Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  Authors of the Impossible - The...

  Jeffrey J. Kripal

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  “Outstanding and almost certainly controversial. . . . [Kripal] has promise to revitalize and extend the reach of religious studies.”  —Choice Most scholars dismiss research into the paranormal as pseudoscience, a frivolous pursuit for the paranoid or gullible. Even historians of religion, whose work naturally attends to events beyond the realm of empirical science, have shown scant interest in the subject. But the history of psychical phenomena, Jeffrey J. Kripal contends, is an untapped source of insight into the sacred and by tracing that history through the last two centuries of Western thought we can see its potential centrality to the critical study of religion. Kripal grounds his study in the work of four major figures in the history of paranormal research: psychical researcher Frederic Myers; writer and humorist Charles Fort; astronomer, computer scientist, and ufologist Jacques Vallee; and philosopher and sociologist Bertrand Méheust. Through incisive analyses of these thinkers, Kripal ushers the reader into a beguiling world somewhere between fact, fiction, and fraud. The cultural history of telepathy, teleportation, and UFOs; a ghostly love story; the occult dimensions of science fiction; cold war psychic espionage; galactic colonialism; and the intimate relationship between consciousness and culture all come together in Authors of the Impossible, a dazzling and profound look at how the paranormal bridges the sacred and the scientific.   “An excellent book. . . . engaging, witty, and thoughtful.” -- Christopher Partridge, Lancaster University “[Kripal] demands nothing short of a paradigm shift in order to make sense of the odd, the anomalous, and the inexplicable.” —Catherine L. Albanese, University of California, Santa Barbara “Quietly earth-shattering.” — Victoria Nelson, author of The Secret Life of Puppets

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  Alert and Attentive - Strategies...

  Julie Tourigny

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  Alert and Attentive offers practical strategies to help young children develop the attention skills they need to thrive. Learn how self-regulation and executive function skills work together to support attention and focus. Discover ways to create a calm and supportive learning environment that fosters concentration, helps children ignore distractions, and promotes learning.   

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  Dramatis Personae

  W. B. Yeats

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  Dramatis Personae is a four part autobiographic collection, published by Yeats in 1936 and detailing incidents, events, and people he met who influenced his artistic development as a poet.
  
  The first section is Dramatis Personae and describes Yeats' meetings with Lady Augusta Gregory at Coole Park, Galway, which eventually led to the creation of the Irish National Theatre Society and the opening of the Abbey Theatre in 1904.
  
  The second section, Estrangement, deals with Yeat's anxiety that his works were not accessible to their intended audience, the Irish people. Yeats came from a wealthy Anglo-Irish Protestant family but became a committed nationalist, attracted to Celtic mysticism, legends and folklore. Nonetheless he lamented that, as part of the elite and an intellectual artist, he felt aloof from the common Irish Catholic population who were largely indifferent to his work.
  
  The third section, The Death Of Synge, describes Yeats' association with John Millington Synge, the child of a wealthy Anglo-Irish Protestant family. Yeats encouraged Synge to travel to the Aran Islands to study the Irish peasants and fishermen who lived there and to use them as inspiration for his work.
  
  In the fourth and final section, The Bounty Of Sweden, Yeats' pays tribute to Sweden for awarding him with the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature in 1923. The award was given to Yeats in the period immediately after the end of the Irish Civil War when the Irish Free State emerged as a newly independent nation. Yeats sought to use the event to establish himself as the cultural representative of Irish independence and Irish nationalism.

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  Maroons The: The History and...

