Jim Davis – författare

Dickens loved the stage--he enjoyed thousands of evenings in the theatre, and longed to write for it and to perform himself, an ambition he eventually satisfied by touring alone with his Readings. Victorian prejudice and his need to preserve his personal image kept him from openly becoming a stage professional earlier in his career, but all his work was informed by his dramatic imagination. He found ways of circumventing these taboos by seeking closer and closer contact over the staging of his work with dramatic writers, admired actors, and trusted theatre managements. In the later stages of his career these tacit collaborations continued (as with Celine Celeste's staging of A Tale of Two Cities), although the 1860s and, subsequent to Dickens's death, the 1870s also saw a number of more independent adaptations, often celebrated for the quality of acting they inspired. This book presents, for the first time, fully edited texts of some of these later plays, ranging from Dion Boucicault's Dot (a version of The Cricket onthe Hearth) to J. P. Burnett's adaptation of Bleak House (entitled Jo), as well as Jingle, a one-act farce adapted from James Albery's dramatization of The Pickwick Papers.

We are currently experiencing the largest and fastest religious shift in US history. It is greater than the First and Second Great Awakening and every revival in our country combined...but in the opposite direction. Yet precious little rigorous study has been done on the broad phenomenon of dechurching in America. Jim Davis and Michael Graham have commissioned the largest and most comprehensive study of dechurching in America by renowned sociologists Dr. Ryan Burge and Dr. Paul Djupe.The Great Dechurching takes the insights gleaned from this study to drill down on how exactly people are dechurching with respect to beliefs, behavior, and belonging.This book gives the church in America its first ever deep dive into the dechurched phenomenon. You'll learn about the dechurched through a detailed sketch of demographics, size, core concerns, church off-ramps, historical roots, and the gravity of what is at stake. Then you'll explore what can be done to slow the bleed, engage the pertinent issues winsomely and wisely, and hopefully re-church some of the dechurched.

Forty years after the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, this important study examines the history, industrial uses, and harmful effects of the twelve most commonly used organochloride chemicals. All have been fully or partially banned by the Stockholm Protocol, an international treaty signed by about 120 countries in December 2000. Among the twelve are the dioxins (the active ingredient in Agent Orange) and polychlorinated byphenyls (PCBs), which are toxic in minute quantities. Johansen pays special attention to the Inuit of the Arctic, where these chemicals have been bio-accumulating to dangerous levels, moving up the food chain to a degree of toxicity that some Inuit mothers are no longer able to safely breast-feed their infants.The polar stratospheric ozone has been devastated by emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), and new scientific findings connect global warming near the Earth's surface to significant cooling in the stratosphere. This synergy aggravates ozone depletion because the chemical reactions that destroy the ozone become more energetic as temperatures drop. Synthetic toxins have taken their toll on minority ethnic groups in the United States, and persistent organic pollutants have inflicted physiological damage on humans and other animals. Finally, Johansen explores the estrogenic effects of such chemicals. Sperm counts have declined as much as 50% in 50 years.

This volume introduces the works of an important but neglected dramatist, one of the most prolific and popular of the mid-Victorian period. H. J. Byron wrote an enormous number of comedies, burlesques and pantomimes. He invented the characters of Widow Twankay and Buttons, still beloved by modern pantomime audiences. His burlesques of melodrama helped to bring an end to the more outlandish examples of the genre; inveterate punning became his trademark. Byron was also a competent editor, theatre manager and actor specializing in the eccentric roles of his own plays. As playwright he was second only to W. S. Gilbert and Tom Robertson, whose careers he helped to further. Jim Davis has edited four of the plays, illustrating them with contemporary drawings and providing an extensive introduction.