Author: Greg Garrett File Type: pdf When humankind faces what it perceives as a threat to its very existence, a macabre thing happens in art, literature, and culture corpses begin to stand up and walk around. The dead walked in the fourteenth century, when the Black Death and other catastrophes roiled Europe. They walked in images from World War I, when a generation died horribly in the trenches. They walked in art inspired by the Holocaust and by the atomic attacks on Japan. Now, in the early twenty-first century, the dead walk in stories of the zombie apocalypse, some of the most ubiquitous narratives of post-911 Western culture. Zombies appear in popular movies and television shows, comics and graphic novels, fiction, games, art, and in material culture including pinball machines, zombie runs, and lottery tickets. The zombie apocalypse, Greg Garrett shows us, has become an archetypal narrative for the contemporary world, in part because zombies can stand in for any of a variety of global threats, from terrorism to Ebola, from economic uncertainty to ecological destruction. But this zombie narrative also brings us emotional and spiritual comfort. These apocalyptic stories, in which the world has been turned upside down and protagonists face the prospect of an imminent and grisly death, can also offer us wisdom about living in a community, present us with real-world ethical solutions, and invite us into conversation about the value and costs of survival. We may indeed be living with the living dead these days, but through the stories we consume and the games we play, we are paradoxically learning what it means to be fully alive. **

Author: Tim Lieder File Type: mobi You dont need to be Jewish or Christian to appreciate She Nailed a Stake Through His Head Tales of Biblical Terror. Still, you may find yourself groping for a religious icon for protection given the unholy places these weird tales will take you. The anthology opens with Gerri Leens eerie reversal of the tale of Ruth and Naomi, wherein Ruths devotion to her mother-in-law is not a blessing but a monstrous curse. Not all of these stories are set in the ancient Middle East, though, as Daniel Kaysens Babylons Burning proves. Meandering between desert sands and skyscrapers, between past, present and alternate timelines, She Nailed a Stake Through His Head is a gallery of horrors inspired by the most nightmarish images of Near Eastern cultures. There are wild-eyed, drug-crazed prophets, witches drawing the dead from the depths of the Underworld, sacred prostitutes with one soul in two bodies, an English Delilah trapped in a house falling down around her, epic beheadings, and a living tomb in the foul and slimy body of a whale driving the prophet deeper into insanity. The collection is bookended with a tale inspired by the New Testament a vampires take on the body and blood of the Christian savior. Regardless of religion (or lack thereof), lovers of speculative fiction will swallow up these provocative stories. -- Erin ORiordan, Author of Beltane and Midsummer Night Pagan Spirits =======================================================================----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This book takes the Bible back from those right-wing fascists who want to rewrite it as a tedious book of loving and caring. These are stories as bawdy and lustful and horrifying as the original Good Book -- wild sex, savage violence, horrific curses...and, of course, vampires. -- Matthue Roth, author. performance poet. torah badass

Author: Robin D. G. Kelley File Type: pdf The two volumes of Kelley and Lewiss To Make Our World Anew integrate the work of eleven leading historians into the most up-to-date and comprehensive account available of African American history, from the first Africans brought as slaves into the Americas, right up to todays black filmmakers and politicians. This first volume begins with the story of Africa and its origins, then presents an overview of the Atlantic slave trade, and the forced migration and enslavement of between ten and twenty million people. It covers the Haitian Revolution, which ended victoriously in 1804 with the birth of the first independent black nation in the New World, and slave rebellions and resistance in the United States in the years leading up to the Civil War. There are vivid accounts of the Civil War and Reconstruction years, the backlash of the notorious Jim Crow laws and mob lynchings, and the founding of key black educational institutions, such as Howard University in Washington, D.C. Here is a panoramic view of African-American life, rich in gripping first-person accounts and short character sketches that invite readers to relive history as African Americans have experienced it.Amazon.com ReviewSince nearly any history of African Americans is bound to be compared to John Hope Franklins masterwork From Slavery to Freedom, perhaps its best to state straightaway that To Make Our World Anew does indeed measure up to, and on some levels