In America, notes acclaimed novelist Francine Prose, we are obsessed with food and diet. And what is this obsession with food except a struggle between sin and virtue, overeating and self-control—a struggle with the fierce temptations of gluttony. In Gluttony, Francine Prose serves up a marvelous banquet of witty and engaging observations on this most delicious of deadly sins. She traces how our notions of gluttony have evolved along with our ideas about salvation and damnation, health and illness, life and death. Offering a lively smorgasbord that ranges from Augustine's Confessions and Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale, to Petronius's Satyricon and Dante's Inferno, she shows that gluttony was in medieval times a deeply spiritual matter, but today we have transformed gluttony from a sin into an illness—it is the horrors of cholesterol and the perils of red meat that we demonize. Indeed, the modern take on gluttony is that we overeat out of compulsion, self-destructiveness, or to avoid intimacy and social contact. But gluttony, Prose reminds us, is also an affirmation of pleasure and of passion. She ends the book with a discussion of M.F.K. Fisher's idiosyncratic defense of one of the great heroes of gluttony, Diamond Jim Brady, whose stomach was six times normal size. "The broad, shiny face of the glutton," Prose writes, "has been—and continues to be—the mirror in which we see ourselves, our hopes and fears, our darkest dreams and deepest desires." Never have we delved more deeply into this mirror than in this insightful and stimulating book.

This core reference provides a one-stop, definitive resource for building robust, Web-enabled software applications for the revolutionary Microsoft .NET development platform. Windows programming authority Jeff Prosise masterfully explains this new programming paradigm as he introduces readers to the .NET Framework and to the new programming models that it embodies: Windows Forms, Web Forms, and Web services. The book includes more than 75 complete sample programs written in C#. The samples are designed to help readers resolve .NET development questions and to complement the book's carefully explained introduction to .NET programming. All the sample programs, as well as an electronic version of the book, are included on the companion CD-ROM.

An accessible, collectable book on Weegee. First immigration American, Weegee (1899-1968) is the archetypal tabloid photographer of the twentieth century. Preferring to photograph under the cover of night, he was known for his aggressive use of flash. Weegee's photographic eye was unstoppable: drawn to the grotesque, the illicit, the illegal, Weegee delivered both harrowing and poignant photographs of crime scenes and criminals to New York's tabloid-reading public in the 1930s and 1940s. Named after the Ouija board' for his uncanny ability to arrive at the scene of a crime before the police, Weegee recorded the dark side of New York's streets. No sordid crime seemed to escape his flash and no crime was too gruesome to capture on camera for the papers the next day. Weegee's understanding of people's simultaneous repulsion and attraction to vivid photographs of crimes of passion, murder, brutal accidents was well before his time. Even today, his photographs still have the power to shock, and the originality of the images has elevated them in importance far beyond the newspapers he worked for.