Download or read book Death by Leisure written by Chris Ayres and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2010-01-19 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A British journalist’s “fast and funny” account of hedonism and conspicuous consumption in Los Angeles—and his attempt to get in on the fun (The New York Times). From the author of War Reporting for Cowards, Death by Leisure is the incisive, irreverent, and savagely funny story of British journalist Chris Ayres’s attempt to infiltrate the American leisure class (and find true love) in the credit-fueled years before the 2008 economic collapse. When the bubble bursts, however, Ayres must learn to live without the billionaire balls, supermodel girlfriends, foie gras pina coladas, and caviar facials to which he’s grown accustomed. Just like the rest of us, alas. “With dry British wit, [Ayres] skewers American greed, L.A. life, and his own endless romantic foibles...Somehow, Ayres knew the fall was coming and kept going anyway. So did we.” —Time “Were this merely a tale of a stranger in a strange land, Ayres’s hilariously self-effacing manner would make this worth reading. But what makes it more than merely clever is the way Ayres turns his own romantic insecurity and material aspiration into a stinging, if sympathetic, indictment of mindless consumption. Yes, we’re destroying the planet, he seems to say, but can we help it, given how pathetic we are? And anyone who can make us laugh at that must be a genius.” —Booklist (starred review)
Download or read book Leisure and Death written by Adam Kaul and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2018-05-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthropological study examines the relationship between leisure and death, specifically how leisure practices are used to meditate upon—and mediate—life. Considering travelers who seek enjoyment but encounter death and dying, tourists who accidentally face their own mortality while vacationing, those who intentionally seek out pleasure activities that pertain to mortality and risk, and those who use everyday leisure practices like social media or dogwalking to cope with death, Leisure and Death delves into one of the most provocative subsets of contemporary cultural anthropology. These nuanced and well-developed ethnographic case studies deal with different and distinct examples of the intertwining of leisure and death. They challenge established conceptions of leisure and rethink the associations attached to the prospect of death. Chapters testify to encounters with death on a personal and scholarly level, exploring, for example, the Cliffs of Moher as not only one of the most popular tourist destinations in Ireland but one of the most well-known suicide destinations as well, and the estimated 30 million active posthumous Facebook profiles being repurposed through proxy users and transformed by continued engagement with the living. From the respectful to the fascinated, from the macabre to the morbid, contributors consider how people deliberately, or unexpectedly, negotiate the borderlands of the living. An engaging, timely book that explores how spaces of death can be transformed into spaces of leisure, Leisure and Death makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning interdisciplinary literature on leisure studies and dark tourism. This book will appeal to students, scholars, and laypeople interested in tourism studies, death studies, cultural studies, heritage studies, anthropology, sociology, and marketing. Contributors: Kathleen M. Adams, Michael Arnold, Jane Desmond, Keith Egan, Maribeth Erb, James Fernandez, Martin Gibbs, Rachel Horner-Brackett, Shingo Iitaka, Tamara Kohn, Patrick Laviolette, Ruth McManus, James Meese, Bjorn Nansen, Stravoula Pipyrou, Hannah Rumble, Cyril Schafer
Download or read book Leisure and Death written by Adam Kaul and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2018-05-28 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthropological study examines the relationship between leisure and death, specifically how leisure practices are used to meditate upon—and mediate—life. Considering travelers who seek enjoyment but encounter death and dying, tourists who accidentally face their own mortality while vacationing, those who intentionally seek out pleasure activities that pertain to mortality and risk, and those who use everyday leisure practices like social media or dogwalking to cope with death, Leisure and Death delves into one of the most provocative subsets of contemporary cultural anthropology. These nuanced and well-developed ethnographic case studies deal with different and distinct examples of the intertwining of leisure and death. They challenge established conceptions of leisure and rethink the associations attached to the prospect of death. Chapters testify to encounters with death on a personal and scholarly level, exploring, for example, the Cliffs of Moher as not only one of the most popular tourist destinations in Ireland but one of the most well-known suicide destinations as well, and the estimated 30 million active posthumous Facebook profiles being repurposed through proxy users and transformed by continued engagement with the living. From the respectful to the fascinated, from the macabre to the morbid, contributors consider how people deliberately, or unexpectedly, negotiate the borderlands of the living. An engaging, timely book that explores how spaces of death can be transformed into spaces of leisure, Leisure and Death makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning interdisciplinary literature on leisure studies and dark tourism. This book will appeal to students, scholars, and laypeople interested in tourism studies, death studies, cultural studies, heritage studies, anthropology, sociology, and marketing. Contributors: Kathleen M. Adams, Michael Arnold, Jane Desmond, Keith Egan, Maribeth Erb, James Fernandez, Martin Gibbs, Rachel Horner-Brackett, Shingo Iitaka, Tamara Kohn, Patrick Laviolette, Ruth McManus, James Meese, Bjorn Nansen, Stravoula Pipyrou, Hannah Rumble, Cyril Schafer
Download or read book Death Culture Leisure written by Matt Coward-Gibbs and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2020-08-20 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death, Culture and Leisure: Playing Dead is an inter- and multi-disciplinary volume that engages with the diverse nexuses that exist between death, culture and leisure. At its heart, it is a playful exploration of the way in which we play with both death and the dead.
