Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) and Truman Capote (1924–1984) should not have been famous. They made their names between the Oscar Wilde trial and Stonewall, when homosexuality meant criminality and perversion. And yet both Stein and Capote, openly and exclusively gay, built their outsize reputations on works that directly featured homosexuality and a queer aesthetic. How did these writers become mass-market celebrities while other gay public figures were closeted or censored? And what did thei...

When it comes to health care we are all on a tightrope- afraid to look down. We blindly hope that we have a covenant with society to be treated well in the event of illness or injury. Nowhere is this covenant more broken than in the fields of pre-hospital (paramedic) and emergency room care. One of the goals of this narrative non-fiction novel is to expose the fallacy of that assumption. Emergency medicine can reach into the lives of rich and poor, the famous and the obscure. It makes us a...

A transformative, fascinating theory—based on robust and groundbreaking experimental research—reveals how our unconscious fear of death powers almost everything we do, shining a light on the hidden motives that drive human behaviorMore than one hundred years ago, the American philosopher William James dubbed the knowledge that we must die “the worm at the core” of the human condition. In 1974, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker won the Pulitzer Prize for his boo...

Die treibende Kraft in unser aller LebenAls Wurm im Herzen des Menschen bezeichnete der amerikanische Psychologe und Philosoph William James einst das Wissen um unsere Vergänglichkeit. In einer faszinierenden Studie, die auf zahlreichen Versuchen beruht, schildern die amerikanischen Psychologen Solomon, Greenberg und Pyszczynski, wie sehr die Furcht vor dem Nicht-mehr-Sein unser alltägliches Leben beeinflusst – häufig unbewusst. Menschen, die in bestimmten Situatio...

Within the realm of American culture and its construction of its citizenry, geography, and ideology, who are southerners and who are queers, and what is the South and what is queerness? Queering the South on Screen addresses these questions by examining the intersections of queerness, regionalism, and identity depicted in film, television, and other visual media about the South during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Southern queers on screen often reflect the fant...

More than one hundred years ago, the American philosopher William James wrote that the knowledge that we must die is "the worm at the core" of the human condition—a universally shared fear that informs all our thoughts and actions, from the great art we create to the devastating wars we wage.Using data collected from human subjects, Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski show conclusively that the fear of death and the desire to transcend it inspire us to buy expensiv...

Rumors of the discovery of Solomon's Jar—in which the biblical King Solomon bound the world's demons after using them to build his temple in Jerusalem—are followed with interest by Annja Creed. An archaeologist intrigued by the arcane, Annja pursues the truth about the vessel and its ancient origins.Her search leads her to a confrontation with a London cult driven by visions of a new world order; and a religious zealot fueled by the insatiable desire for glory. Across the sands of ...