Author: Chris Matthews File Type: epub What was he like? Jack Kennedy said the reason people read biography is to answer that basic question. What was he like, this man whose own wife called him that elusive, unforgettable man? In this New York Times bestselling biography, Chris Matthews answers that question with the verve of a novelist. We see this most beloved president in the company of friends. We see and feel him close-up, having fun and giving off that restlessness of his. We watch him navigate his life from privileged, rebellious youth to gutsy American president. We witness his bravery in war and selfless rescue of his PT boat crew. We watch JFK as a young politician learning to play hardball and watch him grow into the leader who averts a nuclear war. Matthewss extraordinary biography is based on personal interviews with those closest to JFK, oral histories by top political aide Kenneth ODonnell and others, documents from his years as a student at Choate, and notes from Jacqueline Kennedys first interview after Dallas. As Matthews writes I found a fighting prince never free of pain, never far from trouble, never accepting the world he found, never wanting to be his fathers son. He was a far greater hero than he ever wished us to know.
Author: Torkild Thellefsen
File Type: pdf
Hitherto, there has been no book that attempted to sum up the breadth of Umberto Ecos work and it importance for the study of semiotics, communication and cognition. There have been anthologies and overviews of Ecos work within Eco Studies sometimes, works in semiotics have used aspects of Ecos work. Yet, thus far, there has been no overview of the work of Eco in the breadth of semiotics. This volume is a contribution to both semiotics and Eco studies. The 40 scholars who participate in the volume come from a variety of disciplines but have all chosen to work with a favorite quotation from Eco that they find particularly illustrative of the issues that his work raises. Some of the scholars have worked exegetically placing the quotation within a tradition, others have determined the (epistemic) value of the quotation and offered a critique, while still others have seen the quotation as a starting point for conceptual developments within a field of application. However, each article within this volume points toward the relevance of Eco -- for contemporary studies concerning semiotics, communication and cognition. **About the Author Torkild Thellefsen, IVA Copenhagen University, Denmark, and Bent Srensen, independent scholar, Denmark.
Author: Jonathan Kozol
File Type: epub
For two years, beginning in 1988, Jonathan Kozol visited schools in neighborhoods across the country, from Illinois to Washington D.C., and from New York to San Antonio. He spoke with teachers, principals, superintendents, and, most important, children. What he found was devastating. Not only were schools for rich and poor blatantly unequal, the gulf between the two extremes was wideningand it has widened since. The urban schools he visited were overcrowded and understaffed, and lacked the basic elements of learningincluding books and, all too often, classrooms for the students.In Savage Inequalities, Kozol delivers a searing examination of the extremes of wealth and poverty and calls into question the reality of equal opportunity in our nations schools.**
Author: Jane Austen
File Type: epub
Pray, pray be composed, cried Elinor, and do not betray what you feel to every body present. Perhaps he has not observed you yet. For Elinor Dashwood, sensible and sensitive, and her romantic, impetuous younger sister Marianne, the prospect of marrying the men they love appears remote. In a world ruled by money and self-interest, the Dashwood sisters have neither fortune nor connections. Concerned for others and for social proprieties, Elinor is ill-equipped to compete with self-centred fortune-hunters like Lucy Steele, whilst Mariannes unswerving belief in the truth of her own feelings makes her more dangerouslysusceptible to the designs of unscrupulous men. Through her heroines parallel experiences of love, loss, and hope, Jane Austen offers a powerful analysis of the ways in which womens lives were shaped by the claustrophobic society in which they had to survive.**
Author: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
File Type: pdf
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyis famous investigations of optimal experience have revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow. During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. In this new edition of his groundbreaking classic work, Csikszentmihalyi demonstrates the ways this positive state can be controlled, not just left to chance. Flow The Psychology of Optimal Experience teaches how, by ordering the information that enters our consciousness, we can discover true happiness and greatly improve the quality of our lives. **
Author: Fulvio Gosso
File Type: pdf
Examines the relationship between rock art, shamanism, and the origins of human existence. The Dream on the Rock takes an interdisciplinary approach to contextualizing and historicizing the phenomenon of shamanism from the Neolithic Age until the beginning of the Iron Age. Fulvio Gosso and Peter Webster argue that rock art and other ancient materials provide a glimpse of the fundamental role played by nonordinary states of consciousness in our social and evolutionary prehistory. Ultimately, the authors offer a comprehensive exploration of shamanism, religion, and the origins of human consciousness, along with evidence that hallucinogenic plants may have played a key role in this process. This study establishes the use of psychoactive sacraments as the primordial experience that stimulated the evolution of human consciousness and its sense of the divine. It also documents the developing history of this shamanic event through an examination of cave and rock art worldwide, not only in paintings and engravings, but in the strange phenomenon of cup-marks carved in stone in the Alpine region, which may have played a role in the ritual use of the psychoactive Amanita muscaria mushroom. It is the first book to examine the full range of evidence and to place central Europe also in this context. Carl A. P. Ruck, author of Sacred Mushrooms of the Goddess Secrets of Eleusis**
Author: John K. Ryan
File Type: pdf
The character of this work is perhaps sufficently indicated by its title. However it must be noted that the term philosophy is not used so strictly as to exclude material from other disciplines connected with philosophy or helpful to it and to an understanding of its history. **
Author: Jenny Daggers
File Type: pdf
This book extends the feminist theology subfield of creative imagining with traditional Christian doctrines. Whether women are welcomed into partnership and ministry or subject to exclusive male leadership, new imaginings are crucial for the twenty-first century global church. In this volume, contributors critically imagine doctrines of God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, Mary, theological anthropology, grace, free will, creativity, and hope with the aim of furthering global gender justice. As they address these doctrines and give shape to new ecotheologies, the volumes diverse set of contributors reflect on constructive projects from within their respective faith traditions. Their writings on the gospel will resonate with the concerns and projects of justice-seeking readers in a myriad of global contexts and locations.