Download or read book Recreation Leisure and Chronic Illness written by Miriam P Lahey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-03 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Issues of leisure and dying are not often discussed in depth by those in recreation or thanatology. However, Recreation, Leisure, and Chronic Illness bridges the gap between leisure and thanatology. Professionals know that when illness, disability, stress, or poverty threaten the quantity and quality of a person’s life, leisure takes on great meaning. Readers will find in this truly unique book how leisure can be a positive counterforce to the physical and mental diminishments that erode health and work. Contributors to Recreation, Leisure and Chronic Illness explore the philosophy of leisure and how freedom, enjoyment, self-determination, and breaking the set patterns of daily life are central to true leisure, for persons in all walks of life. These authors illustrate the need for leisure in a wide variety of settings and in the face of multiple threats to both the quantity and the quality of life. Readers will find chapters filled with expert theories on how to help clients with limiting conditions realize the fulfillment of their leisure desires, the problem of groups left at the margins of the current health care policy who are also poorly served by the leisure professions, and the inevitable funding dilemma. Specific chapters focus on: improving leisure lifestyles as a crucial first step in rehabilitation the role and importance of recreation in lives of persons with AIDS benefits of recreation programs in senior centers and care centers community-based recreation programs that emphasize preserving existing coping patterns and maintaining daily functioning the ability of recreation to sustain hope for psychiatric patients relationships between leisure education and death education how creative activities--music, dance, art, and creative writing--are used to promote physical mental health While the chapters in Recreation, Leisure and Chronic Illness range from policy issues to specific recreation programs, as a whole they show the healing power of leisure. Professionals and students in both recreation and thanatology fields will find this volume an enlightening approach to promoting healing in those suffering from life-threatening conditions--medical, social, economic, or environmental.
Download or read book The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning written by Margareta Magnusson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *The basis for the wonderfully funny and moving TV series developed by Amy Poehler and Scout Productions* A charming, practical, and unsentimental approach to putting a home in order while reflecting on the tiny joys that make up a long life. In Sweden there is a kind of decluttering called döstädning, dö meaning “death” and städning meaning “cleaning.” This surprising and invigorating process of clearing out unnecessary belongings can be undertaken at any age or life stage but should be done sooner than later, before others have to do it for you. In The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, artist Margareta Magnusson, with Scandinavian humor and wisdom, instructs readers to embrace minimalism. Her radical and joyous method for putting things in order helps families broach sensitive conversations, and makes the process uplifting rather than overwhelming. Margareta suggests which possessions you can easily get rid of (unworn clothes, unwanted presents, more plates than you’d ever use) and which you might want to keep (photographs, love letters, a few of your children’s art projects). Digging into her late husband’s tool shed, and her own secret drawer of vices, Margareta introduces an element of fun to a potentially daunting task. Along the way readers get a glimpse into her life in Sweden, and also become more comfortable with the idea of letting go.
