Books with author John Kent Harrison

Treating ancient plays as living drama. Classical Greek drama is brought vividly to life in this series of new translations. Students are encouraged to engage with the text through detailed commentaries, including suggestions for discussion and analysis. In addition, numerous practical questions stimulate ideas on staging and encourage students to explore the play's dramatic qualities. Hecuba is suitable for students of both Classical Civilisation and Drama. Useful features include full synopsis of the play, commentary alongside translation for easy reference and a comprehensive introduction to the Greek Theatre. Hecuba is aimed primarily at A-level and undergraduate students in the UK, and college students in North America.

A gripping tale of heroism and valorNovelist John Harrison has captured the feeling of adventure in this new novel set in a dark time. A prophecy cast from the dawn of time is coming to be fulfilled in a time when almost all hope of salvation is lost.The lands are in chaos and everyone is trying to survive. The last queen was slain through treachery and decades have past since there has been any form of solid rule in Cennicus. In the interim the races have split from one another and are amassing for a war that threatens to consume them all. This is a time of legends and need.Somehow wrapped up in it all is one boy searching for his past and the keys to his future. Namir and his friends valiantly search out vestiges of his father’s past…a trek that may lead them into the very heart of darkness itself.This is the first book of the Shadow Saga, a must read for any fantasy enthusiast. Join with us as we explore the darkness that is Cennicus.Will they lead us to salvation?Or deeper into the very darkness we seek to escape?

Shadow Play is the spellbinding continuation of the story started in Shadow Dance. This second book of the Shadow Saga carries the adventure to a whole new level of danger and intrigue! The next steps of the prophecy are moving toward fruition and the world hangs in the balance.Dark forces reveal their plots as the forces of good struggle to uncover them. At each turn, those aligned with light are cut off from their own and lost in the chaos that surrounds them. With Aras's death, only his wife and the future heir to the throne are left to combat the growing darkness.Within all of this, Namir and his friends find themselves consumed by enemies, burdened by woes and thrust into the fray against their will. Namir must find the courage to face those who would stop him from fulfilling his fate. All the while, his best friend, Nurn, searches valiantly to find his missing brother.

There is simply no other book like this one on the market. One reason may be that a market scarcely exists for the secrets that baseball’s greatest hitters (or “strikers,” or “stickers”) brought to their craft over a century ago. Like other sports, and like our culture generally, baseball coaches and gurus have invested heavily in the notion of progress. Today is better than yesterday (goes the dogma) in every way, thanks to technology, training, and medical advances. A lot of that notion is true: some of it is bunk.“Players are stronger and healthier today.” True; so why do they strike out one out of every three trips to the plate? “Because pitchers are throwing much harder.” Generally speaking, yes; but the mound is also lower, the hitting background is better, batters wear helmets and body armor, and a zero-tolerance exists for knockdown pitches. Tris Speaker fanned 13 times in 674 plate appearances during the 1920 campaign while batting .388 and leading the league (for the fifth of eight seasons) with 50 doubles. Who performs at that rate today, even in Little League?John Harris believes in the value of historical research and scientific method—and he also entertains a skepticism of our blind, arrogant faith in the present’s superiority to the past. Convinced that yesteryear’s batsmen must have done at least some things better (precisely because they amassed such dazzling numbers while being less healthy and less tutored), he has invested years in reverse-engineering the swing that preceded Babe Ruth and the “live ball.” No single type of swing existed back then, it turns out; in fact, hitting featured a vast diversity of styles compared to the modern game. Nevertheless, certain tendencies can be isolated (front-foot hitting, shifting in the box, choking and hand-spreading, etc.). To judge by casual explanations offered of (for instance) the Georgia Peach's three-inch hand spread, today’s color commentators and technical analysts haven’t a clue about what was going on with Ty Cobb or Honus Wagner. As for baseball historians, they can tell you about Ed Delahanty’s drinking problem or Fred Clarke’s eye for the girls... but most of them have no interest whatever in how their subject gripped a bat.Dr. Harris corrects many such oversights, insofar as is humanly possibly over a century later and with little more than grainy still photos to go on. True students of the game will be shocked--and perhaps delighted--by how many potentially game-changing tips he has managed to uncover for the next generation of hitters... if any risk-takers emerge among the crop, that is.

A gripping tale of heroism and valorNovelist John Harrison has captured the feeling of adventure in this new novel set in a dark time. A prophecy cast from the dawn of time is coming to be fulfilled in a time when almost all hope of salvation is lost.The lands are in chaos and everyone is trying to survive. The last queen was slain through treachery and decades have passed since there has been any form of solid rule in Cennicus. In the interim, the races have split from one another and are amassing for a war that threatens to consume them all. This is a time of legends and need.Somehow wrapped up in it all is one boy searching for his past and the keys to his future. Namir and his friends valiantly search out vestiges of his father’s past…a trek that may lead them into the very heart of darkness itself.This is the first book of the Shadow Saga, a must read for any fantasy enthusiast. Join us as we explore the darkness that is Cennicus.Will they lead us to salvation?Or deeper into the very darkness we seek to escape?

