Download or read book A Better Angel written by Chris Adrian and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2008-08-05 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stories in A Better Angel describe the terrain of human suffering—illness, regret, mourning, sympathy—in the most unusual of ways. In "Stab," a bereaved twin starts a friendship with a homicidal fifth grader in the hope that she can somehow lead him back to his dead brother. In "Why Antichrist?" a boy tries to contact the spirit of his dead father and finds himself talking to the Devil instead. In the remarkable title story, a ne'er do well pediatrician returns home to take care of his dying father, all the while under the scrutiny of an easily-disappointed heavenly agent. With Gob's Grief and The Children's Hospital, Chris Adrian announced himself as a writer of rare talent and originality. The stories in A Better Angel, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, and McSweeney's, demonstrate more of his endless inventiveness and wit, and they confirm his growing reputation as a most exciting and unusual literary voice—of heartbreaking, magical, and darkly comic tales.

Download or read book The Better Angels of Our Nature written by Steven Pinker and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 834 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think this is the most violent age ever seen. Yet as bestselling author Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true.

Download or read book Our Better Angels written by Jonathan Reckford and published by St. Martin's Essentials. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspiring and insightful, Our Better Angels: Seven Simple Virtues That Will Change Your Life and the World celebrates the shared principles that unite and enable us to overcome life’s challenges together. “When the waters rise, so do our better angels.”—President Jimmy Carter Jonathan Reckford, the CEO of Habitat for Humanity, has seen time and again the powerful benefits that arise when people from all walks of life work together to help one another. In this uplifting book, he shares true stories of people involved with Habitat as volunteers and future homeowners who embody seven timeless virtues—kindness, community, empowerment, joy, respect, generosity, and service—and shows how we can all practice these to improve the quality of our own lives as well as those around us. A Vietnam veteran finds peace where he was once engaged in war. An impoverished single mother offers her family’s time and energy to enrich their neighbors’ lives. A Zambian family of nine living in a makeshift tent makes room to shelter even more. A teenager grieving for his mother honors her love and memory by ensuring other people have a place to call home. A former president of the United States leads by example with a determined work ethic that motivates everyone around him to be the best version of themselves. These stories, and many others, illustrate how virtues become values, how cooperation becomes connection, and how even the smallest act of compassion can encourage actions that transform the world around us. Here are tales that will make readers laugh and cry and embrace with passion the calling of our better angels to change the way we take care of ourselves, our families, our communities, and the world.

Download or read book The Better Angel written by Roy Morris and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000-07-27 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For nearly three years, Walt Whitman immersed himself in the devastation of the Civil War, tending to thousands of wounded soldiers and recording his experiences with an immediacy and compassion unequaled in wartime literature anywhere in the world. In The Better Angel, acclaimed biographer Roy Morris, Jr. gives us the fullest account of Whitman's profoundly transformative Civil War years and an historically invaluable examination of the Union's treatment of its sick and wounded. Whitman was mired in depression as the war began, subsisting on journalistic hackwork, his "great career" as a poet apparently stalled. But when news came that his brother George had been wounded at Fredericksburg, Whitman rushed south to find him. Deeply affected by his first view of the war's casualties, he began visiting the camp's wounded and found his calling for the duration of the war. Three years later, he emerged as the war's "most unlikely hero," a living symbol of American democratic ideals of sharing and brotherhood. Brilliantly researched and beautifully written, The Better Angel explores a side of Whitman not fully examined before, one that greatly enriches our understanding of his later poetry. Moreover, it gives us a vivid and unforgettable portrait of the "other army"--the legions of sick and wounded soldiers who are usually left in the shadowy background of Civil War history--seen here through the unflinching eyes of America's greatest poet.

Download or read book Lincoln s Better Angel written by David L. Selby and published by Mayhaven Pub. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a steamy July 4th, a man who cares for the Lincoln Monument in Washington D.C. meets a man who professes to be Abraham Lincoln. This novel presents a ghost story that crosses across generations, wars, and perceptions.

Download or read book Caveman Logic written by Hank Davis and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2009-12-30 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Davis laments a modern world in which more people believe in ESP, ghosts, and angels than in evolution. Superstition and religion get particularly critical treatment, although Davis argues that religion, itself, is not the problem.

Download or read book Better Angels written by Greg Stolze and published by . This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A supervillain roleplaying game.