surpass, Franklins epochal work. In this impressive multidisciplinary book, professors Robin D.G. Kelley and Earl Lewis bring together nine scholars, including Colin Palmer, Vincent Harding, Peter Wood, and Barbara Blair, to outline the 500-year African American experience, from the Middle Passage to the Million Man March. The history of African Americans is nothing less than the dramatic saga of a people attempting to remake the world, Kelley and Lewis write. Even when they did not succeed, the actions, thoughts, and dreams of Africans are responsible for some of the most profound economic, political, and cultural developments in the modern west. Every aspect of the African American experience is explored slavery, slave rebellions, emancipation, segregation, lynchings, civil rights, and the post civil rights era. Major figures like Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Harriet Tubman are highlighted, as are the lesser-known exploits of Esteban, the Afro-Moorish slave who discovered New Mexico and Arizona, and Henry Box Brown, the Virginia slave who escaped to freedom by putting himself in a coffin-like box that was shipped to Philadelphia. The book is particularly strong on late-20th-century social issues, with insightful coverage of the attack on affirmative action and the impact of immigration, crack cocaine, and AIDS on the black community. To Make Our World Anew is essential reading for anyone interested in the black American experience. --Eugene Holley Jr.From Publishers WeeklyA detailed survey of African-American life before the 21st century, this volume contains 10 essays by academics, arranged chronologically to provide an invigorating history from the Middle Passage to the election of Maxine Waters to the House of Representatives and the death of Amadou Diallo at the hands of New York City police officers in 1999. In a chapter covering the Great Depression and WWII, William Trotter reveals that blacks called the New Deal the raw deal and the National Recovery Act the Negro Run Around. Noralee Frankels Breaking the Chains explains how, after the Civil War, many black farmers became landless sharecroppers in the shadow of federal programs designed to alleviate the suffering of the poor. James R. Grossman documents how curriculum and school leadership [in the early 1900s] reflected different notions of how black Americans could attain full citizenship in a nation seemingly committed to their subordination. Other offerings discuss rent parties, the transformation of the union movement from a roadblock to a facilitator of black rights, the development of Roosevelts Black Cabinet, Marcus Garvey, Jimi Hendrix and The Cosby Show. The scholarship sparkles throughout, offering not just the what, but also the why of the social, cultural and political events shaping the present. Editors Kelley and Lewis have synthesized the vast knowledge of contemporary African-American studies into a single, fluid volume that provides an intelligent introduction to the historys intricacies, divisions and accomplishments. (May) 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Author: Avner Ben-Zaken File Type: pdf Commonly translated as The Self-Taught Philosopher or The Improvement of Human Reason, Ibn-Tufayls story Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan inspired debates about autodidacticism in a range of historical fields from classical Islamic philosophy through Renaissance humanism and the European Enlightenment. Avner Ben-Zakens account of how the text traveled demonstrates the intricate ways in which autodidacticism was contested in and adapted to diverse cultural settings. In tracing the circulation of the Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan, Ben-Zaken highlights its key place in four far-removed historical moments. He explains how autodidacticism intertwined with struggles over mysticism in twelfth-century Marrakesh, controversies about pedagogy in fourteenth-century Barcelona, quarrels concerning astrology in Renaissance Florence, and debates pertaining to experimentalism in seventeenth-century Oxford. In each site and period, Ben-Zaken recaptures the cultural context that stirred scholars to relate to Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan and demonstrates how the text moved among cultures, leaving in its wake translations, interpretations, and controversies as various as the societies themselves. Pleas for autodidacticism, Ben-Zaken shows, not only echoed within close philosophical discussions they surfaced in struggles for control between individuals and establishments. Presented as self-contained histories, these four moments together form a historical collage of autodidacticism across cultures from the late Medieval era to early modern times. The first book-length intellectual history of autodidacticism, this novel, thought-provoking work will interest a wide range of historians, including scholars of the history of science, philosophy, literature, Europe, and the Middle East. **