Download or read book Coming of Age in Utopia written by Paul M. Gaston and published by NewSouth Books. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this exquisitely wrought memoir of a committed life, historian, and civil rights activist, Paul Gaston reveals his deep roots in Fairhope---the unique Utopian community founded in 1894 by his grandfather on the shores of Mobile Bay, Alabama. Fairhope grew into a unique political, economic, and educational experiment and a center of radical economic and educational ideals. As time passed, however, Fairhope's radical nature went into decline. By the early 1950s, the author began to look outward for ways to take part in the coming struggle---the civil rights movement. Gaston's career at the University of Virginia, where he taught from 1957-97, forms the core of Coming of Age in Utopia.
Download or read book Greetings from Utopia Park written by Claire Hoffman and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this engrossing, provocative, and intimate memoir, a young journalist reflects on her childhood in the heartland, growing up in an increasingly isolated meditation community in the 1980s and ’90s—a fascinating, disturbing look at a fringe culture and its true believers. When Claire Hoffman’s alcoholic father abandons his family, his desperate wife, Liz, tells five-year-old Claire and her seven-year-old brother, Stacey, that they are going to heaven—Iowa—to live in Maharishi’s national headquarters for Heaven on Earth. For Claire’s mother, Transcendental Meditation—the Maharishi’s method of meditation and his approach to living the fullest possible life—was a salvo that promised world peace and enlightenment just as their family fell apart. At first this secluded utopia offers warmth and support, and makes these outsiders feel calm, secure, and connected to the world. At the Maharishi School, Claire learns Maharishi’s philosophy for living and meditates with her class. With the promise of peace and enlightenment constantly on the horizon, every day is infused with magic and meaning. But as Claire and Stacey mature, their adolescent skepticism kicks in, drawing them away from the community and into delinquency and drugs. To save herself, Claire moves to California with her father and breaks from Maharishi completely. After a decade of working in journalism and academia, the challenges of adulthood propel her back to Iowa, where she reexamines her spiritual upbringing and tries to reconnect with the magic of her childhood. Greetings from Utopia Park takes us deep into this complex, unusual world, illuminating its joys and comforts, and its disturbing problems. While there is no utopia on earth, Hoffman reveals, there are noble goals worth striving for: believing in belief, inner peace, and a firm understanding that there is a larger fabric of the universe to which we all belong.
Download or read book Utopia written by Thomas More and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2023-12-03 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia is a work of fiction and socio-political satire by Thomas More published in 1516 in Latin. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. Many aspects of More's description of Utopia are reminiscent of life in monasteries.
Download or read book On a Sunbeam written by Tillie Walden and published by First Second. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Tillie Walden is the future of comics, and On a Sunbeam is her best work yet. It’s a ‘space’ story unlike any you’ve ever read, with a rich, lived-in universe of complex characters.” —Brian K. Vaughan, Saga and Paper Girls Two timelines. Second chances. One love. A ragtag crew travels to the deepest reaches of space, rebuilding beautiful, broken structures to piece the past together. Two girls meet in boarding school and fall deeply in love—only to learn the pain of loss. With interwoven timelines and stunning art, award-winning graphic novelist Tillie Walden creates an inventive world, breathtaking romance, and an epic quest for love. LA Times Festival of Books 2018 Book Prize Winner, Graphic Novel/Comics A Publisher's Weekly Best Book of 2018 One of The Washington Post's "10 Best Graphic Novels of 2018" A School Library Journal Best Book of 2018 A YALSA Top Ten Great Graphic Novel A 2019 Hugo Award Nominee, Best Graphic Story A Harvey Award Nominee, Book of the Year A Harvey Award Nominee, Best Children's or Young Adult Book
Download or read book Necessary Errors written by Caleb Crain and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ONE OF THE YEAR'S BEST BOOKS The Wall Street Journal • Slate • Kansas City Star • Flavorwire • Policy Mic • Buzzfeed “Necessary Errors is a very good novel, an enviably good one, and to read it is to relive all the anxieties and illusions and grand projects of one’s own youth.”—James Wood, The New Yorker The exquisite debut novel by the author of Overthrow that brilliantly captures the lives and romances of young expatriates in newly democratic Prague It’s October 1990. Jacob Putnam is young and full of ideas. He’s arrived a year too late to witness Czechoslovakia’s revolution, but he still hopes to find its spirit, somehow. He discovers a country at a crossroads between communism and capitalism, and a picturesque city overflowing with a vibrant, searching sense of possibility. As the men and women Jacob meets begin to fall in love with one another, no one turns out to be quite the same as the idea Jacob has of them—including Jacob himself. Necessary Errors is the long-awaited first novel from literary critic and journalist Caleb Crain. Shimmering and expansive, Crain’s prose richly captures the turbulent feelings and discoveries of youth as it stretches toward adulthood—the chance encounters that grow into lasting, unforgettable experiences and the surprises of our first ventures into a foreign world—and the treasure of living in Prague during an era of historic change.
