Bøger af WIlliam J. Kennedy

Jonathan West can now officially call himself an MD. It's the spring of 1975, and he's honored to graduate from Yale with his classmates. But his growing unease about the future has cast a shadow on the day. Jonathan may be a skilled doctor, but he's also a CIA assassin. His handlers all expected him to spin out after he completed his first kill, but Jonathan was remarkably unfazed. He was so unaffected that he's beginning to wonder if this is something to be concerned about.Jonathan has many other worries. He has a one-year-old son and a wife who thinks he's just a pharmaceutical researcher. He's also accepted a new mission from the CIA that'll place him in Iran during one of the most turbulent times in history. His target is the Shah of Iran, and the Shah's death could have enormous implications for the entire world. As Jonathan plunges into his new assignment, this healer understands he must once again become an assassin for the greater good. But as he travels from Geneva to Tehran to Egypt in pursuit of his victim, will his scruples get in the way of carrying out his murderous task?

The Italian scholar and poet Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374) is best remembered today for vibrant and impassioned love poetry that helped to establish Italian as a literary language. Petrarch inspired later Renaissance writers, who produced an extraordinary body of work regarded today as perhaps the high-water mark of poetic productivity in the European West. These "e;Petrarchan"e; poets were self-consciously aware of themselves as poets-as craftsmen, revisers, and professionals. As William J. Kennedy shows in Petrarchism at Work, this commitment to professionalism and the mastery of poetic craft is essential to understanding Petrarch's legacy.Petrarchism at Work contributes to recent scholarship that explores relationships between poetics and economic history in early-modern European literature. Kennedy traces the development of a Renaissance aesthetics from one based upon Platonic intuition and visionary furor to one grounded in Aristotelian craftsmanship and technique. Their polarities harbor economic consequences, the first privileging the poet's divinely endowed talent, rewarded by the autocratic largess of patrons, the other emphasizing the poet's acquired skill and hard work. Petrarch was the first to exploit the tensions between these polarities, followed by his poetic successors. These include Gaspara Stampa in the emergent salon society of Venice, Michelangelo Buonarroti in the "e;gift"e; economy of Medici Florence and papal Rome, Pierre de Ronsard and the poets of his Pleiade brigade in the fluctuant Valois court, and William Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the commercial world of Elizabethan and early Stuart London. As Kennedy shows, the poetic practices of revision and redaction by Petrarch and his successors exemplify the transition from a premodern economy of patronage to an early modern economy dominated by unstable market forces.

"The publication of this book, I believe, is a milestone. . .Kennedy and Gentle have done an outstanding job of assembling the best techniques from a great variety of sources, establishing a benchmark for the field of statistical computing." ---Mathematics of Computation ." . .a very impressive text. . .highly readable and well illustrated with examples. . . .the reader who intends to take a hand in designing his own regression and multivariate packages will find a storehouse of information." ---Journal of the American Statistical Association ." . .a valuable addition to the literature on statistical computing." ---Mathematical Reviews