Author: Émile Zola
File Type: epub
Only the earth is immortal...the earth we love enough to commit murder for her. Zolas novel of peasant life, the fifteenth in the Rougon-Macquart series, is generally regarded as one of his finest achievements, comparable to Germinal and LAssommoir. Set in a village in the Beauce, in northern France, it depicts the harshness of the peasants world and their visceral attachment to the land. Jean Macquart, a veteran of the battle of Solferino and now an itinerant farm labourer, is drawn into the affairs of the Fouan family when he starts courting young Francoise. He becomes involved in a bitter dispute over the property of Papa Fouan when the old man divides his land between his three children. Resentment turns to greed and violence in a Darwinian battle for supremacy. Zolas unflinching depiction of the savagery of peasant life shocked his readers, and led to attacks on Naturalisms literary agenda. This new translation captures the novels blend of brutality and lyricism in its evocation of the inexorable cycle of the natural world. ABOUT THE SERIES For over 100 years Oxford Worlds Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxfords commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. **Review Zolas novel is rich in insights like this. Its an outstanding example of Zolas storytelling in the service of a bigger picture, revealing the complexity of small village life without romanticising it or populating it with unrealistic quirky characters. Highly recommended! Reading Zola Blog About the Author Brian Nelson has been editor of the Australian Journal of French Studies since 2002. He is well known for his critical studies and translations of the novels of Emile Zola. These include The Cambridge Companion to Zola, Zola and the Bourgeoisie, and translations for Oxford Worlds Classics of The Fortune of the Rougons, The Belly of Paris, The Kill, Pot Luck, and The Ladies Paradise. His most recent publication is The Cambridge Introduction to French Literature (CUP, 2015). Julie Rose is an internationally renowned translator, whose many translations range from Victor Hugos Les Miserables, Racines Phedre and Andre Gortzs Letter to D to a dozen works by celebrated urbanist-architect and theorist Paul Virilio, and other leading French thinkers.
Author: Bret Stephens
File Type: epub
A world in which the leading liberal-democratic nation does not assume its role as world policeman will become a world in which dictatorships contend, or unite, to fill the breach. Americans seeking a return to an isolationist garden of Eden--alone and undisturbed in the world, knowing neither good nor evil--will soon find themselves living within shooting range of global pandemonium--From the Introduction In a brilliant book that will elevate foreign policy in the national conversation, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Bret Stephens makes a powerful case for American intervention abroad. In December 2011 the last American soldier left Iraq. Were leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq, boasted President Obama. He was proved devastatingly wrong less than three years later as jihadists seized the Iraqi city of Mosul. The event cast another dark shadow over the future of global order--a shadow, which, Bret Stephens argues, we ignore at our peril. America in Retreat identifies a profound crisis on the global horizon. As Americans seek to withdraw from the world to tend to domestic problems, Americas adversaries spy opportunity. Vladimir Putins ambitions to restore the glory of the czarist empire go effectively unchecked, as do Chinas attempts to expand its maritime claims in the South China Sea, as do Irans efforts to develop nuclear capabilities. Civil war in Syria displaces millions throughout the Middle East while turbocharging the forces of radical Islam. Long-time allies such as Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, doubting the credibility of American security guarantees, are tempted to freelance their foreign policy, irrespective of U.S. interests. Deploying his characteristic stylistic flair and intellectual prowess, Stephens argues for American reengagement abroad. He explains how military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan was the right course of action, foolishly executed. He traces the intellectual continuity between anti-interventionist statesmen such as Henry Wallace and Robert Taft in the late 1940s and Barack Obama and Rand Paul today. And he makes an unapologetic case for Pax Americana, a world in which English is the default language of business, diplomacy, tourism, and technology in which markets are global, capital is mobile, and trade is increasingly free in which values of openness and tolerance are, when not the norm, often the aspiration. In a terrifying chapter imagining the world of 2019, Stephens shows what could lie in store if Americans continue on their current course. Yet we are not doomed to this future. Stephens makes a passionate rejoinder to those who argue that America is in decline, a process that is often beyond the reach of political cures. Instead, we are in retreat--the result of faulty, but reversible, policy choices. By embracing its historic responsibility as the worlds policeman, America can safeguard not only greater peace in the world but also greater prosperity at home. At once lively and sobering, America in Retreat offers trenchant analysis of the gravest threat to global order, from a rising star of political commentary--