Elodie is 17. She’s French. She washes her legs before going to church. She believes in God. Otto is 15. He’s a German soldier. Bulletproof skin. Eyes that could pierce tanks. He was part of a firing squad today. It’s 1944. Outside, the world around them is exploding. Inside, the room shakes. Elodie and Otto’s naked bodies touch.

The book presents an alternative society which would emerge sometime in the distant future. It first attempts a theory of how societies come into existence. The Future Society then goes on to explain how through higher values of love, compassion and enlightenment there are infinite possibilities for the society to rise to higher and higher existential planes, and at the same time, how degradations in values can degenerate the societies to abysmal levels. The Future Society is conceptualized as a love and meditation based society which has transcended all parochialisms and risen to amazingly high levels of peace, prosperity and enlightenment. Its ways of living, doing and thinking are so dramatically different than those of ours that it will drive anyone into amazement and delightful wonderment!

American citizens assume that the future for this country will be a future much like the past-beautiful in many respects. This optimistic view is now countered by those who see a country in decay, struggling to address problems in health care, education, the environment, international affairs, and other sectors. This book calls on citizens and their leaders to build the future they most desire. The future should not happen to citizens but instead be created by citizens. In part one, this book examines the reasons for future building and the processes for doing so through interactive public sector-private sector dialogue and by applying methods of continuous improvement, reengineering, and visioning. In part two, Ziegenfuss presents scenarios of America's future that include the country's points of decay, trends, vision, and strategies in each of the "parts of America," meaning energy, health care, transportation, business, housing and urban development, education, arts and entertainment, science, environment, agriculture, international affairs and defense, and law and justice. Public and private citizens, especially students, teachers, and planners are encouraged to lead the debates with hope and vision, defining the future they most desire. Book jacket.

Donna is convinced that Eric is the man she needs to get her life back on track. But then Ridge returns to Forrester Creations determined, it seems, to tease and taunt her. When Donna, Eric and Ridge travel to the South of France for a photo shoot, Donna thinks that, finally, Eric is about to reveal his love for her. But a yachting accident changes everything ...

The Beautiful, Winged Madness is a state both inspired and mad where one discovers sublime truths and terrifying illusions. It is the domain of Guy, a poet and a painter, and Anna, a performance artist who often wears personas--metaphorical costumes. In present-day Los Angeles, the two artists confront love and pain, beauty and terror, visions and madness, death and rebirth, and the raptures of flesh and spirit in a unique story that takes the reader on an extraordinary odyssey.

This is a public health text aimed at bridging the gap between current public health values and skills and those required to tackle future challenges.

Leaders need to renew and recharge regularly to lead more effectively. Forget the squeezed hour of coaching on Zoom or in a busy office – this book invites coaches and leaders alike to re-energise their style of executive coaching by stepping beyond traditional techniques and out of the office for an executive day retreat. Based on the award-winning framework of the Positive Vision Day programme, this accessible book introduces a new approach to coaching, combining time-out in a natural and beautiful setting with positive psychology. The book is designed to inspire coaches and leaders to take a day away from the desk, step into nature and renew their energy and purpose. As a coach, you are needed more than ever to help leaders align their strengths and values to their personal vision. This book does just that, and provides: Detailed exercises linking psychological underpinnings to the goals of each exercise, including how to avoid classic coaching pitfalls. Journaling prompts for self-reflection and self-coaching. Easy-to-understand models, templates, scripts and action steps for every stage of the process. The approach used in the book will be of particular interest to not only leadership and executive coaches, and internal executive coaches, but also career, entrepreneurship, business, wellbeing and life coaches, as well as leaders themselves who are mid-career or at a career or psychological crossroads.

Industry analysts are in the business of shaping the technological and economic future. They attempt to 'predict' what will become the next big thing; to spot new emerging trends and paradigms; to decide which hi-tech products will win out over others and to figure out which technology vendors can deliver on their promises. In just a few short years, they have developed a surprising degree of authority over technological innovation. Yet we know very little, if anything about them. This book seeks to explain how this was achieved and on what this authority rests. Who are the experts who increasingly command the attention of vendor and user communities? What is the nature of this new form of technical and business knowledge? How Industry Analysts Shape the Digital Future offers the first book length study into this rarely scrutinized form of business expertise. Contributions to this volume show how, from a small group of mainly North American players which arose in the 1970s, Gartner Inc. has emerged as clear leader of a $6 billion industry that involves several hundred firms worldwide. Through interviews and observation of Gartner Inc. and other industry analyst firms, the book explores how these firms create their predictions, market classifications and rankings, as well as with how these outputs are assessed and consumed. The book asks why many social scientists have ignored the proliferation of these new forms of management and technical expertise. In some cases scholars have 'deflated' this kind of business acumen, portraying it as arbitrary knowledge whose methods and content do not deserve enquiry. The valuable exception here has been the path-breaking work on the 'performativity' of economic, financial or accounting knowledge. Drawing upon recent performativity arguments, the book argues the case for a Sociology of Business Knowledge.

In this elegant new study Galen Johnson retrieves the concept of the beautiful through the framework of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics. Although Merleau-Ponty seldom spoke directly of beauty, his philosophy is essentially about the beautiful. In Johnson’s formulation, the ontology of Flesh as element and the ontology of the Beautiful as elemental are folded together, for Desire, Love, and Beauty are part of the fabric of the world’s element, Flesh itself, the term at which Merleau-Ponty arrived to replace Substance, Matter, or Life as the name of Being. Merleau-Ponty’s Eye and Mind is at the core of the book, so Johnson engages, as Merleau-Ponty did, the writings and visual work of Paul Cézanne, Auguste Rodin, and Paul Klee, as well as Rilke’s commentary on Cézanne and Rodin. From these widely varying aesthetics emerge the fundamental themes of the retrieval of the beautiful: desire, repetition, difference, rhythm, and the sublime. The third part of Johnson’s book takes each of these up in turn, bringing Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic thinking into dialogue with classical philosophy as well as Sartre, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Deleuze. Johnson concludes his final chapter with a direct dialogue with Kant and Merleau-Ponty, and also Lyotard, on the subject of the beautiful and the sublime. As we experience with Rodin’s Balzac, beauty and the sublime blend into one another when the beautiful grows powerful, majestic, mysterious, and transcendent.

Just War scholarship has adapted to contemporary crises and situations. But its adaptation has spurned debate and conversation—a method and means of pushing its thinking forward. Now the Just War tradition risks becoming marginalized. This concern may seem out of place as Just War literature is proliferating, yet this literature remains welded to traditional conceptualizations of Just War. Caron E. Gentry and Amy E. Eckert argue that the tradition needs to be updated to deal with substate actors within the realm of legitimate authority, private military companies, and the questionable moral difference between the use of conventional and nuclear weapons. Additionally, as recent policy makers and scholars have tried to make the Just War criteria legalistic, they have weakened the tradition's ability to draw from and adjust to its contemporaneous setting. The essays in The Future of Just War seek to reorient the tradition around its core concerns of preventing the unjust use of force by states and limiting the harm inflicted on vulnerable populations such as civilian noncombatants. The pursuit of these challenges involves both a reclaiming of traditional Just War principles from those who would push it toward greater permissiveness with respect to war, as well as the application of Just War principles to emerging issues, such as the growing use of robotics in war or the privatization of force. These essays share a commitment to the idea that the tradition is more about a rigorous application of Just War principles than the satisfaction of a checklist of criteria to be met before waging “just” war in the service of national interest.