Ingebretsen (English, Georgetown U.) poses an interesting question in his introduction, "Why does Milton's Satan have all the best lines?" A glance at the bestsellers list shows that king of horror Stephen King tops the charts with five books. Americans obviously love to be scared out of their wits because, the author argues, our puritanical theology demands fear to attain conversion, and the writings of Cotton Mather, Hawthorne, Frost, and King are the relics of this collective memory. Tracing themes of captivity, expiation, self-loss, and possession, the volume provides an entertaining analysis of American literature and cultural identity. Paper edition (unseen), $19.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A collection of 57 essays by J.K. Elliott on aspects of New Testament textual criticism including examinations of textual variation and important Greek manuscripts and analyses of printed editions of the New Testament text, all making the case for thoroughgoing textual criticism.

This volume is one of the most important works on ancient Athens in the last fifty years. The focus is on the early city, from the end of the Bronze Age--ca. 1200 BCE--to the Archaic period, when Athens became the largest city of the Classical period, only to be destroyed by the Persians in 480/479 BCE. From a systematic study of all the excavation reports and surveys in central Athens, the author has synthesized a detailed diachronic overview of the city from the Submycenaean period through the Archaic. It is a treasure trove of information for archaeologists who work in this period. Of great value as well are the detailed maps included, which present features of ancient settlements and cemeteries, the repositories of the human physical record. Over eighty additional large-scale, interactive maps are available online to complement the book.

Andrew Rogerson is one of the most important and influential archaeologists currently working in East Anglia. This collection will be essential reading for those interested in the history and archaeology of Norfolk and Suffolk, in the interpretation of artefacts within their landscape contexts, and in the material culture of the Middle Ages.

The use of contextually aware, pervasive, distributed computing, and sensor networks to bridge the gap between the physical and online worlds is the basis of mobile social networking. This book shows how applications can be built to provide mobile social networking, the research issues that need to be solved to enable this vision, and how mobile social networking can be used to provide computational intelligence that will improve daily life. With contributions from the fields of sociology, computer science, human-computer interaction and design, this book demonstrates how mobile social networks can be inferred from users' physical interactions both with the environment and with others, as well as how users behave around them and how their behavior differs on mobile vs. traditional online social networks.