Download or read book Escaping Utopia written by Janja Lalich and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-01 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We think of cults as bizarre, inexplicable, or otherworldly places that only strange people inhabit, but cults and other abusive and high-demand groups (and relationships) are actually quite commonplace. In fact, the behaviors, social pressures, and authoritarian structures that create cults exist to a greater or lesser extent in every human relationship and every human group. In the first in-depth research of its kind, the author interviewed sixty-five people who were born in or grew up in thirty-nine different cultic groups spanning more than a dozen countries. What’s especially interesting about these individuals is that they each left the cult on their own, without outside help or internal support. In Escaping Utopia: Growing Up in a Cult, Getting Out, and Starting Over, the authors craft Lalich’s original and groundbreaking research into an accessible and engaging book, the first of its kind focusing on this particular population.
Download or read book The Age of Paradise written by John Strickland and published by Ancient Faith Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Before there was a West, there was Christendom. This book tells the story of how both came to be." (from the Introduction) The Age of Paradise is the first of a projected four-volume history of Christendom, a civilization with a supporting culture that gave rise to what we now call the West. At a time of renewed interest in the future of Western culture, author John Strickland-an Orthodox scholar, professor, and priest-offers a vision rooted in the deep past of the first millennium. At the heart of his story is the early Church's "culture of paradise," an experience of the world in which the kingdom of heaven was tangible and familiar. Drawing not only on worship and theology but statecraft and the arts, the author reveals the remarkably affirmative character Western culture once had under the influence of Christianity-in particular, of Eastern Christendom, which served the West not only as a cradle but as a tutor and guardian as well.
Download or read book The Age of Division written by John Strickland and published by Ancient Faith Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-15 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you have ever wondered exactly how we got from the Christian society of the early centuries, united in its faithfulness to apostolic tradition, to the fragmented and secular state of the West today, The Age of Division will answer all your questions and more. In this second of a four-volume cultural history of Christendom, author John Strickland applies insights from the Orthodox Church to trace the decline and disintegration of both East and West after the momentous but often neglected Great Schism. For five centuries, a divided Christendom was led further and further from the culture of paradise that defined its first millennium, resulting in the Protestant Reformation and the secularization that defines our society today.
Download or read book Welcome to Utopia written by Karen Valby and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BONUS: This edition contains a new Afterword and a reading group guide. Utopia, Texas: It’s either the best place on earth, or it’s no place at all. In the twenty-first century, it’s difficult to imagine any element of American life that remains untouched by popular culture, let alone an entire community existing outside the empire of pop. But Karen Valby discovered the tiny town of Utopia tucked away in the Texas Hill Country. There are no movie theaters for sixty miles in any direction, no book or music stores. But cable television and the Internet have recently thrown wide the doors of Utopia. Valby follows the lives of four Utopians—Ralph, the retired owner of the general store; Kathy, the waitress who waits in terror for three of her boys to return from war; Colter, the son of a cowboy with the soul of a hipster; and Kelli, an aspiring rock star and one of the only black people in town—as they reckon, on an intensely human scale, with war and race, class and culture, and the way time’s passage can change the ground beneath our feet. Utopia is the kind of place we still think of as the “real America,” a place of cowboys and farmers and high-school sweethearts who stay together till they die. But its dramatic stories show us what happens when the old tensions of small-town life confront a new reality: that no town, no matter how small and isolated, can escape the liberating and disruptive forces of the larger world. Welcome to Utopia is a moving elegy for a proud American way of life and a celebration of our relentless impulse toward rebirth.
Download or read book The Age of Utopia written by John Strickland and published by Ancient Faith Publishing. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Continuing the epic of Christendom told in earlier volumes, The Age of Paradise and The Age of Division, the author explains how, between the Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth century and the Russian Revolution of the twentieth, secular humanism displaced Christianity to become the source of modern culture. The result was some of the most illustrious music, science, philosophy, and literature ever produced. But the cultural reorientation from paradise to utopia-from an experience of the kingdom of heaven to one bound exclusively by this world-all but eradicated the traditional culture of the West, leaving it at the beginning of the twentieth century without roots in anything transcendent.
Download or read book Archaeologies of the Future written by Fredric Jameson and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an age of globalization characterized by the dizzying technologies of the First World, and the social disintegration of the Third, is the concept of utopia still meaningful? Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson's most substantial work since Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, investigates the development of this form since Thomas More, and interrogates the functions of utopian thinking in a post-Communist age. The relationship between utopia and science fiction is explored through the representations of otherness . alien life and alien worlds . and a study of the works of Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson and more. Jameson's essential essays, including "The Desire Called Utopia," conclude with an examination of the opposing positions on utopia and an assessment of its political value today.