Any devout baseball enthusiast will appreciate the creative metrics that Dr. Harris has applied to the careers of young black ballplayers whose big-league life (in the cases examined here) began a good six or eight years after Jackie Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. The “study group” is mostly drawn from Post Cereal cards that Harris lovingly collected as a boy. Some of his collection’s most promising members had dropped off the map when he revisited the cards decades later, and he grew curious. Black players, especially, seemed abundant in this unhappy set of strange disappearances. The project started, therefore, in a thesis: as of about 1960, making it in the Major Leagues remained much harder for African-Americans than for Caucasians.Statistical review included not only a comparison of black and white batting averages, Earned Run Averages, and other standard metrics, but also an exploration of environmental conditions, such as how often players endured the disruption of being traded and how much time they spent in inactivity between starts. There are two sides to every story, of course, and Harris takes pains to underscore the presumptions and blind spots in his own arguments; but the tendency for black players to encounter more obstacles and fewer rewards often emerges rather powerfully.As Dr. Harris attempts to refine these findings with additional research into sportswriters’ accounts and other sources, he unveils a theory never succinctly proposed by any source: that the prejudices in question were not simply a conditioned reflex to skin color, but that the “anything goes” baseball of the Negro Leagues made coaches and managers of the Fifties’ systematized, highly controlled Major League game very suspicious and uncomfortable. Members of the Caucasian “brain trust” feared being shown up or drawn beyond the bounds of their expertise. This stylistic prejudice—which lay close to the heart of the game’s racial prejudice, Harris believes—appears nowhere more clearly than in the emphasis of the home run. Aaron, Mays, Robinson, Banks... they all rose to glory on an impressive wave of homering; but potential superstars like Pinson, Altman, Al Smith, and Floyd Robinson may have been ruinously infected by Home Run Fever.Such a conclusion, because it removes prejudice from the purely ideological corner of racism and chooses to view it as a complex puzzle—because, that is, it doesn’t confront us with a simplistic “good guy/bad guy” scenario—will disappoint many of today’s social critics who want to cast all racial questions in a “good vs. evil” mold. Dr. Harris stresses, however, that he is uninterested in being the “white scholar trying to advertise… moral enlightenment” in a grand feat of virtue-signaling. Referring to prejudices that beset his own son’s baseball experience—not racial, but nevertheless severe—he asserts instead, “I am a father who once felt the anguish of looking on helplessly as his son’s confidence was sabotaged—and who has re-aggravated that anguish in pondering the young lives of a few talented men now gone from this world.”The book thus ends up being a personal odyssey: an odd, even unique evolution for a work on sports history. But then, baseball is a unique game. It bonds fathers and sons, and it breaks down barriers that ordinarily separate our communities. If John Harris’s approach defies the expectations of sportswriting by confusing its subjects with our sons and our brothers, does it not also therein suggest the only possible solution to the problem of racial bigotry?

Shadow Play is the spellbinding continuation of the story started in Shadow Dance. This second book of the Shadow Saga carries the adventure to a whole new level of danger and intrigue! The next steps of the prophecy are moving toward fruition and the world hangs in the balance.Dark forces reveal their plots as the forces of good struggle to uncover them. At each turn, those aligned with light are cut off from their own and lost in the chaos that surrounds them. With Aras's death, only his wife and the future heir to the throne are left to combat the growing darkness.Within all of this, Namir and his friends find themselves consumed by enemies, burdened by woes and thrust into the fray against their will. Namir must find the courage to face those who would stop him from fulfilling his fate. All the while, his best friend, Nurn, searches valiantly to find his missing brother.

The age of the NES was transformative for video gaming. The console, and its Japanese predecessor, the Famicom, were extraordinarily popular in that time. When a console is that popular, it attracts a lot of people to make games for it. Many of these games are good. Many of them, to put it bluntly, are not.But it isn’t always easy to decide which are which. Some games present many of the warning signs of a bad game, but there’s something there, waiting, some might say lurking, for a persistent player to come along, to make them say, if just for a moment, “maybe this isn’t so bad after all.” And a few games were popular at the time but their stature has fallen, recently, as they get proclaimed the “black sheep” of their series.Come with us on a journey through the Other Half of the NES library. The games that could have been, if they had a better developer, if they had put in just a bit more effort, if someone had cared about their license a little more, if there had been more marketing money to spare, or even if they had been released a little earlier. To find the grime-covered treasures, ignored or even derided by others. And once we’ve found them, we’ll give you a few tips, just enough to get you started seeing the fun hidden beneath all the mud and gunk.It’s not that they’re all great games. Some of them aren’t even good. But they all have something there, some thing that can be enjoyed, even celebrated. At least you aren’t stuck with only one to play until your next birthday.

Shadow Play is the spellbinding continuation of the story started in Shadow Dance. This second installment of the Shadow Saga carries the adventure to a whole new level of danger and intrigue! The next steps of the prophecy are moving toward fruition and the world hangs in the balance.Dark forces reveal their plots as the forces of good struggle to unravel them. At each turn, those aligned with light are cut off from their own and lost in the chaos surrounding them. With the death of Aras, only his wife and the future heir to the throne are left to combat the growing darkness.Amidst all the chaos, Namir and his friends find themselves beset by enemies. Beleaguered by woes, and thrust against his will into the fray, Namir must find the courage to face those who would stop him from fulfilling his fate. All the while, his best friend Nurn searches valiantly to find his missing brother.Which side will come out ahead? Can the light hold off the darkness? Buy Shadow Play today to find out!