Biotraffic explores the complex world of biological resource trade. It takes readers inside the contemporary Ciskei region of South Africa, a once-notorious apartheid homeland turned extractive hub for wild medicinal plants. Drawing from in-depth ethnographic and archival research, Christopher Morris examines the region's trade in Pelargonium sidoides, a plant once contested as a tuberculosis treatment in early twentieth-century Europe and now an internationally marketed remedy for the common cold. The story of this trade links past and present, encapsulating a larger tale about colonial legacies and their intersection with global environmental governance ambitions. It also teems with a diverse cast of actors, from plant harvesters and pharmaceutical companies to activist NGOs and the chiefs who have become business partners with multinational drug firms. The book's analysis extends beyond considering merely the extraction and commercialization of plant resources and offers a critical examination of how demand for therapeutics intertwines with broader struggles over land and political power in South Africa. Biotraffic illuminates how a distance-defying trade is reshaping the sociopolitical landscape of a region--a region grappling with apartheid's afterlives and the challenges of environmental and economic justice.

: A Beginner's Guide to Understanding AI: Unleashing the Power of Artificial Intelligence

Are you fascinated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) but find the subject overwhelming? Look no further - A Beginner's Guide to Understanding AI is the perfect companion to demystify the world of AI and empower you to navigate its vast landscape with confidence.

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Biotraffic explores the complex world of biological resource trade. It takes readers inside the contemporary Ciskei region of South Africa, a once-notorious apartheid homeland turned extractive hub for wild medicinal plants. Drawing from in-depth ethnographic and archival research, Christopher Morris examines the region's trade in Pelargonium sidoides, a plant once contested as a tuberculosis treatment in early twentieth-century Europe and now an internationally marketed remedy for the common cold. The story of this trade links past and present, encapsulating a larger tale about colonial legacies and their intersection with global environmental governance ambitions. It also teems with a diverse cast of actors, from plant harvesters and pharmaceutical companies to activist NGOs and the chiefs who have become business partners with multinational drug firms. The book's analysis extends beyond considering merely the extraction and commercialization of plant resources and offers a critical examination of how demand for therapeutics intertwines with broader struggles over land and political power in South Africa. Biotraffic illuminates how a distance-defying trade is reshaping the sociopolitical landscape of a region--a region grappling with apartheid's afterlives and the challenges of environmental and economic justice.

An ambitious study of the ways opera has sought to ensure its popularity by keeping pace with changes in media technology.

From the early days of television broadcasts to today's live streams, opera houses have embraced technology as a way to reach new audiences. But how do these new forms of remediated opera extend, amplify, or undermine production values, and what does the audience gain or lose in the process? In Screening the Operatic Stage, Christopher Morris critically examines the cultural implications of opera's engagement with screen media.

Foregrounding the potential for a playful exchange and self-awareness between stage and screen, Morris uses the conceptual tools of media theory to understand the historical and contemporary screen cultures that have transmitted the opera house into living rooms, onto desktops and portable devices, and across networks of movie theaters. If these screen cultures reveal how inherently technological opera is as a medium, they also highlight a deep suspicion among opera producers and audiences toward the intervention of media technology. Ultimately, Screening the Operatic Stage shows how the conventions of televisual representation employed in opera have masked the mediating effects of technology in the name of fidelity to live performance.

Mississippi represented the Old South and all that it stood for--perhaps more so than any other state. Tracing its long histories of economic, social, and cultural evolution, Morris takes a close and richly detailed look at a representative Southern community: Jefferson Davis's Warren County, in the state's southwestern corner. Drawing on many wills, deeds, court records, and manuscript materials, he reveals the transformation of a loosely knit, typically Western community of pioneer homesteaders into a distinctly Southern society based on plantation agriculture, slavery, and a patriarchal social order.

This thoughtful, well-written study doubtless will be widely read and deservedly influential.--American Historical Review.