Download or read book The Soul of America written by Jon Meacham and published by Random House. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jon Meacham helps us understand the present moment in American politics and life by looking back at critical times in our history when hope overcame division and fear. ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • The Christian Science Monitor • Southern Living Our current climate of partisan fury is not new, and in The Soul of America Meacham shows us how what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature” have repeatedly won the day. Painting surprising portraits of Lincoln and other presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson, and illuminating the courage of such influential citizen activists as Martin Luther King, Jr., early suffragettes Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, civil rights pioneers Rosa Parks and John Lewis, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Army-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph N. Welch, Meacham brings vividly to life turning points in American history. He writes about the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the birth of the Lost Cause; the backlash against immigrants in the First World War and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s; the fight for women’s rights; the demagoguery of Huey Long and Father Coughlin and the isolationist work of America First in the years before World War II; the anti-Communist witch-hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy; and Lyndon Johnson’s crusade against Jim Crow. Each of these dramatic hours in our national life have been shaped by the contest to lead the country to look forward rather than back, to assert hope over fear—a struggle that continues even now. While the American story has not always—or even often—been heroic, we have been sustained by a belief in progress even in the gloomiest of times. In this inspiring book, Meacham reassures us, “The good news is that we have come through such darkness before”—as, time and again, Lincoln’s better angels have found a way to prevail. Praise for The Soul of America “Brilliant, fascinating, timely . . . With compelling narratives of past eras of strife and disenchantment, Meacham offers wisdom for our own time.”—Walter Isaacson “Gripping and inspiring, The Soul of America is Jon Meacham’s declaration of his faith in America.”—Newsday “Meacham gives readers a long-term perspective on American history and a reason to believe the soul of America is ultimately one of kindness and caring, not rancor and paranoia.”—USA Today

Download or read book The Great Night written by Chris Adrian and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-04-26 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed as a "gifted, courageous writer"(The New York Times), Chris Adrian brings all his extraordinary talents to bear in The Great Night—a brilliant and mesmerizing retelling of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." On Midsummer Eve 2008, three people, each on the run from a failed relationship, become trapped in San Francisco's Buena Vista Park, the secret home of Titania, Oberon, and their court. On this night, something awful is happening in the faerie kingdom: in a fit of sadness over the end of her marriage, which broke up in the wake of the death of her adopted son, Titania has set loose an ancient menace, and the chaos that ensues will threaten the lives of immortals and mortals alike. Selected by The New Yorker as one the best young writers in America, Adrian has created a singularly playful, heartbreaking, and humorous novel—a story that charts the borders between reality and dreams, love and magic, and mortality and immortality.

Download or read book The Children s Hospital written by Chris Adrian and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2007-10 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A hospital is preserved, afloat, after the Earth is flooded beneath seven miles of water. Inside, doctors and patients are left to remember the world they've lost and to imagine one to come. At the center, Jemma Claflin, a medical student, finds herself gifted with strange powers and a frightening destiny.

Download or read book Good Angel written by A. M. Blaushild and published by . This book was released on 2017-08-07 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: GOOD OMENS meets FANGIRL in this urban fantasy dramedy about good, evil, friendship, and the end of the world.Iofiel is an ideal candidate to become a guardian angel, and help steer humans away from sin: she's helpful, cheery, and utterly loyal. And, as the 'angel of beauty', it's not like she has anything better to do.Heaven and Hell long ago ran out of space: there are too many humans these days, so both have come to a shaky truce - one school sheltered in the forests of Canada, hidden from humanity, where their young can study.All seems well for Iofiel's first days at university - her Archangel roommate is a bit uptight, and dealing with demons feels weird- but when a picked on demon confesses he's too nervous to pursue his true passion of soul stealing... Iofiel promises she'll major in it with him!So much for being a proper angel. Her helpful impulse has repercussions that shake the school, and may just change the world forever. Or just end it.Because that's a possibility too.

Download or read book A Cry of Angels written by Jeff Fields and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-09-15 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An authentic cry of American innocence . . . The author seizes the reader with a Southern gift for storytelling and never lets go.”—Time Magazine It is the mid-1950s in Quarrytown, Georgia. In the slum known as the Ape Yard, hope’s last refuge is a boardinghouse where a handful of residents dream of a better life. Earl Whitaker, who is white, and Tio Grant, who is black, are both teenagers, both orphans, and best friends. In the same house live two of the most important adults in the boys’ lives: Em Jojohn, the gigantic Lumbee Indian handyman, is notorious for his binges, his rat-catching prowess, and his mysterious departures from town. Jayell Crooms, a gifted but rebellious architect, is stuck in a loveless marriage to a conventional woman intent on climbing the social ladder. Crooms’s vision of a new Ape Yard, rebuilt by its own residents, unites the four—and puts them on a collision course with a small-town Machiavelli who rules the community like a feudal lord. Jeff Fields’s exuberantly defined characters and his firmly rooted sense of place have earned A Cry of Angels an intensely loyal following. Its republication, more than three decades since it first appeared, is cause for celebration. “A humdinger . . . even better than To Kill a Mockingbird . . . funny, touching, and gripping.”—Chicago Daily News “Heartwarming . . . We find ourselves wondering why delightful novels like this aren’t written anymore, and grateful that this one has come along to fill the void.”—The New York Times “A flooded-with-life novel with a story to tell and characters to be cherished.”—Boston Sunday Globe

