When Frank Morgan sets up camp in a lush valley in Montana, the last thing he expects to see is fires lighting up the night sky as fields, farms and homes are torched by gunslicks hired by two powerful ranchers. For the ranchers, the battle lines have been drawn in the form of newly settled farmland that's cutting through the ranges, separating cattle from grazing land and water. But the settlers are breaking no law and no one is going to prevent them from building their homes and becoming...

A succinct, approachable guide to the origins, development, key texts, concepts, and practices of yoga.Yoga is practiced by many millions of people worldwide and is celebrated for its mental, physical, and spiritual benefits. And yet, as Daniel Simpson reveals in The Truth of Yoga, much of what is said about yoga is misleading. For example, the word “yoga” does not always mean union. In fact, in perhaps the discipline’s most famous text—the Yoga Sutra of P...

Ever dreamed of changing the world? Daniel Simpson shows how not to do it. His memoir charts a gonzo career at The New York Times. Ambitious and idealistic, he was hired to report on the Balkans but quit within months, freaked out by his editor s zeal for starting wars. Disillusioned, he went native in Belgrade. Together with the charismatic G, who had appeared one night in lavish puffs of dope smoke, he decided to organize a Serbian version of Woodstock: a festival on an island in the Dan...

How much has yoga changed over the past 2,000 years? Daniel Simpson provides an engaging and authoritative overview of shifts in priorities that shaped new techniques, making yoga more appealing to contemporary practitioners.Before the modern era, most yogis were men who renounced worldly life. Non-seated postures—first mentioned in texts about a thousand years ago—served as warm-ups for subtler techniques, and the ultimate goal was to sit like a stone. The average...

This book offers the first in-depth enquiry into the origins of 135 Indigenous Australian objects acquired by the Royal Navy between 1795 and 1855 and held now by the British Museum. In response to increasing calls for the ‘decolonisation’ of museums and the restitution of ethnographic collections, the book seeks to return knowledge of the moments, methods, and motivations whereby Indigenous Australian objects were first collected and sent to Britain. By structuring its discussion in terms...

Stories of war and conflict form the backbone of much of the Western literary canon, portraying a certain image of heroism, stoicism, and survival in the face of violence. War and Imagination challenges the canon with essays, short stories, and a wide variety of perspectives.Paying particular attention to the twentieth century and prioritizing the writings of civilians, the works highlighted in War and Imagination offer an opportunity to challenge representations ...

A group of stories-within-a-story, told in the classic Louisa May Alcott style. "I've a little cold," said the old lady, "and am too hoarse for talking, my dears; but Aunt Elinor has looked up a parcel of old tales that I've told her at different times and which she has written down. You will like to hear her reading better than my dull way of telling them, and I can help Minnie and Lotty with their work, for I see they are bent on learning to spin." The young folk were well pleased with g...

Much of what is said about yoga is misleading. To take two examples, it is neither five thousand years old, as is commonly claimed, nor does it mean union, at least not exclusively. In perhaps the most famous text-The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali-the aim is separation, isolating consciousness from everything else. And the earliest evidence of practice dates back about twenty-five hundred years. Yoga may well be older, but no one can prove it. Scholars have learned a lot more about the history ...

Bayesian statistics and statistical practice have evolved over the years, driven by advancements in theory, methods, and computational tools. Bayesian Workflow explores the intricate workflows of applied Bayesian statistics, aiming to uncover the tacit knowledge often overlooked in published papers and textbooks. By systematizing the process of Bayesian model development, the book seeks to improve applied analyses and inspire future innovations in theory, methods, and soft...

Wives have long been neglected as a topic of scholarly research. The invisibility of married women in England within the historical record, the complexities of their legal and economic status, and an erroneous belief that women’s activities were confined to the domestic has meant that little attention has been focussed exclusively on wives. Now, however, new scholarship is challenging the orthodoxy of previously dominant ‘private sphere’ narratives and demonstrating that the roles availabl...

Joe Simpson, with just his partner Simon Yates, tackled the unclimbed West Face of the remote 21,000 foot Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes in June 1995. But before they reached the summit, disaster struck. A few days later, Simon staggered into Base Camp, exhausted and frostbitten, to tell their non-climbing companion that Joe was dead. For three days he wrestled with guilt as they prepared to return home. Then a cry in the night took them out with torches, where they found Joe, badly in...

Modeling spatial and spatio-temporal continuous processes is an important and challenging problem in spatial statistics. Advanced Spatial Modeling with Stochastic Partial Differential Equations Using R and INLA describes in detail the stochastic partial differential equations (SPDE) approach for modeling continuous spatial processes with a Matérn covariance, which has been implemented using the integrated nested Laplace approximation (INLA) in the R-INLA package. Key conce...