Jay Scherer Libri

Big money and municipal politics collide in the story of Edmonton's Rogers Place hockey arena.

Evil is back. With a vengeance. In the sequel to The Lamia, the demon Lilith is freed from her Vatican prison by a Cardinal determined to trigger the birth of the AntiChrist, and start the world on a path to Christ's return. But partnering with a demon is fraught with deceit and danger, and Lilith has her own plans. Lilith is focused on vengeance by repossessing the girl that got away - Taylor Morgan - and using her as a vessel for birthing the AntiChrist, while also destroying humanity with her legion of lamias, leaving her and the AntiChrist to rule a population of vampires. Dr. Richard Morgan and his misfit team of cohorts must once again save his daughter from this unspeakable evil. He not only has to go up against the demon Lilith, but also the Pontifical Swiss Guard, a sect within the Catholic Church, international law enforcement, and his own personal demons, if he's to overcome the insurmountable and save his daughter, and humanity. Once again, Morgan is sent on an international quest, with stops in Vatican City, Rome, the Cave of the Apocalypse on the Island of Patmos, Monaco, Nazareth, Pisa, and culminating with a chilling climax in the Sistine Chapel. The Night Hag is a masterful sequel to The Lamia, and will leave you on the edge of your seat as you race to turn each chilling page.

In 2011, New Zealand rugby fans erupted in celebration as the All Blacks narrowly defeated France to win the Rugby World Cup - the team's first title since New Zealand hosted the inaugural tournament in 1987. In the years between these victories, the sport of rugby has been radically transformed from its amateur roots to a professional, global entertainment 'product'. This book explores these developments and focuses initially on the New Zealand Rugby Union's key deals with Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and global sportswear giant Adidas in the 1990s. The new pay-per-view era has curtailed the traditional 'viewing rights' of rugby fans to have live, free-to-air access to All Blacks test matches on public television. Adidas, meanwhile, has relentlessly commodified aspects of national heritage and indigenous identity in pursuit of local and global markets while exploiting labour in developing countries. Escalating merchandise costs and ticket prices have, at the same time, pushed the sport further out of the reach of ordinary New Zealanders. All of these issues, however, have not gone uncontested, and the authors argue that rugby remains a contested terrain in the face of a new set of limits and pressures in the global economy.

Although New Zealand exists as a small (pop. 4.3 million), peripheral nation in the global economy, it offers a unique site through which to examine the complex, but uneven, interplay between global forces and long-standing national traditions and cultural identities. This book examines the profound impact of globalization on the national sport of rugby and New Zealand’s iconic team, the All Blacks. Since 1995, the national sport of rugby has undergone significant change, most notably due to the New Zealand Rugby Union’s lucrative and ongoing corporate partnerships with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and global sportswear giant Adidas. The authors explore these significant developments and pressures alongside the resulting tensions and contradictions that have emerged as the All Blacks, and other aspects of national heritage and indigenous identity, have been steadily incorporated into a global promotional culture. Following recent research in cultural studies, they highlight the intensive, but contested, commodification of the All Blacks to illuminate the ongoing transformation of rugby in New Zealand by corporate imperatives and the imaginations of marketers, most notably through the production of a complex discourse of corporate nationalism within Adidas’s evolving local and global advertising campaigns.

In 1942, almost a year after America entered the Second World War, Jay Jackson—a former railroad worker and sign painter, now working as a cartoonist and illustrator for the legendary Black newspaper the Chicago Defender—did something unexpected.He took the Defender’s stale and long-running gag strip Bungleton Green and remade it into a gripping, anti-racist science-fiction adventure comic. He teamed the bumbling Green with a crew of Black teens called the Mystic Commandos, and together they battled the enemies of America and racial equality in the past, present, and future. Nazis, segregationist senators, Benedict Arnold, fifth columnists, eighteenth-century American slave traders, evil scientists, and a nation of racist Green Men all faced off against the Mystic Commandos and Green, who in the strip’s run would be transformed by Jackson into the first-ever Black superhero.Never before collected or republished, Jackson’s stories are packed with jaw-dropping twists and breathtaking action, and present a radical vision of a brighter American future.This edition includes a new eye-opening essay by Jeet Heer, who investigates Jackson's earlier work and personal history and provides a fuller portrait of the cartoonist who remade Bungleton Green.