Dark Quetzal

* The final adventure in the award-winning Echorium Sequence. * Eleven years have passed since the Khizpriest's attempt to build a palace of dark crystal to break the power of the Echorium. A new generation of Singers is emerging, among them Kyarra - Frazhin's own lost daughter, raised on the Isle of Echoes by the Singers with no memory of her father. Frazhin hatches a final desperate plan to destroy the Echorium, and Kyarra is the only one who can stop him. She has the help of a beautiful boy-bird, who knows the secret of the yellow flowers that grow in the Quetzal Forest. But when she comes face to face with Frazhin, which will prove stronger: Kyarra's dark blood, or the Echorium's Songs? "Fast paced action and surprising plot twists... a satisfying conclusion." School Library Journal.

Kyarra, a novice Singer, seeks to destroy evil and learn the truth about her mother and father.

In communities throughout precontact Mesoamerica, calendar priests and diviners relied on pictographic almanacs to predict the fate of newborns, to guide people in choosing marriage partners and auspicious wedding dates, to know when to plant and harvest crops, and to be successful in many of life's activities. As the Spanish colonized Mesoamerica in the sixteenth century, they made a determined effort to destroy these books, in which the Aztec and neighboring peoples recorded their understanding of the invisible world of the sacred calendar and the cosmic forces and supernaturals that adhered to time. Today, only a few of these divinatory codices survive. Visually complex, esoteric, and strikingly beautiful, painted books such as the famous Codex Borgia and Codex Borbonicus still serve as portals into the ancient Mexican calendrical systems and the cycles of time and meaning they encode. In this comprehensive study, Elizabeth Hill Boone analyzes the entire extant corpus of Mexican divinatory codices and offers a masterful explanation of the genre as a whole. She introduces the sacred, divinatory calendar and the calendar priests and diviners who owned and used the books. Boone then explains the graphic vocabulary of the calendar and its prophetic forces and describes the organizing principles that structure the codices. She shows how they form almanacs that either offer general purpose guidance or focus topically on specific aspects of life, such as birth, marriage, agriculture and rain, travel, and the forces of the planet Venus. Boone also tackles two major areas of controversy—the great narrative passage in the Codex Borgia, which she freshly interprets as a cosmic narrative of creation, and the disputed origins of the codices, which, she argues, grew out of a single religious and divinatory system.

The enchanted land of the Sierra Estrella holds many secrets. The legend has passed from father to son and young Zip is mesmerized by them. When Achak, his father, disappears, the legend is set aside and the young boy leaves home in search of answers. He finds himself in the middle of the legend as he realizes a truth kept hidden from him by Achak and his mother, Marguerite. The Dark One knows the truth and works in earnest to keep Zip from his true purpose. He meets Ronnie and Maria, along with a shaman with a habit of disappearing when under attack, and, with their help, gains the courage to face his inner demons and the dark forces of the world before the moon covers the sun. The enchanted land of the Sierra Estrella holds many secrets. As the legends pass from generation to generation young Zip finds himself in the middle of the legend as he realizes a truth kept hidden from him by his late father. Through his journeys across the desert, Zip gains the courage to face his inner demons leading him to find his true purpose. True purpose lies within. Hidden in plain sight. It is meant to be found by looking into the light. The story of a young boy in search of his father. His journey takes him through the enchanted Bosque Mesquite to the summit of the Sierra Estrella. On the way he meets those who give him the strength to find his true purpose. A story that parallels the journey through life and the search one’s true purpose.

In the early 1960s, pianist Horace Tapscott gave up a successful career in Lionel Hampton’s band and returned to his home in Los Angeles to found the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, a community arts group that focused on providing community-oriented jazz and jazz training. Over the course of almost forty years, the Arkestra, together with the related Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension collective, was at the forefront of the vital community-based arts movement in Black Los Angeles. Some three hundred artists—musicians, vocalists, poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, and graphic artists—passed through these organizations, many ultimately remaining within the community and others moving on to achieve international fame. In The Dark Tree, Steven L. Isoardi draws on one hundred in-depth interviews with the Arkestra’s participants to tell the history of the important and largely overlooked community arts movement of Black Los Angeles. This revised and updated edition brings the story of the Arkestra up to date, as its ethos and aesthetic remain vital forces in jazz and popular music to this day.

Primeros Memoriales is here published for the first time in its entirety both in the original Nahuatl and in English translation. The volume follows the manuscript order reconstructed for the Primeros Memoriales by Francisco del Paso y Troncoso in his 1905-1907 facsimile edition of the collection of Sahaguntine manuscripts he called Codices Matritenses. During the 1960s, Thelma D. Sullivan, a Nahuatl scholar living in Mexico, began a paleographic transcription of the Primeros Memoriales, along with an English translation. After Sullivan's death in 1981, a group of her colleagues finished, enlarged, and annotated her project. This long-awaited publication makes available to specialists and interested laypersons alike an invaluable portion of the remarkable Sahaguntine treasure of information on sixteenth-century Aztec society.

The World Has Already Ended. The future--where a terrible battle against a parasitic virus called "Gastrea" has been fought...and lost. Humanity is cornered and lives in despair. Rentaro and Enju face constant danger in their work as a team of anti-Gastrea specialists known as "civil security officers." As if the daily fight against oblivion weren't enough, they'll soon face a threat that could destroy all of Tokyo...

This book examines the Mexican nationalist rhetoric that promoted race mixing as a cultural ideal, placing it within its broader contemporary polemic between vitalist and scientific thought. Part of its analysis compares the attitudes of anthropologist Manuel Gamio and educator José Vasconcelos with those of the European primitivist D. H. Lawrence, and concludes that although Gamio and Vasconcelos made lasting contributions to the construction of popular notions of mexicanidad, their paradigms were fatally flawed because they followed European prescriptions for the development of national identity. This ultimately reinforced the belief that indigenous cultural expression must be assimilated into the dominant mestizo culture in order for Mexico to progress. Consequently, these thinkers were unsuccessful in resolving the cultural dilemma Mexico suffered in the years immediately following the Revolution.

From the award-winning birder and author of Birds of Prey, an authoritative, information-packed guide to distinguishing North American birds. In this book, bursting with more information than any field guide could hold, the well-known author and birder Pete Dunne introduces readers to the “Cape May School of Birding.” It's an approach to identification that gives equal or more weight to a bird's structure and shape and the observer's overall impression (often called GISS, for General Impression of Size and Shape) than to specific field marks. After determining the most likely possibilities by considering such factors as habitat and season, the birder uses characteristics such as size, shape, color, behavior, flight pattern, and vocalizations to identify a bird. The book provides an arsenal of additional hints and helpful clues to guide a birder when, even after a review of a field guide, the identification still hangs in the balance. This supplement to field guides shares the knowledge and skills that expert birders bring to identification challenges. Birding should be an enjoyable pursuit for beginners and experts alike, and Pete Dunne combines a unique playfulness with the work of identification. Readers will delight in his nicknames for birds, from the Grinning Loon and Clearly the Bathtub Duck to Bronx Petrel and Chicken Garnished with a Slice of Mango and a Dollop of Raspberry Sherbet.