Adopting and transforming the Romantic fascination with mountains, modernism in the German-speaking lands claimed the Alps as a space both of resistance and of escape. This new 'cult of mountains' reacted to the symptoms and alienating forces associated with modern culture, defining and reinforcing models of subjectivity based on renewed wholeness and an aggressive attitude to physical and mental health. The arts were critical to this project, none more so than music, which occupied a similar space in Austro-German culture: autonomous, pure, sublime. In Modernism and the Cult of Mountains opera serves as a nexus, shedding light on the circulation of contesting ideas about politics, nature, technology and aesthetics. Morris investigates operatic representations of the high mountains in German modernism, showing how the liminal quality of the landscape forms the backdrop for opera's reflexive engagement with the identity and limits of its constituent media, not least music. This operatic reflexivity, in which the very question of music's identity is repeatedly restaged, invites consideration of musical encounters with mountains in other genres, and Morris shows how these issues resonate in Strauss's Alpine Symphony and in the Bergfilm (mountain film). By using music and the ideology of mountains to illuminate aspects of each other, Morris makes an original and valuable contribution to the critical study of modernism.

An ambitious study of the ways opera has sought to ensure its popularity by keeping pace with changes in media technology.

From the early days of television broadcasts to today's live streams, opera houses have embraced technology as a way to reach new audiences. But how do these new forms of remediated opera extend, amplify, or undermine production values, and what does the audience gain or lose in the process? In Screening the Operatic Stage, Christopher Morris critically examines the cultural implications of opera's engagement with screen media.

Foregrounding the potential for a playful exchange and self-awareness between stage and screen, Morris uses the conceptual tools of media theory to understand the historical and contemporary screen cultures that have transmitted the opera house into living rooms, onto desktops and portable devices, and across networks of movie theaters. If these screen cultures reveal how inherently technological opera is as a medium, they also highlight a deep suspicion among opera producers and audiences toward the intervention of media technology. Ultimately, Screening the Operatic Stage shows how the conventions of televisual representation employed in opera have masked the mediating effects of technology in the name of fidelity to live performance.

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Tennis is one of the most challenging sports in the world, requiring a heady cocktail of technical skill, physical prowess, and mental strength. It can be an intimidating game for beginners to pick up, while experienced club players often struggle to improve. And 99.99% of tennis players never play professional-standard tennis, while also dreaming what it would be like to do so.

In this multi-purpose guide to the sport of tennis, a former highly ranked British junior provides a raft of practical tips for improving your game, while uncloaking the myths which surround the halcyon turf of the professional game.

This book outlines all of the key basic tennis techniques, provides you with the best drills to improve your game, and explains how to develop the skills that professional players possess.

It also handholds you through the world of junior tennis, and explains why all may not be as it seems inside expensive academies and the junior tennis circuit. And the book furthermore contributes to the ongoing debate regarding the importance of talent versus practice.

Tennis Player 2.0 is your guide to becoming the tennis player you want to be, for players of all skill levels, while also outlining what it is possible for you to achieve in the game of tennis.

About the Expert

Christopher Morris was ranked in the top 20 juniors in Britain in both short tennis and lawn tennis as a teenager. He was also part of the first state school team to reach the British schools finals. An insider in the British LTA scheme, Morris was part of several of the top junior development squads, where he regularly played against several players, both male and female, who went on to play professional tennis. He also worked with the highest rated LTA coaches of the time.Morris has since become a successful freelancer writer, with his work featuring in Newsweek, Yahoo and Seeking Alpha, amongst many other publications. His personal website is christopherpaulmorris.com.

HowExpert publishes quick 'how to' guides on all topics from A to Z by everyday experts.

