Books about Hinterland from Amazon.com

All of Myrillia is held in a grip of unease when a skull, twisted and corrupted by dark Graces, is found. It's the work of the Cabal, a faction of daemonic naethryn intent on destroying the Nine Lands. Former Shadowknight Tylar must unravel the mystery of the skull before all of Myrillia is threatened.

To save the Nine Lands-and himself-Tylar must enter the Hinterland, the desolate territory beyond the blessed Lands, where rogue gods roam and dark Graces flow-and from which no Shadowknight has ever returned..
Price: $6.93 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The title doesn't lie. Mathematician Georges Ifrah's masterpiece, The Universal History of Numbers, is a wonderfully comprehensive overview of numbers and counting spanning all the inhabited continents as far back in time as records will allow us to look. Beyond the ancient Babylonians, Sumerians, and Indians, Ifrah takes us farther south into Africa to examine an early decimal counting system and into ancient Mexico to reconstruct what we can of the Mayan calendar and numerical system. The 27 chapters are chiefly organized by culture, though there are some cross-cultural overviews of topics like letters and numbers.

The author's aim was grand: "to provide in simple and accessible terms the full and complete answer to all and any questions ... about the history of numbers and counting, from prehistory to the age of computers." This led him to wander the world for 10 years, studying and learning; this scholastic pilgrim has returned with amazing stories to tell. Toward the end of the book, Ifrah makes the book truly universal by refuting alien-intervention theories of cultural origins--surely our benefactors would have given us an efficient decimal counting system, zero and all, before helping us build pyramids and such. Such charming ideas, combined with such rigorously researched facts, make The Universal History of Numbers a uniquely important and fascinating volume. --Rob Lightner.
Price: $8.25 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Robert Morgan's first novel unfolds through the voices of three generations of Appalachian storytellers. In the first segment, adventurous teenager Petal runs off with a handsome homesteader in 1772. She tells of setting up housekeeping on the frontier, including the story of birthing her first baby while staving off a panther. In 1816, Petal's grandson uses a starved pig to track the best route for building a route down the mountain to market. In 1845, Petal's grandson constructs the turnpike down the mountain..
Price: $14.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Nation-building and the construction of citizenship, so often conducted--or coerced--from the center, are all too commonly studied from the center as well. This book moves the view of cultural citizenship to the periphery--specifically to the perspective of hinterland groups in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Sarawak, East Malaysia--to show that notions of nationhood and citizenship are not given, but created in dialogue between the state and local communities.
Written by an emergent generation of anthropologists, these essays address the question of how the identities of peoples whose lives are "marginal" to the modern nation-state have nonetheless been shaped by the impingement of the nation-state on their worlds. Together, these essays make a powerful contribution to understanding how cultural diversity in some parts of Southeast Asia has been reconfigured as modern states have promoted distinctive and powerfully-backed "imaginings" of nations..
Price: $6.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Casas Grandes, or Paquimé, is one of the most important settlements in the prehistoric North American Southwest. The largest and most complex community in the Puebloan world, it was characterized by its principal excavator, Charles Di Peso, as an outpost of the Toltec empire, which used it as a trade link between Mesoamerican and southwestern cultures. Michael E. Whalen and Paul E. Minnis have worked extensively in the Casas Grandes area and now offer new research arguing that it was not as similar to the highly developed complex societies of Mesoamerica as has been thought. In the first book of its kind in 25 years, the authors analyze settlement pattern data from more than 300 communities in the area surrounding Casas Grandes to show that its Medio period culture was a local development. Whalen and Minnis propose that Casas Grandes lacked extensive stratification, well-established decision-making hierarchies, and formalized positions of authority. They suggest instead that emerging elites used bribes, promises, and threats to build factions and extend their power. The communities at the periphery are shown to have had varying levels of social and economic interaction with Casas Grandes. This innovative study offers a new model for the rise and fall of Casas Grandes that departs considerably from the view most scholars have come to accept and will be of interest to all concerned with the comparative study of emergent complexity. It clearly shows that the idea of extensive regional centralization by Casas Grandes is no longer tenable and merits reconsideration by the archaeological community..
Price: $39.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In this exciting study, J. William Harris explores two great ironies of American history-the South's commitment to a liberty supported by slavery and its attempt to maintain the status quo with a war that undermined southern society. He examines why white southerners-most of whom did not own slaves-united in a long, bloody war to preserve the institution, arguing that slaveowners relied on an ideology of liberty, a potential for social mobility, and a web of personal relationships between classes to contain white class divisions and ensure control over the black population. The strains of war, Harris shows, dissolved these bonds of community and made Confederate victory impossible, forever changing southern society..
Price: $15.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"A 160 page fantasy sourcebook that explores and maps the areaof the Great Northern Wilderness just outside the mountains that divide the Land of the Damned from the rest of the world. The Shadow Coast of Bizantium. A hotbed of colonial rebellion. Kiridin, land of Eternal Autumn and oppression from the Coyle hordes. Coyle clans, villains and monsters. The Wild Lords -- long forgotten gods. Information about the Vault of Destiny and Palladium of Desires! Key people and places. Maps and adventure ideas.".
Price: $9.30 [Notify me when price goes down.]