Despite the West's growing involvement in Muslim societies, conflicts, and cultures, its inability to understand or analyze the Islamic world threatens any prospect for East–West rapprochement. Impelled by one thousand years of anti-Muslim ideas and images, the West has failed to engage in any meaningful or productive way with the world of Islam. Formulated in the medieval halls of the Roman Curia and courts of the European Crusaders and perfected in the newsrooms of Fox News and CNN, this anti-Islamic discourse determines what can and cannot be said about Muslims and their religion, trapping the West in a dangerous, dead-end politics that it cannot afford. In Islam Through Western Eyes, Jonathan Lyons unpacks Western habits of thinking and writing about Islam, conducting a careful analysis of the West's grand totalizing narrative across one thousand years of history. He observes the discourse's corrosive effects on the social sciences, including sociology, politics, philosophy, theology, international relations, security studies, and human rights scholarship. He follows its influence on research, speeches, political strategy, and government policy, preventing the West from responding effectively to its most significant twenty-first-century challenges: the rise of Islamic power, the emergence of religious violence, and the growing tension between established social values and multicultural rights among Muslim immigrant populations. Through the intellectual "archaeology" of Michel Foucault, Lyons reveals the workings of this discourse and its underlying impact on our social, intellectual, and political lives. He then addresses issues of deep concern to Western readers―Islam and modernity, Islam and violence, and Islam and women―and proposes new ways of thinking about the Western relationship to the Islamic world.

Islam Through Western Eyes: From the Crusades to the War on Terrorism

History

Lyons, Jonathan

Middle East

Columbia University Press

The story of the internal clash of Islam versus Islam in today's Iran Two seasoned scholar/journalists of the Islamic world focus on Iran-the modern age's first theocracy-to challenge the prevailing Western belief that the Islamic world is an undifferentiated mass of disaffected and dangerous fanatics. Instead, Geneive Abdo and Jonathan Lyons explore the controversial view that Iranians have a legitimate quarrel with the United States and the West stemming from decades of exploitive foreign policies against Iran and its people. Taking the reader inside the country's key institutions, the authors, whose research includes an astounding three years of intensive meetings with leading theologians, argue that the 1979 Iranian revolution, long viewed in the West as the pursuit of an imagined medieval Utopia, was, in fact, a political movement designed to modernize Islam. A power struggle between conservative and reform elements has provoked a clash that is destabilizing the country and limiting Iran's ability to integrate with the world community. Since 2000, when the authors were forced to flee Iran, free expression has been stifled and the democratically elected president, Mohammad Khatami, has been stripped of power, as have other mullahs who advocate flexibility in the application of Islamic law. The uninformed U.S. response to this struggle has strengthened the hand of the conservatives. The authors demonstrate Iran's critical influence on the world's 1.4 billion Muslims and Islamists and its chances for democracy in the years ahead.

Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in Twenty-First-Century Iran

Abdo, Geneive

Henry Holt and Co.

“Riveting . . . a side of Iran that is often misrepresented by the world’s media—[an] insightful, captivating book.” —San Francisco Chronicle Taking the reader inside Iran’s key institutions, Geneive Abdo and Jonathan Lyons argue that the 1979 Iranian revolution, long viewed in the West as the pursuit of an imagined medieval Utopia, was in fact a political movement designed to modernize Islam. Twenty years later, a power struggle between conservative and reform elements provoked a clash that has destabilized the country and limited Iran’s ability to integrate with the world community. Answering Only to God challenges the prevailing Western belief that the Islamic world is an undifferentiated mass of disaffected and dangerous fanatics or that a Western-style democracy will soon transform this ancient land of Shi’ite and Sufi tradition. Instead, the authors explore the controversial view that beyond their quarrel with the West, stemming from decades of exploitive foreign policies, the real struggle in Iran is between reformers and conservative mullahs.

