A Friendship Of Two Suns

This book examines the deterioration of relations between the USSR and China in the 1960s, whereby once powerful allies became estranged, competitive, and increasingly hostile neighbors. It shows how the intrinsic inequality of the Sino-Soviet alliance - seen as entirely natural by the Russians but bitterly resented by the Chinese - resulted in its ultimate collapse.

Fifteen-year-old Adam, a Yugoslavian Jew, escapes the dangers of WWII when his family flees to America. But when a romance with a local girl provokes the anger of their parents, the two teens face another barrier to happiness

The Zama Codex is a fictional novel set in Central America and structured as alternating chapters describing parallel stories, one set during the fall of the Mayan classic age and the other at a present day archaeological excavation. The reader is drawn into the life of Zama, a scribe and noble living in a highland Mayan city-state (circa 800 A.D). When the city's high priest prophesizes the demise of Mayan civilization, Zama becomes apprentice and scribe to Chaco, a sorcerer with an ambitious plan to save the best of Mayan mystical knowledge from oblivion. The parallel story follows events surrounding the discovery of Zama's codex containing instructions for the acquisition of mystical power on a cosmic scale.

This poignant historical novel about two teenagers from different worlds centers on a little-known event on the World War II homefront. To Adam Bornstein, a 15-year-old Jewish Yugoslavian, World War II has meant constant danger, secrecy, and fear. But when Rome is liberated in June 1944, Adam, along with his mother and sister, is given the chance to escape war-ravaged Italy for the safety of upstate New York. To 14-year-old Christine Cook the war symbolizes all the drama and excitement missing in her own humdrum world of Oswego, NY. When a refugee camp is established near her home, she finds herself drawn to the residents whose pasts are so different from her own. There Christine meets Adam, and the attraction between the two is instant and overpowering. But their parents don't approve, and their objections grow more pronounced as the romance develops. Christine and Adam are brought together by a world at war, but the struggle that threatens to tear them apart lies within their own families. Will their love for each other prevail over the narrow-mindedness of the adults around them?

"This book revises the common observation that Philippines-Japan relations are characterized by inequality. Such an observation is the twin of another common observation, that the bilateral relationship between the Philippines and Japan is largely economic in nature. . . . For two countries that have had relations for more than a century, there is certainly something more that can be said about this relationship, aside from the obvious. We can arrive at a more significant and nuanced characterization of Philippines-Japan relations by looking at the other aspects of the relationship without totally dismissing the admittedly important economic relationship. As we conditionally admit that the relationship is unequal, we look at the balance to see which side is heavier; we change the contents of the balance and vary their combinations to find out if one side is always heavier than the other or if both sides are sometimes equal. "The book does this by narrating how the past is remembered, by bridging the elite and the popular, and by describing people-to-people relations across national borders within and beyond state structure." --from the Introduction

In the ancient world, friendship was a virtue of great philosophical importance. Aristotle wrote extensively about it, as did Cicero. Their conception of friendship as a relationship based on reason and virtue was transformed by Christianity into a connection based on the mutual love of an individual and God. In Dante’s Idea of Friendship, Filippa Modesto offers sharp readings of the Commedia, Vita Nuova, and Convivio that demonstrate Dante’s interest in that theme. Drawing on a lucid and wide-ranging examination of the literature on friendship, she shows how he weaved together the contradictory classical and the Christian concepts of friendship into a harmonious synthesis in which friendship became a handmaiden to salvation and happiness. A fresh, perceptive interpretation of Dante’s works, Dante’s Idea of Friendship will engage medievalists, classicists, and scholars of friendship throughout the ages.

Dreambooks in Byzantium offers for the first time in English translation and with commentary six of the seven extant Byzantine oneirocritica, or manuals on the interpretation of dreams. (The seventh, The Oneirocriticon of Achmet ibn Sereim was published previously by the author.) Dreams permeated all aspects of Byzantine culture, from religion to literature to everyday life, while the interpretation of the future through dreams was done by professionals (emperors had their own) or through oneirocritica. Dreambooks were written and attributed to famous patriarchs, biblical personages, and emperors, to fictitious writers and interpreters, or were copied and published anonymously. Two types of dreambooks were produced: short prose or verse manuals, with the dreams usually listed alphabetically by symbol; and long treatises with subject matter arranged according to topics and with elaborate dream theory. The manuals were meant for a popular audience, mainly readers of the middle and lower classes; their content deals with concerns like family, sickness and health, poverty and wealth, treachery by friends, fear of authorities, punishment and honor-concerns, in other words, that pertain to the individual dreamer, not to the state or a cult. The dreambook writers drew upon various sources in Classical and Islamic literature, oral and written Byzantine materials, and, perhaps, their own oneirocritic practices. Much of the source-material was pagan in origin and, therefore, needed to be reworked into a Christianized context, with many interpretations given a Christian coloring. For each dreambook the author provides a commentary focusing on analyses of the interpretations assigned to each dream-symbol; historical, social, and cultural discussions of the dreams and interpretations; linguistic, lexical, and grammatical issues; and cross-references with Achmet, Artemidorus, and the other Bzyantine dreambooks. There are also introductory chapters on Byzantine dream interpretation; the authors, their dates, and sources; the manuscripts of the dreambooks; and a lengthy discussion of the contribution of these dreambooks to psychohistory, cultural history, historical sociology, and gender studies. The book is unique in that it offers a full study, through translation and commentary, of the oneirocritica to a wide audience - Byzantinists, Arabists, cultural historians, medievalists (several of the Byzantine dreambooks were translated into Latin and became fundamental dream-texts throughout the Middle Ages), and psychohistorians, all of whom will find the book useful in their study of dreams, transmission of Arabic sources by Byzantine authors, and cultural anthropology. Together with the Oneirocriticon of Achmet, it offers a complete study of dream-interpretation in medieval Greece.