLING...COMPASSIONATE...Wong has a strong, distinct, storyteller's voice, he has a vision, and a real point of view." --Hungry Mind Review "A UNIQUE VIEW of a world that is both distant and remarkably close to our own. Norman Wong writes with an affecting directness, and with vigor." --Oscar Hijuelos "SAD, HONEST, TOUCHING, FUNNY...Wong speaks of universal experiences in Cultural Revolution...It's a book that anybody could relate to and everybody should read." --The Advocate

"Lovell delights, astonishes, and challenges us with her insightful new readings of early American paintings and material culture objects."--"Journal of the Early Republic"

This series was specially written and designed for students to support science, history and social studies research in Grades 7-10. Each volume contains about 90 profiles of scientists throughout history and from all parts of the world. Sidebar stories, timelines, illustrations, and marginal definitions illuminate the text and each volume concludes with a comprehensive index. This continuing series will introduce two volumes each year covering scientists, events and issues.