Download or read book This Republic of Suffering written by Drew Gilpin Faust and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-01-06 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Download or read book The City of Good Death written by Priyanka Champaneri and published by Restless Books. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Priyanka Champaneri’s transcendent debut novel brings us inside India’s holy city of Banaras, where the manager of a death hostel shepherds the dying who seek the release of a good death, while his own past refuses to let him go. Banaras, Varanasi, Kashi: India’s holy city on the banks of the Ganges has many names but holds one ultimate promise for Hindus. It is the place where pilgrims come for a good death, to be released from the cycle of reincarnation by purifying fire. As the dutiful manager of a death hostel in Kashi, Pramesh welcomes the dying and assists families bound for the funeral pyres that burn constantly on the ghats. The soul is gone, the body is burnt, the time is past, he tells them. Detach. After ten years in the timeless city, Pramesh can nearly persuade himself that here, there is no past or future. He lives contentedly at the death hostel with his wife, Shobha, their young daughter, Rani, the hostel priests, his hapless but winning assistant, and the constant flow of families with their dying. But one day the past arrives in the lifeless form of a man pulled from the river—a man with an uncanny resemblance to Pramesh. Called “twins” in their childhood village, he and his cousin Sagar are inseparable until Pramesh leaves to see the outside world and Sagar stays to tend the land. After Pramesh marries Shobha, defying his family’s wishes, a rift opens up between the cousins that he has long since tried to forget. Do not look back. Detach. But for Shobha, Sagar’s reemergence casts a shadow over the life she’s built for her family. Soon, an unwelcome guest takes up residence in the death hostel, the dying mysteriously continue to live, and Pramesh is forced to confront his own ideas about death, rebirth, and redemption. Told in lush, vivid detail and with an unforgettable cast of characters, The City of Good Death is a remarkable debut novel of family and love, memory and ritual, and the ways in which we honor the living and the dead. PRAISE FOR THE CITY OF GOOD DEATH “In Champaneri’s ambitious, vivid debut, the dying come to the holy city of Kashi to die a good death that frees them from the burden of reincarnation…. In sharp prose, Champaneri explores the power of stories—those the characters tell themselves, those told about them, and those they believe. . . . This epic, magical story of death teems with life.” —Publishers Weekly “Brimming with characters whose lives overlap and whose stories interweave, Champaneri’s exquisite debut delves into the consequences of the past, and how stories that are told can become reality even when they contain barely a shred of truth. As Pramesh discovers, the bitterness of past wounds can bring hope for redemption and life.” —Bridget Thoreson, Booklist “Lush prose evokes the thick, close atmosphere of Kashi and the intricate religious practices upon which life and death depend. Rumor and superstition hold sway over even the most level-headed people, twisting what’s explainable into something extraordinary—with tragic consequences. . . . The City of Good Death is a breathtaking, unforgettable novel about how remembering the past is just as important as moving on.” —Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews, Starred Review "Champaneri’s Kashi is teeming and vivid . . . the book frequently charms, and it's as full of humor, warmth, and mystery as Kashi’s own marketplace." —Kirkus Reviews “The City of Good Death is the debut novel of Priyanka Champaneri but it has the confidence of a master storyteller. Drawing on the rich literary traditions of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, Champaneri’s epic saga will satisfy armchair travelers thirsty for adventure, and sick of looking out their windows.” —Chicago Review of Books "In intricate detail and with remarkable skill, Champaneri writes a powerful tale about the pull of the past and our aching need to understand the mysteries and misunderstandings that thwart our relationships. An atmospheric and immersive debut with a rich cast of characters you won’t soon forget." —Marjan Kamali, author of The Stationery Shop
Download or read book Death by a Thousand Cuts written by Timothy Brook and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-15 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Beijing in 1904, multiple murderer Wang Weiqin became one of the last to suffer the extreme punishment known as lingchi, called by Western observers “death by a thousand cuts.” This is the first book to explore the history, iconography, and legal contexts of Chinese tortures and executions from the 10th century until lingchi’s abolition in 1905.
