Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

• 

  A Man of Bad Reputation - The...

  Drew A. Swanson

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Five years after the Civil War, North Carolina Republican state senator John W. Stephens was found murdered inside the Caswell County Courthouse. Stephens fought for the rights of freedpeople, and his killing by the Ku Klux Klan ultimately led to insurrection, Governor William W. Holden's impeachment, and the early unwinding of Reconstruction in North Carolina. In recounting Stephens's murder, the subsequent investigation and court proceedings, and the long-delayed confessions that revealed what actually happened at the courthouse in 1870, Drew A. Swanson tells a story of race, politics, and social power shaped by violence and profit. The struggle for dominance in Reconstruction-era rural North Carolina, Swanson argues, was an economic and ecological transformation. Arson, beating, and murder became tools to control people and landscapes, and the ramifications of this violence continued long afterward. The failure to prosecute anyone for decades after John Stephens's assassination left behind a vacuum, as each side shaped its own memory of Stephens and his murder.The malleability of and contested storytelling around Stephens's legacy presents a window into the struggle to control the future of the South.

  Mostra libro

• 

  The Science of Science Fiction -...

  Mark Brake

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Media headlines declare this the age of automation. The TV talks about the coming revolution of the robot, tweets tell tales of jets that will ferry travelers to the edge of space, and social media reports that the first human to live for a thousand years has already been born. The science we do, the movies we watch, and the culture we consume is the stuff of fiction that became fact, the future imagined in our past—the future we now inhabit.The Science of Science Fiction is the story of how science fiction shaped our world. No longer a subculture, science fiction has moved into the mainstream with the advent of the information age it helped realize. Explore how science fiction has driven science, with topics that include:● Guardians of the Galaxy: Is Space Full of Extraterrestrials?● Jacking In: Will the Future Be Like Ready Player One?● Mad Max: Is Society Running down into Chaos?● The Internet: Will Humans Tire of Mere Reality?● Blade Runner 2049: When Will We Engineer Human Lookalikes?

  Mostra libro

• 

  The Life You Save May Be Your...

  Paul Elie

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  A Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year: “A fascinating multiple biography of four of the most influential Catholic literary figures of the 20th century.” —Booklist 
   
  Winner, PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction * Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award * An Atlantic Monthly Book of the Year * A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year * A San Jose Mercury News Top Book of the Year 
   
  Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk in Kentucky; Dorothy Day the founder of the Catholic Worker movement in New York; Flannery O’Connor a “Christ-haunted” literary prodigy in Georgia; Walker Percy a doctor in New Orleans who quit medicine to write fiction and philosophy. In the mid-twentieth century, these four American Catholics came to believe that the best way to explore the questions of religious faith was to write about them, in works that readers of all kinds could admire. A friend came up with a name for them—the School of the Holy Ghost—and for three decades they exchanged letters, ardently read one another’s books, and grappled with what one of them called a “predicament shared in common.” 
   
  A pilgrimage is a journey taken in light of a story; and in The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie tells these writers’ story as a pilgrimage from the God-obsessed literary past of Dante and Dostoevsky out into the thrilling chaos of postwar American life. It is a story of how the Catholic faith, in their vision of things, took on forms the faithful could not have anticipated. And it is a story about the ways we look to great books and writers to help us make sense of our experience, about the power of literature to change—to save—our lives. 
   
  “Reminds us of what it means to live authentically in a world that seems determined to dull our senses and our intellect and our spirits with doublespeak, nonsense, meaningless distraction.” —Alice McDermott, Commonweal 
   
  “Lucid, humane, poignant, and wise. As a work of the spirit, it is universal and in no way sectarian.” —Harold Bloom 
   
  “[An] engrossing, smartly conceived and perfectly realized work.” —Tom Nolan, San Francisco Chronicle 
   
  “An elegant, intelligent blend of biography and literary criticism.” —Ben Lytal, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  Mostra libro

• 

  The Score Takes Care of Itself -...

  Steve Jamison, Bill Walsh, Craig...

