Photography, like many art forms, is a broad field filled with specific disciplines and focuses. Mature photographers may dabble between a few different disciplines, but there is usually one or two specific disciplines in which they have chosen to focus their body of work. So as you develop as a photographer and you have learned and mastered the basics, you will find yourself looking to focus on a specific aspect of photography. You will find yourself looking for resources to help you learn. If you don’t have a mentor, the next best thing is a book on that specific discipline. For me, one aspect that appeals to me is close-up photography. So in my quest, I stumbled upon Bryan Peterson’s new book, Understanding Close-Up Photography. I was fortunate to acquire a copy of this fine instructional book from Watson-Guptill, the publisher, for review.

This book views Mercury as a whole in the context of its environment. It illustrates what we know and what we need to know, and why understanding Mercury is so crucial to our understanding of solar system origin and current processes on Earth. The book describes our current state of knowledge for Mercury and interactions between interior, exterior, and space environment which are highly dynamic and thus critical to understanding Mercury as a system.

New Religious Movements (NRMs) can involve vast numbers of followers and in many cases are radically changing the way people understand and practice religion and spirituality. Moreover, many are having a profound impact on the form and content of mainstream religion. The Encyclopedia of New Religious Movements provides uniquely global coverage of the phenomenon, with entries on over three hundred movements from almost every country in the world. Coverage includes movements that derive from the major religions of the world and to neo-traditional movements, movements often overlooked in the study of NRMs. In addition to the coverage of particular movements there are also entries on topics, themes, key thinkers and key ideas, for example the New Age Movement, Neo-Paganism, New Religion and gender, NRMs and cyberspace, NRMs and the law, the Anti-Cult Movement, Swedenborg, Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, Lovelock, Gurdjieff, al-Banna, Qutb. The marked global approach and comprehensiveness of the encyclopedia enable an appreciation of the innovative energy of NRMs, of their extraordinary diversity, and the often surprising ways in which they can propagate geographically. The most ambitions publication of its sort, the Encyclopedia of New Religious Movements is a major addition to the reference literature for students and researchers of the field in religious studies and the social sciences. Entries are cross-referenced with short bibliographies for further reading. There is a full index

A fascination with 1988, the most liberal moment in China since 1949, inspired this study, as did a frustration with breathless accounts of present day social change in China. As an historian, I wanted to trace the roots of contemporary developments, building on an almost fortyyear acquaintance with life in China. Many people and institutions have kindly enabled me to do this. A major grant from the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand provided much appreciated support for several visits to China. The Lee Hysan Foundation generously supported a two-month period working in the Universities Service Centre for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The PekingUniversity Library was a productive home base for much of this research. Other institutions that helped include the Shanghai Library, the Library of the China Youth University for Political Sciences in Beijing, the National Library in Beijing, and the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. Research support also came from the University of Auckland, including its Faculty of Arts. Many colleagues and friends have helped along the way, including Philip Abela, Chris Berry, Tony and Susan Browne, Chen Xin, BrianDonovan, Hong-yu Gong,AndersHansson, Wayne Lawrence, HaiqingLin, Bonnie McDougall, Rumi Sakamoto, RobertSanders, Rebecca Wu Xiaojing, and Zhou Xuelin. Bonnie McDougall and Stanley Rosen offered valuable advice at crucial points in the project. Linda Lew made good use of a University of Auckland Summer Scholarship to trawl the Internet on my behalf. Jeff Lau has helped keep me grounded. At Cambridge in New York, Eric Crahan and Abigail Zorbaugh provided vital encouragement and support. These people and institutions, along with numerous friends and colleagues in China whom I have not named, have made the research a pleasure and this book possible. I warmly thank them all, including those whom I have not identified. The book’s shortcomings are mine alone.

eginning HTML5 and CSS3 is your introduction to the new features and elements of HTML5 - all the leaner, cleaner, and more efficient code you've hoped for is available now with HTML5, along with some new tools that will allow you to create more meaningful and richer content. For everyone involved in web design, this book also introduces the new structural integrity and styling flexibility of CSS 3 - which means better-looking pages and smarter content in your website projects.

In the early sixteenth century, the monk Filofei proclaimed Moscow the "Third Rome." By the 1930s, intellectuals and artists all over the world thought of Moscow as a mecca of secular enlightenment. In Moscow, the Fourth Rome, Katerina Clark shows how Soviet officials and intellectuals, in seeking to capture the imagination of leftist and anti-fascist intellectuals throughout the world, sought to establish their capital as the cosmopolitan center of a post-Christian confederation and to rebuild it to become a beacon for the rest of the world. Clark provides an interpretative cultural history of the city during the crucial 1930s, the decade of the Great Purge. She draws on the work of intellectuals such as Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Tretiakov, Mikhail Koltsov, and Ilya Ehrenburg to shed light on the singular Zeitgeist of that most Stalinist of periods. In her account, the decade emerges as an important moment in the prehistory of key concepts in literary and cultural studies today-transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and world literature. By bringing to light neglected antecedents, she provides a new polemical and political context for understanding canonical works of writers such as Brecht, Benjamin, Lukacs, and Bakhtin. Moscow, the Fourth Rome breaches the intellectual iron curtain that has circumscribed cultural histories of Stalinist Russia, by broadening the framework to include considerable interaction with Western intellectuals and trends. Its integration of the understudied international dimension into the interpretation of Soviet culture remedies misunderstandings of the world-historical significance of Moscow under Stalin.

In this “chilling, in-depth examination of a rapidly emerging global crisis” (In These Times), Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, two of the most active opponents to the privatization of water show how, contrary to received wisdom, water mainly flows uphill to the wealthy. Our most basic resource may one day be limited: our consumption doubles every twenty years—twice the rate of population increase. At the same time, increasingly transnational corporations are plotting to control the world’s dwindling water supply. In England and France, where water has already been privatized, rates have soared, and water shortages have been severe. The major bottled-water producers—Perrier, Evian, Naya, and now Coca-Cola and PepsiCo—are part of one of the fastest-growing and least-regulated industries, buying up freshwater rights and drying up crucial supplies. A truly shocking exposé that is a call to arms to people around the world, Blue Gold shows in frightening detail why, as the vice president of the World Bank has pronounced, “The wars of the next century will be about water.”

Since the Middle Ages Europe has been one of the most urbanized continents on the planet and Europe's cities have firmly stamped their imprint on the continent's economic, social, political, and cultural life. This study of European cities and towns from the fall of the Roman Empire to the present day looks both at regional trends from across Europe and also at the widely differing fortunes of individual communities on the roller coaster of European urbanization. Taking a wide-angled view of the continent that embraces northern and eastern Europe as well as the city systems of the Mediterranean and western Europe, it addresses important debates ranging from the nature of urban survival in the post-Roman era to the position of the European city in a globalizing world. The book is divided into three parts, dealing with the middle ages, the early modern period, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - with each part containing chapters on urban trends, the urban economy, social developments, cultural life and landscape, and governance. Throughout, the book addresses key questions such as the role of migration, including that of women and ethnic minorities; the functioning of competition and emulation between cities, as well as issues of inter-urban cooperation; the different ways civic leaders have sought to promote urban identity and visibility; the significance of urban autonomy in enabling cities to protect their interests against the state; and not least why European cities and towns over the period have been such pressure cookers for new ideas and creativity, whether economic, political, or cultural.