Bøger af Valerie Hansen

The Silk Road is iconic in world history; but what was it, exactly? It conjures up a hazy image of a caravan of camels laden with silk on a dusty desert track, reaching from China to Rome. The reality was different--and far more interesting. In The Silk Road: A New History with Documents, Valerie Hansen describes the remarkable archeological finds that revolutionized our understanding of these trade routes. Hansen explores eight sites along the road, from Xi'an to Samarkand, where merchants, envoys, pilgrims, and travelers mixed in cosmopolitan communities, tolerant of religions from Buddhism to Zoroastrianism. Designed for use in the classroom and based on the award-winning trade edition (OUP, 2012), The Silk Road: A New History with Documents offers a selection of excerpted primary sources in each chapter. The wide-ranging sources include memoirs of medieval Chinese monks and modern explorers, letters written by women, descriptions of towns, legal contracts, religious hymns, and many others. A new final chapter provides coverage of the Silk Road during the period of Mongol rule.

What do Strange Sexual Problems, Deviant People, Goofy Surveys, Weird Criminals and Bizarre Medical and Scientific Facts have in common? They All Need Punch Lines! Luckily, thanks to the satirical wit of Valerie Hansen, no story here has gone un-punched! From a joke writer who has had jokes published alongside such famous late-night comics as Jay Leno, David Letterman, Bill Maher and Conan O'Brien comes a book full of one-liners and wisecracks about today's stupidest news! Read Valerie's opinions on such important stories as a woman who was born with two vaginas, a man who lost part of his penis while sexually gratifying himself with a vacuum cleaner, a woman with size 164xxx breasts, a giant bronze sculpture of dog feces, a man who had sex with an elephant, a six year study on whether or not bisexual men exist, a woman who died after giving oral sex to a German Shepherd, Testicle Festivals and more!

"It was long assumed that the centuries immediately prior to AD 1000 were lacking in any major cultural developments or geopolitical encounters, that the Europeans hadn't yet discovered North America, that the farthest anyone had traveled over sea was the Vikings' invasion of Britain. But how, then, to explain the presence of blonde-haired people in Mayan temple murals in Chichen Itza, Mexico? Could it be possible that the Vikings had found their way to the Americas during the height of the Mayan empire? Valerie Hansen ... argues that the year 1000 was the world's first point of major cultural exchange and exploration"--

In October 2014 the body of Sofia Molina is found near the train tracks toward the north end of Healdsburg. The next morning Mary, a retired physician, finds her neighbor, Mabel Garrity, strangled to death. Detective Greg Davidson leads the investigation of both murders.Greg and his team discover that Sofia was having a series of sexual encounters with various married men. They also learn that Mabel was a gossip and a blackmailer. This knowledge results in multiple potential suspects, including Frank James, who had sex with Sofia the night she was murdered and who lives across the street from Mabel.In the meantime, Greg hasn't seen his younger sister for forty years. He believes himself responsible for a traumatic injury she suffered when she was six years old. Now she wants to meet, filling him with anxiety.Greg, who's already in a relationship, finds himself emotionally drawn to Mabel's neighbor, Mary. He recognizes the murderer's voice when he tries to call Mary and realizes she's in danger.

This intriguing book explores how ordinary people in traditional China used contracts to facilitate the transactions of their daily lives, as they bought, sold, rented, or borrowed land, livestock, people, or money. In the process it illuminates specific everyday concerns during China's medieval transformation. Valerie Hansen translates and analyzes surviving contracts and also draws on tales of the supernatural, rare legal sources, plays, language texts, and other anecdotal evidence to describe how contracts were actually used. She explains that the educated wrote their own contracts, whereas the illiterate paid scribes to draft them and read them aloud. The contracts reveal much about everyday life: problems with inflation that resulted from the introduction of the first paper money in the world; the persistence of women's rights to own and sell land at a time when their lives were becoming more constricted; and the litigiousness of families, which were complicated products of remarriages, adoptions, and divorces. The Chinese even armed their dead with contracts asserting ownership of their grave plots, and Hansen provides details of an underworld court system in which the dead could sue and be sued. Illustrations and maps enrich a book that will be fascinating for anyone interested in Chinese life and society.