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Bill Walsh was perhaps the most influential and successful coach in NFL history, transforming the San Francisco 49ers from the worst franchise in sports to a dynasty that won five Super Bowls. He is acclaimed not only for his strategic brilliance but also for his advanced approach to leadership. His teams sustained a consistency of excellence rarely seen in sports or anywhere else. Drawn from a series of deeply revealing conversations with coauthor Steve Jamison, The Score Takes Care of Itself offers Walsh's best leadership principles illustrated by anecdotes from his entire career. Additional insights and perspective are provided by his son Craig Walsh. A sample of Bill's wisdom:—Believe in people: No one will ever come back later and thank you for expecting too little of them.—Professionalism matters: There was no showboating allowed after touchdowns, no taunting of opponents, and no demonstrations to attract attention to oneself.—Keep a short enemies list: One enemy can do more damage than the good done by a hundred friends.—Leaders can't escape criticism: Ignore the undeserved. Learn from the deserved. Lick your wounds. Move on. It may hurt, but sometimes you can't have the last word. The book will delight football fans and guide the vast business audience eager to learn how Bill Walsh motivated individuals and crafted winning teams.

  Mostra libro

• 

  The Cap - The Price of a Life

  Roman Frister

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  A Polish survivor’s “brutal and beautifully written” Holocaust memoir. “The power of his portrayal of one man’s instinct for survival . . . cannot be denied” (The Boston Globe).  The Cap is an unconventional Holocaust memoir that defies all moral judgment and ventures into a soul blackened by the unforgiving cruelty of its surroundings. Roman Frister’s memoir of his life before, during, and after his imprisonment in the Nazi concentration camps sparked enormous controversy and became an international bestseller. With bone-chilling candor, Frister illustrates how the impulse to live unhinges our comfortable notions of morality, blurring the boundary between victim and oppressor and leaving absolutely no room for martyrdom.   By the time Roman Frister was sixteen, he had watched his mother murdered by an SS officer and he had waited for his father to expire, eager to retrieve a hidden half loaf of bread from beneath the dying man’s cot. When confronted with certain death, he placed another inmate in harm’s way to save himself. Frister’s resilience and instinct for self-preservation—developed in the camps—become the source of his life’s successes and failures. Chilling and unsentimental, The Cap is a rare and unadorned self-portrait of a man willing to show all of his scars. Reflected in stark relief are the indelible wounds of all twentieth-century European Jews. An exceptional and groundbreaking testimony, Roman Frister’s “gut-wrenching memoir is a must-read” (Kirkus Reviews).   “Staggering in its honesty . . . Frister’s courage to plumb the ambiguity of his actions . . . leaves the reader awestruck.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  Mostra libro

• 

  The Splendid Years - The Memoirs...

  David Kenny, Maire Nic Shuibhlaigh

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh was a founder actress of the Abbey Theatre and its first leading lady on its opening in 1904, when she played the title role in W. B. Yeats's Kathleen Ni Houlihan. On that night, five members of her family were acting and working in the theatre. Her beauty and talent captivated audiences and critics at home and abroad. Portrait artists queued up to paint her. Revolutionaries and poets wrote plays for her. The Pearse brothers, AE, Countess Markievicz, Maud Gonne, J. M. Synge and John B. Yeats counted among her admirers.
  The Splendid Years – with a foreword by Padraic Colum – is Maire's first-hand account of some of the momentous events that shaped Irish history: including the establishment of the Abbey Theatre and her role as leader of the Cumann na mBan 'girls' in Jacob's Biscuit Factory during the Rising. Withdrawn from print just weeks after its initial publication in the 1950s, the story of this remarkable and inspiring Irishwoman is available again, with new and never-before-seen material.
  Here we have Pearse imitating Yeats onstage; J. M. Synge rolling cigarettes for his actors; Maire's aged father printing the War News in 1916; her marriage to Major General Bob Price, and a lost portion of her story, detailing her childhood in Carlow before her rebellious, Parnellite family was run out of town by the clergy.

  Mostra libro