Download or read book Angel Interrupted written by Chaz McGee and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-09-07 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some cases are as cold as the grave... A lost soul in limbo, Kevin Fahey is trying to prove he's a better ghost than he ever was a man. And trying to help Maggie Gunn, the detective who replaced him, is a good way to start.

Download or read book Twelfth Angel written by Og Mandino and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2011-02-02 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A very special story about life and love and courage." MERLIN OLSEN, SPORTSCASTER John Harding had a high-powered career, a loving wife, and a beautiful son. He's lost it all and has returned to his home town of Boland, New Hampshire, teetering on the brink of suicide. But an old friend asks John to manage his old Little League team, the Angels. Reluctantly, he agrees, and meets a hopeless player who bears a striking resemblance to his dead son--and through their extroardinary relationship, John finds the wisdom in living that he thought had slipped beyond his grasp forever.... AN ALTERNATE SELECTION OF THE LITERARY GUILD

Download or read book Grit written by Angela Duckworth and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this instant New York Times bestseller, Angela Duckworth shows anyone striving to succeed that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent, but a special blend of passion and persistence she calls “grit.” “Inspiration for non-geniuses everywhere” (People). The daughter of a scientist who frequently noted her lack of “genius,” Angela Duckworth is now a celebrated researcher and professor. It was her early eye-opening stints in teaching, business consulting, and neuroscience that led to her hypothesis about what really drives success: not genius, but a unique combination of passion and long-term perseverance. In Grit, she takes us into the field to visit cadets struggling through their first days at West Point, teachers working in some of the toughest schools, and young finalists in the National Spelling Bee. She also mines fascinating insights from history and shows what can be gleaned from modern experiments in peak performance. Finally, she shares what she’s learned from interviewing dozens of high achievers—from JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon to New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff to Seattle Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll. “Duckworth’s ideas about the cultivation of tenacity have clearly changed some lives for the better” (The New York Times Book Review). Among Grit’s most valuable insights: any effort you make ultimately counts twice toward your goal; grit can be learned, regardless of IQ or circumstances; when it comes to child-rearing, neither a warm embrace nor high standards will work by themselves; how to trigger lifelong interest; the magic of the Hard Thing Rule; and so much more. Winningly personal, insightful, and even life-changing, Grit is a book about what goes through your head when you fall down, and how that—not talent or luck—makes all the difference. This is “a fascinating tour of the psychological research on success” (The Wall Street Journal).

Download or read book The Angel Numbers Book written by Mystic Michaela and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Have you ever noticed yourself waking up at exactly the same time every night? Or find yourself stuck on a certain page number of a book? What about seeing those very numbers repeated on signs and license plates while you travel? Numbers repeated throughout your day are one major way that angels communicate guidance, warning, and praise to let you know whether the path you are on is right for you. The Angel Numbers Book can help you decipher these messages. Here you'll receive the tools to understand the meaning of each number and number pattern sent by your angel guides. You'll also find space to record and reflect on the numbers you see, cultivating meanings that are personal to you and your experiences. You'll learn to turn your attention toward the communications of your angel guides, strengthen your understanding of the messages they are sending, and stay more tune in whenever they're trying to speak to you. Unlock your potential -- and light the way to a more satisfying, meaningful life -- with The Angel Numbers Book!" --

Download or read book The Unfinished Angel written by Sharon Creech and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-09-22 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Newbery Medal winner Sharon Creech crafts a truly endearing story, one that is imbued with happiness, wonder, and an appreciation for all the little things that make life big. With beautiful, fresh new cover art, this is a gem of a book. In the winding stone tower of the Casa Rosa, in a quiet little village in the Swiss Alps, lives one very unlikely angel—one that is still awaiting her instructions from the angel-training center. What happens to an angel who doesn't know her mission? She floats and swishes from high above, watching the crazy things that "peoples" say and do. But when a zany American girl named Zola arrives in town and invades the Casa Rosa, dogs start arfing, figs start flying through the air, lost orphans wander in, and the village becomes anything but quiet. And as Zola and the angel work together to rescue the orphans, they each begin to realize their purpose and learn that there is magic in the most ordinary acts of kindness.