Models of Misrepresentation: On the Fiction of E. L. Doctorow by Christopher Morris The work of E. L. Doctorow is most often seen as a political and cultural critique of eras of American history, like the settlement of the West, the Gilded Age, the Depression, or the beginnings of the Cold War. In his fiction critics have found searching and subversive questions concerning received national values. At the same time, they have seen him as a literary experimenter, comparing his with the work of such modernist writers as Faulkner and Hemingway. Models of Misrepresentation, an original and comprehensive reading of Doctorow's work, considers both these views under a broader rubric, the struggle for representation in art. The author of this penetrating and persuasive study considers this theme from a philosophical standpoint: How can the writer depict America, or how can the reader interpret its values, when the very capacity of language to represent is put in doubt, as it is in Doctorow's fiction? From this perspective, Doctorow's works form part of the twentieth century's continuing intellectual crisis over the possibility of meaning in art. The understanding of this crisis in the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida shows how the broader issue of representation underpins both Doctorow's political-cultural critiques and his literary experimentalism. This vantage-point sheds new light on some perennial questions that intrigue Doctorow's readers: Who are the narrators of Ragtime and Loon Lake? Why do the novels' left-wing critiques also undermine left-wing solutions? What is the significance of repeated leitmotifs in his work? Why does Doctorow's later fiction seem to return to simpler literary forms? In Models of Misrepresentation the answers to these questions are discovered in the novels' continuing preoccupation with the creative process itself-with their narrators' anxious struggles to make something new in spite of convincing fears of deathly repetition. This preoccupation is also apparent in Doctorow's book reviews, interviews, and essays. It is animated by an intransigent despair. Looking at Doctorow's novels as models of misrepresentation reveals doubts in them more dangerous than those usually associated with social satire or avant-gardism, for they extend to the heart of writing itself. Christopher Morris is a professor of English at Norwich University.

Americans is the second book in a series on America by Christopher Morris. While the first book, My America (Steidl, 2006), focused on Republican nationalism, Americans takes a much broader journey across American society. With an empathetic and critical eye, Morris presents a nation in a state of perpetual loss and its people searching for an identity--stranded within two long-running wars and an economy on the verge of collapse.

North Jersey residents have enjoyed frothy pints since the first brewhouse opened in Hoboken in 1641. Brewing was big in the Garden State prior to Prohibition, and by 1900, more than fifty breweries were in operation. Nearly half of them--like Krueger--were located in Newark. The dry reign of Prohibition and the region's proximity to major cities made it a hub for bootleggers and gangsters like Longy Zwillman and Waxey Gordon. Even after the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed, North Jersey brewing sputtered. Some independent breweries like Ballantine restarted operation, but it wasn't until the 1990s that the region saw a craft brewing renaissance. Today, Jerseyans enjoy premium ales and lagers from breweries like Climax, River Horse and New Jersey Beer Company. Beer writer Chris Morris explores the origins and the new revolution of brewing in North Jersey.

What is normal anyway?

As Chris's home life deteriorates and he descends into an abyss, he's showing up for high school finals so high he can't even remember his locker combination. While other kids are having Thanksgiving dinner, Chris is chasing his drunk mom down the sidewalk of a strip mall, trying to take her to rehab. He's winning a cruise to the Bahamas, drinking and pretending to be in his twenties to hook up with someone much older. Bad decisions and misadventures abound when Chris tries his best to be normal having no idea how.

Set in the mid-90s outside of Chicago, this riveting memoir-by turns heartbreaking and uplifting-chronicles how a family broken by alcoholism creates an uncertain world for Chris as he stumbles through suburbia, trying to find a way out. Both a cautionary tale and coming-of-age story, We Are All Made of Scars'' is also a rarely seen glimpse into the world of addiction from a teenage boy's perspective.

'We Are All Made of Scars' contains vital insight into the generational trauma of alcoholism. Honest and open throughout, author Christopher Morris is unafraid to confide in the reader and, by sharing so many personal truths, manages to create a vivid memoir of hope and survival. - Indie Reader

Chris's profound words of advice at the end are my favorite part of the book, as he speaks about being conscious of how the past affects the present and healing from early negative influences. - Readers' Favorite

A perfect family read whose voice and moral lessons will echo for years to come. Readers are bound to incalculably draw strength and hope from this new magnum opus. - Bestsellersworld.com

A portion of the proceeds of this book are being donated to alcoholism treatment centers and Al-Anon groups in the area where the author resides.

Embark on a transformative journey towards reclaiming your well-being with Chronic Pain Relief: Strategies for Wellness and Healing. This comprehensive guide offers a holistic approach to managing chronic pain, empowering you to explore diverse strategies tailored to your unique needs. From understanding the intricate nuances of chronic pain to integrating traditional treatments with alternative therapies, this book equips you with invaluable insights and practical tools for navigating your pain management journey. Dive into chapters dedicated to exploring the mind-body connection, optimizing nutrition, incorporating exercise, and fostering a supportive environment for healing. Discover how lifestyle modifications, spiritual practices, and advocacy can play pivotal roles in your quest for relief. With a focus on holistic wellness and empowerment, Chronic Pain Relief invites you to embrace a multifaceted approach to healing, unlocking the potential for lasting transformation and renewed vitality.

