Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  Aki-wayn-zih - A Person as...

  Eli Baxter

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  Members of Eli Baxter’s generation are the last of the hunting and gathering societies living on Turtle Island. They are also among the last fluent speakers of the Anishinaabay language known as Anishinaabaymowin.
  		 
  Aki-wayn-zih is a story about the land and its spiritual relationship with the Anishinaabayg, from the beginning of their life on Miss-koh-tay-sih Minis (Turtle Island) to the present day. Baxter writes about Anishinaabay life before European contact, his childhood memories of trapping, hunting, and fishing with his family on traditional lands in Treaty 9 territory, and his personal experience surviving the residential school system. Examining how Anishinaabay Kih-kayn-daa-soh-win (knowledge) is an elemental concept embedded in the Anishinaabay language, Aki-wayn-zih explores history, science, math, education, philosophy, law, and spiritual teachings, outlining the cultural significance of language to Anishinaabay identity. Recounting traditional Ojibway legends in their original language, fables in which moral virtues double as survival techniques, and detailed guidelines for expertly trapping or ensnaring animals, Baxter reveals how the residential school system shaped him as an individual, transformed his family, and forever disrupted his reserve community and those like it.
  		 
  Through spiritual teachings, historical accounts, and autobiographical anecdotes, Aki-wayn-zih offers a new form of storytelling from the Anishinaabay point of view.

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  The Most Fascinating Man in the...

  John Harpoon

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  Peter Freuchen was born on February 2, 1886, in the small town of Nykøbing Falster, Denmark. Raised in a well-off family, his early life was marked by an environment that fostered curiosity and exploration. From a young age, Freuchen exhibited a strong interest in adventure and the natural world. He was inspired by his father, a civil engineer, and his mother, who instilled in him a love for literature and storytelling. These early experiences would play a crucial role in shaping his adventurous spirit and intellectual curiosity, which would define much of his later life. 
  Freuchen's education was broad and varied. Initially attending school in his hometown, he soon showed an aptitude for science and geography. However, his desire to explore the world beyond the classroom eventually led him to study at the University of Copenhagen, where he focused on medicine and natural sciences. Although Freuchen did not complete his medical degree, his time at the university was pivotal in forming his understanding of the natural world and fostering his interest in Arctic exploration. 
  During his student years, Freuchen was drawn to the literature of explorers such as Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen. These accounts of Arctic adventures ignited a deep passion in him to experience such feats firsthand. While still a young man, he decided to leave behind his academic pursuits and embark on an adventure that would change his life forever. At the age of 22, Freuchen sailed to Greenland, where he would spend the next several years of his life living among the Inuit people. It was here that Freuchen learned the skills necessary to survive in one of the harshest environments on Earth. His time in Greenland was not just a physical trial but also an intellectual journey, as he immersed himself in the culture, language, and survival techniques of the Inuit.

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  Terrible Beauty - Reckoning with...

  Auden Schendler

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  Something's gone badly awry with environmentalism. We faithfully separate our waste into different streams, but wonder whether it really makes a difference. Global companies announce their commitment to carbon negativity while simultaneously sponsoring oil conferences. American businesses, communities, and individuals assiduously measure their carbon footprints, then implement voluntary emissions-reduction programs, all while trumpeting their do-gooderism. 
   
   
   
  The problem is, none of this—whether individual efforts or corporate sustainability tactics—will make a dent in solving the civilizational threat of climate change. We only pretend it will, at our peril. 
   
   
   
  As Auden Schendler argues in this provocative, powerful book, we're living a big green lie. The hard truth is that much of the modern environmental road map could have been written by the fossil fuel industry specifically to avoid disrupting the status quo. But there is another truth: while ineffective or duplicitous environmentalism has become standard practice, we all have friends and family we love and care about, whose future depends on solving the problem of climate change. Conscience tells us we have an obligation to repair the world. How can our common dreams be so at odds with our daily practice? And how might we meld our spirit and our passion to create a better future?

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  Fancies versus Fads

  G K Chesterton

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  The last volume of Chesterton's collected essays, Gathered from the London Mercury, the New Witness, and the Illustrated London News, it is the only volume from after WWI, and is most serious, philosophical, and socially direct collection. 
  "The problem is not so much Prohibition with a large P as prohibition with a small one. I mean, I am interested not so much in liquor as in liberty. I want to know on what principle the prohibitionists are proceeding in this case, and how they think it applies to any other case. And I cannot for the life of me make out. They…do not attack liquor; they do quite simply attack liberty. I mean that they are satisfied with saying about this liberty what can obviously be said about any liberty – that it can be, and is, abominably abused. If that had been a final objection to any form of freedom, there never would have been any form of freedom." 
  "So long as we combine ceaseless and often reckless scientific speculation with rapid and often random social reform, the result must inevitably be not anarchy but ever-increasing tyranny. There must be a ceaseless and almost mechanical multiplication of things forbidden. The resolution to cure all the ills that flesh is heir to, combined with the guesswork about all possible ills that flesh and nerve and brain-cell may be heir to – these two things conducted simultaneously must inevitably spread a sort of panic of prohibition. Scientific imagination and social reform between them will quite logically and almost legitimately have made us slaves."

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  Some Unfinished Chaos - The...

  Arthur Krystal

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  Surely enough has been written about F. Scott Fitzgerald, the man who coined "the Jazz Age" and symbolized the Roaring Twenties, whose very name conjures up a meteoric rise and an equally spectacular fall? But the better question might be, why has so much ink been spent on a writer who completed only four novels, who fell from grace in the 1930s only to be resurrected twenty years later? The answer, according to the cultural critic Arthur Krystal, "is the problem that is Fitzgerald." 
   
   
   
  Drawn to the glitter of fame but aspiring to the empyrean heights of Joseph Conrad and James Joyce, Fitzgerald careened from the perfection of The Great Gatsby to the hack world of Hollywood screenwriting, penning stories that were either brilliant distillations of the age or superficial works of fiction. Like America itself, Fitzgerald was a work in progress, a self-created and conflicted human being striving for ideals that neither he nor the nation could ever live up to. 
   
   
   
  In this unusual biography Krystal gives us not only the peripatetic and turbulent life of a cultural icon but also the intellectual sweep of a period in history that created our modern America. Some Unfinished Chaos delivers a nuanced portrait of a man whose various sides embodied the trends, passions, and pursuits of the imperfect society that both glorified and dismissed him.

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  Vanishing Act - The Enduring...

  Dan Hampton

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  From New York Times bestselling author Dan Hampton comes the gripping, untold story of a vital secret mission set during the darkest days of the Second World War. 
   
   
   
  In the dark days after the devastating Pearl Harbor attacks during the spring of 1942, the United States was determined to show the world that the Axis was not invincible. Their bold plan? Bomb Tokyo. On April 18, 1942, sixteen B-25s, known as the Doolittle Raiders, hit targets across Japan before escaping to China. 
   
   
   
  The eighth plane, however, did not follow the other raiders. Instead, Plane 8's pilots, Captain Edward "Ski" York and Lieutenant Bob Emmens, never attacked Tokyo, but headed across Japan to the Soviet Union, supposedly due to low fuel. Yet, this bomber was the only plane on the mission with maps of the Soviet Union aboard. And why did Plane 8's route, recently discovered in the Japanese Imperial Archives, show them nowhere near their target? Uncovered facts reveal that bombing Tokyo was merely a cover for Plane 8's real mission, but what was their secret objective? No one, aside from the two pilots and whomever sent them on this mission, truly knew why they were there, nor has the reason ever been revealed. 
   
   
   
  Until now.

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