  Editors Charles River

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  The Underground Railroad is one of the most taught topics to young schoolchildren, and every American is familiar with the idea of fugitive slaves escaping to Canada and the North with the help of determined abolitionists and even former escaped slaves like Harriet Tubman. The secrecy involved in the Underground Railroad made it one of the most mysterious aspects of the mid-19th century in America, to the extent that claims spread that 100,000 slaves had escaped via the Underground Railroad. Of course, from a practical standpoint, the Underground Railroad had to remain covert not only for the sake of thousands of slaves, but for a small army of men and women of every race, religion and economic class who put themselves in peril on an ongoing basis throughout the first half of the 19th century, and in the years leading up to the war.  
  Of course, a fairly common form of resistance was running away and seeking hiding places in environments where slave catchers experienced difficulty. Slaves who ran and hid out, or who made their own settlements, were called maroons, from the Spanish word cimarron, which means “wild” or “untamed.” The term that historians commonly use to describe this is marronage, adapted from the French word maron, meaning the same as maroon. Marronage took two forms, grand and petty. Grand marronage was permanent, with escapees joining together to establish lasting settlements in inaccessible areas in mountains and swamps, sometimes preferring death rather than being caught and enslaved again.

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  The Matryoshka Memoirs - A Story...

  Sasha Colby

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  “[Colby] breathes new life into well-trodden WWII tropes, building a vivid, novelistic narrative focused on memory and family.” — Publishers Weekly
  		 
  “The writing is vivid and lyrical, the narratives are arresting, and the women are unforgettable.” — Craig Howes, Director, Center for Biographical Research, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
  		 
  A remarkable story of strength and resilience in the crucible of Nazi Germany
  		 
  Irina Nikifortchuk was 19 years old and a Ukrainian schoolteacher when she was abducted to be a forced laborer in the Leica camera factory in Nazi Germany. Eventually pulled from the camp hospital to work as a domestic in the Leica owners’ household, Irina survived the war and eventually found her way to Canada.
  		 
  Decades later Sasha Colby, Irina’s granddaughter, seeks out her grandmother’s story over a series of summer visits and gradually begins to interweave the as-told-to story with historical research. As she delves deeper into the history of the Leica factory and World War II forced labor, she discovers the parallel story of Elsie Kühn-Leitz, Irina’s rescuer and the factory heiress, later imprisoned and interrogated by the Gestapo on charges of “excessive humanity.”
  		 
  This is creative nonfiction at its best as the mystery of Irina’s life unspools skillfully and arrestingly. Despite the horrors that the story must tell, it is full of life, humor, food, and the joy of ordinary safety in Canada. The Matryoshka Memoirs takes us into a forgotten corner of history, weaving a rich and satisfying tapestry of survival and family ties and asking what we owe those who aid us.

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  Stuart Restoration The: The...

  Editors Charles River

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  Oliver Cromwell is one of the most important men in England’s history, but everything he struggled for collapsed within two decades of his death. The army, Parliament and the citizens of London grappled with each other for control of the country, and even the army no longer remained a united political force. Civil war almost broke out again as a force under Lambert failed to prevent General Monck, the military governor of Scotland, from marching south and dissolving the Rump Parliament. Excluded MPs were restored on condition that they themselves dissolve Parliament, and following fresh elections without military intervention, a new Parliament met on April 25, 1660. Dominated by Presbyterians and Royalists, it accepted a settlement offered by the man titling himself Charles II, the son and heir of Charles I. On May 25, 1660, Charles II returned to England, and less than two years after Cromwell’s death, his work was undone by the Restoration. King Charles II heaped ignominy upon defeat by having Cromwell’s body dug up and posthumously executed. Cromwell’s body was then decapitated, as was Ireton’s, and their heads were placed on a pike above Westminster Hall, where Charles I had been tried, for several years.  
  	Despite the Restoration, however, and despite the fact England’s republican experiment barely outlasted Cromwell, the Commonwealth and Restoration were hugely important in asserting the power of Parliament, and it permanently shifted England’s political balance firmly towards a constitutional monarchy limited by Parliament. The Stuart monarchy was restored on condition of compromise with Parliament and the army, and a precedent had been set for Parliament to replace the monarch, a precedent it would follow in the 1680s when James II was replaced by William and Mary in a settlement that set even more limits around the monarch.

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