The Figure of the Road examines the metaphor of the road, way, or path in works of representative humanities disciplines (literature, religion, philosophy, visual art, popular culture) to show how writers and artists anticipated the dilemma known to contemporary deconstruction as the aporia or pathless place. This tradition exposes the solution advocated in Derrida's late thought - the search for the tout autre - as a negative theology and suppression of writing's freedom to allegorize these insoluble problems. The Figure of the Road concludes by tracing the bleak, Beckett-like implications of this freedom for curriculum and ethics in a world understood as wholly figural.

Adopting and transforming the Romantic fascination with mountains, modernism in the German-speaking lands claimed the Alps as a space both of resistance and of escape. This new 'cult of mountains' reacted to the symptoms and alienating forces associated with modern culture, defining and reinforcing models of subjectivity based on renewed wholeness and an aggressive attitude to physical and mental health. The arts were critical to this project, none more so than music, which occupied a similar space in Austro-German culture: autonomous, pure, sublime. In Modernism and the Cult of Mountains opera serves as a nexus, shedding light on the circulation of contesting ideas about politics, nature, technology and aesthetics. Morris investigates operatic representations of the high mountains in German modernism, showing how the liminal quality of the landscape forms the backdrop for opera's reflexive engagement with the identity and limits of its constituent media, not least music. This operatic reflexivity, in which the very question of music's identity is repeatedly restaged, invites consideration of musical encounters with mountains in other genres, and Morris shows how these issues resonate in Strauss's Alpine Symphony and in the Bergfilm (mountain film). By using music and the ideology of mountains to illuminate aspects of each other, Morris makes an original and valuable contribution to the critical study of modernism.

Mississippi represented the Old South and all that it stood for--perhaps more so than any other state. Tracing its long histories of economic, social, and cultural evolution, Morris takes a close and richly detailed look at a representative Southern community: Jefferson Davis's Warren County, in the state's southwestern corner. Drawing on many wills, deeds, court records, and manuscript materials, he reveals the transformation of a loosely knit, typically Western community of pioneer homesteaders into a distinctly Southern society based on plantation agriculture, slavery, and a patriarchal social order.

This thoughtful, well-written study doubtless will be widely read and deservedly influential.--American Historical Review.

In The Big Muddy, the first long-term environmental history of the Mississippi, Christopher Morris offers a brilliant tour across five centuries as he illuminates the interaction between people and the landscape, from early hunter-gatherer bands to present-day industrial and post-industrial society.

Over the past 20 years Christopher Morris has concentrated the greater part of his work on war correspondence, documenting more than 18 foreign conflicts, including the U.S. invasion of Panama, the Persian Gulf War, the drug war in Columbia, and the wars in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Yugoslavia. For the last four years he has been home, photographing the relative calm of the domestic side of George W. Bush's presidency, on assignment for Time. Morris describes this collection of his Bush-era work as his personal journey into a Republican America. Hopefully, Morris says, you will see what I saw and feel what I felt--a nation that has wrapped its eyes so tightly in red, white and blue that it has gone blind. This is My America. Morris, a founding member of the photojournalist agency VII, based in Paris, has received numerous awards for his work, including the Robert Capa Gold Medal, several World Press Photo awards, and the Infinity Photojournalist award from the International Center of Photography. This is his first monograph.

In this brilliant collection, five historians and literary critics explore the many ways that southern writers influence and are influenced by their region. Christopher Morris examines the relationship between economic development and the humor of such Old Southwestern writers as Augustus B. Longstreet and Johnson Jones Hooper, while Susan A. Eacker explains how South Carolina author Louisa McCord came to defend slavery. Anne Goodwyn Jones offers a penetrating deconstruction of gender in the southern literary renaissance, Charles Joyner reassesses William Styron's controversial decision to write The Confessions of Nat Turner in the first person, and Bertram Wyatt-Brown reveals the connection between depression and literary creativity. Presenting interdisciplinary topics within a broad chronological range, this remarkable work will be of interest to all students of southern literature and history.