Download or read book Utopia written by Sir Thomas More and published by Primedia E-launch LLC. This book was released on 1969 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edition includes: -Several illustrations from the original work -Extended and up to date introduction -A discussion of the structure of the book First published in 1516, Saint Thomas More's Utopia is one of the most important works of European humanism. Through the voice of the mysterious traveller Raphael Hythloday, More describes a pagan, communist city-state governed by reason. Addressing such issues as religious pluralism, women's rights, state-sponsored education, colonialism, and justified warfare, Utopia seems remarkably contemporary nearly five centuries after it was written, and it remains a foundational text in philosophy and political theory. Precminent More scholar Clarence H. Miller does justice to the full range of More's rhetoric in this new translation. Professor Miller includes a helpful introduction that outlines some of the important problems and issues that Utopia raises, and also provides informative commentary to assist the reader throughout this challenging and rewarding exploration of the meaning of political community.
Download or read book In Utopia written by J. C. Hallman and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicling one man's search to find the meaning of Utopia in our present-day world, "In Utopia" explores the history of utopian literature and thought in the narrative context of the real-life fruits of that history. b&w illustrations.
Download or read book Utopia for Realists written by Rutger Bregman and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Universal basic income. A 15-hour workweek. Open borders. Does it sound too good to be true? One of Europe's leading young thinkers shows how we can build an ideal world today. "A more politically radical Malcolm Gladwell." -- New York Times After working all day at jobs we often dislike, we buy things we don't need. Rutger Bregman, a Dutch historian, reminds us it needn't be this way -- and in some places it isn't. Rutger Bregman's TED Talk about universal basic income seemed impossibly radical when he delivered it in 2014. A quarter of a million views later, the subject of that video is being seriously considered by leading economists and government leaders the world over. It's just one of the many utopian ideas that Bregman proves is possible today. Utopia for Realists is one of those rare books that takes you by surprise and challenges what you think can happen. From a Canadian city that once completely eradicated poverty, to Richard Nixon's near implementation of a basic income for millions of Americans, Bregman takes us on a journey through history, and beyond the traditional left-right divides, as he champions ideas whose time have come. Every progressive milestone of civilization -- from the end of slavery to the beginning of democracy -- was once considered a utopian fantasy. Bregman's book, both challenging and bracing, demonstrates that new utopian ideas, like the elimination of poverty and the creation of the fifteen-hour workweek, can become a reality in our lifetime. Being unrealistic and unreasonable can in fact make the impossible inevitable, and it is the only way to build the ideal world.
Download or read book Chasing Utopia written by David Leach and published by ECW Press. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating, non-partisan exploration of an incendiary region Say the word “Israel” today and it sparks images of walls and rockets and a bloody conflict without end. Yet for decades, the symbol of the Jewish State was the noble pioneer draining the swamps and making the deserts bloom: the legendary kibbutznik. So what ever happened to the pioneers’ dream of founding a socialist utopia in the land called Palestine? Chasing Utopia: The Future of the Kibbutz in a Divided Israel draws readers into the quest for answers to the defining political conflict of our era. Acclaimed author David Leach revisits his raucous memories of life as a kibbutz volunteer and returns to meet a new generation of Jewish and Arab citizens struggling to forge a better future together. Crisscrossing the nation, Leach chronicles the controversial decline of Israel’s kibbutz movement and witnesses a renaissance of the original vision for a peaceable utopia in unexpected corners of the Promised Land. Chasing Utopia is an entertaining and enlightening portrait of a divided nation where hope persists against the odds.
Download or read book Dealing in Dreams written by Lilliam Rivera and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A novel exploration of societal roles, gender, and equality.” —School Library Journal (starred review) The Outsiders meets Mad Max: Fury Road in this “daring and dramatic” (Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling) dystopian novel about sisterhood and the cruel choices people are forced to make in order to survive. At night, Las Mal Criadas own these streets. Sixteen-year-old Nalah leads the fiercest all-girl crew in Mega City. That role brings with it violent throwdowns and access to the hottest boydega clubs, but Nala quickly grows weary of her questionable lifestyle. Her dream is to get off the streets and make a home in the exclusive Mega Towers, in which only a chosen few get to live. To make it to the Mega Towers, Nalah must prove her loyalty to the city’s benevolent founder and cross the border in a search of the mysterious gang the Ashé Riders. Led by a reluctant guide, Nalah battles crews and her own doubts but the closer she gets to her goal the more she loses sight of everything—and everyone—she cares about. Nalah must choose whether or not she’s willing to do the unspeakable to get what she wants. Can she discover that home is not where you live but whom you chose to protect before she loses the family she’s created for good?
Download or read book Seeking Utopia Making Life Better written by William G. Harris and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2018-05-18 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's been said that a journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step. For young Mae, that first step is huge. Mae was born on a farm under the yoke of an oppressive father who wished she was a boy. Mae cannot read or write and has no friends. Often, she daydreams about what it might be like away from the farm and live in an exciting big city. Eventually, her dream comes true when Father sends her to live with Aunt Wilma - a retired school teacher she has never met. Notwithstanding their age differences, they get along famously. Exposed to another way of life, Mae learns to read and write. She even finds time for romance, and soon, her son, Ronnie, is born. Despite objections from cruel people in hostile places, Mae is determined to make good on her promise to provide Ronnie with a better life.