Holt Paperbacks

Comedy for Animators

While comedy writers are responsible for creating clever scripts, comedic animators have a much more complicated problem to solve: What makes a physical character funny? Comedy for Animators breaks down the answer by exploring the techniques of those who have used their bodies to make others laugh. Drawing from traditions such as commedia dell’arte, pantomime, Vaudeville, the circus, and silent and modern film, animators will learn not only to create funny characters, but also how to execute gags, create a comic climate, and use environment as a character. Whether you’re creating a comic villain or a bumbling sidekick, this is the one and only guide you need to get your audience laughing! <ul><ul>
<li>Explanation of comedic archetypes and devices will both inspire and inform your creative choices </li> <li>Exploration of various modes of storytelling allows you to give the right context for your story and characters </li> <li>Tips for creating worlds, scenarios, and casts for your characters to flourish in </li> <li>Companion website includes example videos and further resources to expand your skillset--check it out at www.comedyforanimators.com!</li> </ul></ul> Jonathan Lyons delivers simple, fun, illustrated lessons that teach readers to apply the principles of history’s greatest physical comedians to their animated characters. This isn’t stand-up comedy―it’s the falling down and jumping around sort!

Arts & Photography

Graphic Design

Routledge

While comedy writers are responsible for creating clever scripts, comedic animators have a much more complicated problem to solve: What makes a physical character funny? Comedy for Animators breaks down the answer by exploring the techniques of those who have used their bodies to make others laugh. Drawing from traditions such as commedia dell’arte, pantomime, Vaudeville, the circus, and silent and modern film, animators will learn not only to create funny characters, but also how to execute gags, create a comic climate, and use environment as a character. Whether you’re creating a comic villain or a bumbling sidekick, this is the one and only guide you need to get your audience laughing!    Explanation of comedic archetypes and devices will both inspire and inform your creative choices    Exploration of various modes of storytelling allows you to give the right context for your story and characters    Tips for creating worlds, scenarios, and casts for your characters to flourish in    Companion website includes example videos and further resources to expand your skillset--check it out at www.comedyforanimators.com!   Jonathan Lyons delivers simple, fun, illustrated lessons that teach readers to apply the principles of history’s greatest physical comedians to their animated characters. This isn’t stand-up comedy―it’s the falling down and jumping around sort!

Of the many 20th-century upheavals that continue to rattle our 21st-century world, few are as misunderstood or as stubbornly resistant to Western understanding as Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Now, that Iran and its long-time foe, the United States, appear to be mending ties, there is widespread hope that the distortions, misunderstandings, and stereotypes that formed the Western impression of the Islamic republic will end. For more than three decades, viewing Iranian society as an incendiary, pariah state that harbors unrelenting hostility for many of its influential, pro-American neighbors – from Israel to Saudi Arabia – has helped keep the focus on Iran as the implacable foe of U.S. interests. While the degree of demonization will likely subside as Iran and the West improve relations, this is unlikely to bring Westerners to a closer understanding of why the Islamic revolution happened in the first place. The more difficult challenge is to develop a proper appreciation of the far more fundamental role played by the vexed questions of religion and religious identity – topics that readers, analysts, politicians, and academics all too often discount in favor of more familiar and comfortable factors: the political, the economic, and the strategic. This is not only true for Iran but for Arab societies as well, which are often studied and analyzed with little attention paid to the role religion in destabilizing societies and fomenting violence. The Western understanding of history, grounded in the Enlightenment with its general disdain for religion, has compounded the difficulty of analyzing and understanding those societies – in contrast to our own – in which religion has never been formally separated from other central aspects of social, political, and intellectual life. Answering Only to God is an attempt to redress this state of affairs by focusing much-needed attention on the very questions that continue to this day to animate Iran and, by extension, much of the contemporary Arab and broader Muslim world: What does it mean to be a good Muslim? And who gets to answer that question? In the specific case of Iran, these concerns have taken on another, related aspect, chiefly, Can the Iranian Revolution deliver on its promise to create a society that is both recognizably democratic and legitimately Islamic?

Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in 21st-Century Iran

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

A dynamic collection of provocative stories forming a tribute to the work and life of William S. Burroughs. Foreword by novelist Graham Masterton Stories are: PASO ROBLES - BY JOHN PALISANO Inside there's passage to a darker, deeper reality, if you rip off your eyelids to see it. WHAT DO YOU MEAN / WHERE ARE YOU NOW BY EMILE-LOUIS TOMAS JOUVET The boy meant everything, both to the Exterminator and the Insects alike. PRINCE OF MARS - BY SAM RICHARD On the Red Planet, Bill Lee must fight for survival and the hand of the Prince of Mars. AN INSIDER'S SKETCH OF THE RIO GRANDE VALLEY BY BOSLEY GRAVEL The informed traveller’s guide to the Rio Grande Valley where nothing is true and everything is permitted THE ROUTINE OF A SKINNY JUNKIE- BY ANTHONY SERVANTE A day in the life of a Skinny Junkie: his hallucinatory thoughts and lucid insights CHORUS - BY TRAVIS J. GATES A man, sick with life, contemplates the past and future while his surroundings look on. DROUGHT IN POP UP - BY JØNATHAN LYONS Xanthous is inspired by a patient the author witnessed as a janitor in a hospital, yellow and catheterized. THE TIMER - BY DANIELE SANTAGIULIANA A small rural town, from thousands of years practise a bloody ritual to gain something rare... BURGER EMPIRE - BY TOM LUCAS A walk-through for a seemingly innocent video game reveals a dark truth that lives among us. ORGAN VOID - BY JON PADGETT A commuter's worldview is shattered by two words printed on a cardboard sign. THE KINGDOM OF GOD - BY KARINA SIMS You may try your very best. But man is flawed and his fate, sealed. THE DUST OF TEN LONG DEAD STARS BY DEAN M. DRINKEL How can one night a year ago still affect these people? It does and with disastrous results.

The Junk Merchants

Literature & Fiction

Padgett, Jon

Lucas, Tom

Drinkel, Dean M.

Gates, Travis J.

Servante, Anthony

Santagiuliana, Daniele

Sims, Karina

Literary

The corporate-funded police force of Old New York dropped its investigation into a man's mysterious death by fire. Spontaneous human combustion is the rumored cause, but a down-and-out private detective, a former member of the Old New York Police Force, soon learns that this wasn't the only man to die this way.  Now, working with an inhumanly beautiful android 'Netrunner named Jonny Cache, and with a little help from a team of paranormal enthusiasts and a militant group of genetically redesigned women, he must find out who, why, and how the killings are taking place without attracting the wrath of Expedite Corp. and the police force it funds.  In a surreal twenty-first century full of androids, binaries, chip trippers, NewSchool Grrls and Morlocks, black acid rain and StellarNet obsession, we meet Cage, a private detective down on his luck. Kicked off the prestigious Old New York Police Force after having gone up against Expedite, the most powerful computer corporation in the world, he is struggling to make ends meet when fate seems to lend him a helping hand. Fragile Janice Gild comes to him with the story of the death of her brother James, a death so bizarre, Cage can only begin to guess at the method of the gruesome killing, and the motive behind it.  Soon Cage's path is littered with the burnt remains of a seemingly unconnected group of people. Only James' ex-girlfriend, the inhumanly lovely Jonny Cache, can shed any light on the victims who have been made to burn....

Burn

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Thrillers & Suspense

Double Dragon Pub

In a surreal twenty-first century full of androids, binaries, chip trippers, NewSchool Grrls and Morlocks, black acid rain and StellarNet obsession, we meet Cage, a private detective down on his luck. Kicked off the prestigious Old New York Police Force after having gone up against Expedite, the most powerful computer corporation in the world, he is struggling to make ends meet when fate seems to lend him a helping hand. Fragile Janice Gild comes to him with the story of the death of her brother James, a death so bizarre, Cage can only begin to guess at the method of the gruesome killing, and the motive behind it. Soon Cage's path is littered with the burnt remains of a seemingly unconnected group of people. Only James' ex-girlfriend, the inhumanly lovely Jonny Cache, can shed any light on the victims who have been made to burn....

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction

Domhan Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lyons, Jonathan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Lyons, Jonathan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lyons, Jonathan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Islam Through Western Eyes: From the Crusades to the War on Terrorism

Islam Through Western Eyes: From the Crusades to the War on Terrorism

Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in Twenty-First-Century Iran

Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in Twenty-First-Century Iran

Comedy for Animators

Comedy for Animators

Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in 21st-Century Iran

The Junk Merchants

Burn

Burn