Download or read book Unplugged written by William H. Colby and published by Amacom Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Medical technology has helped mankind conquer tuberculosis, polio, and countless other once certain-death diseases. It has given us hope against cancer and AIDS, allowed heart and brain surgeries that have saved untold numbers of lives, and delivered us from the pain and crippling legacy of injury. Medical technology, it seems, is a never-ending string of miracles. But it is also a double-edged sword. More often than not, death today happens because of a decision to stop doing something, or to not do it at all. As the tragic life and death of Terri Schiavo so poignantly illustrated, universal definitions of life, death, nature, and many other concepts are elusive at best. Unplugged addresses the fundamental questions of the right-to-die debate, and discusses how the medical advances that bring so much hope and healing have also helped to create today's dilemma. This compelling book explores recent high-profile cases, including that of Mrs. Schiavo, and illuminates the complex legal, ethical, medical, and deeply personal issues of a debate that ultimately affects us all. Compassionate and beautifully written, the book helps readers understand the implications of current laws and proposed legislation, various medical options (including hospice), and the typical end-of-life decisions we all must face in order to make informed decisions for ourselves and our loved ones."
Download or read book The Leisure Hour written by and published by . This book was released on 1873 with total page 868 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Of Human Kindness written by Paula Marantz Cohen and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning scholar and teacher explores how Shakespeare's greatest characters were built on a learned sense of empathy While exploring Shakespeare's plays with her students, Paula Marantz Cohen discovered that teaching and discussing his plays unlocked a surprising sense of compassion in the classroom. In this short and illuminating book, she shows how Shakespeare's genius lay with his ability to arouse empathy, even when his characters exist in alien contexts and behave in reprehensible ways. Cohen takes her readers through a selection of Shakespeare's most famous plays, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and The Merchant of Venice, to demonstrate the ways in which Shakespeare thought deeply and clearly about how we treat "the other." Cohen argues that only through close reading of Shakespeare can we fully appreciate his empathetic response to race, class, gender, and age. Wise, eloquent, and thoughtful, this book is a forceful argument for literature's power to champion what is best in us.
Download or read book The Politics of Leisure written by Rudy Dunlap and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-24 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores entanglements between politics and leisure, ranging from the electorate’s concerns with public recreation resources, to the presence of politics in casual conversation, and to the use of leisure as a means of preserving racial hierarchies in society. In noting the contributions of past scholarship, it also points toward a trend of increasingly political leisure research, where research helps to unpack the multiple ways in which power suffuses the experience of leisure. A contrast between ‘being political’, on one hand, and the tribal politicization that characterizes much of contemporary social life, on the other hand, demonstrates that scholars and educators can and should be engaged in politically-oriented scholarship, while also building a more diverse and intellectually productive academy. This edited volume will be of great interest to researchers and scholars interested in race, power, polarization, and the interrelationship between politics and leisure. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Leisure Sciences.
Download or read book Leisure in Later Life written by Tania Wiseman and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-15 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses leisure choice as a complex concept, made more complicated in later life than at any other time. The author posits that there are many unanswered questions about the new booming generation of healthy, older people, and this book asks what it is really like to be old at the beginning of the 21st century in the United Kingdom, analysing leisure in older people in the context of the subtle politics of the day to day. Throughout the chapters, the author highlights the often missing depictions of older people who enjoy and enact bold, informed agency as part of their everyday lives. Drawing upon secondary data from the Mass Observation Archive, a social thesis of leisure and ageing emerges that challenges the individualism inherent in ‘active ageing.’ It is proposed that the idea of ‘active ageing’ creates complex constraints to leisure as people strive to measure up to cultural expectations. The stories in this book advocate for an appreciation and re-evaluation of passive leisure in later life, and the enjoyment and freedom it can bring. The project is therefore useful to students and researchers of leisure studies, gerontology and sociology of ageing.
Download or read book Once More We Saw Stars written by Jayson Greene and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A gripping and beautiful book about the power of love in the face of unimaginable loss.” --Cheryl Strayed For readers of The Bright Hour and When Breath Becomes Air, a moving, transcendent memoir of loss and a stunning exploration of marriage in the wake of unimaginable grief. As the book opens: two-year-old Greta Greene is sitting with her grandmother on a park bench on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. A brick crumbles from a windowsill overhead, striking her unconscious, and she is immediately rushed to the hospital. But although it begins with this event and with the anguish Jayson and his wife, Stacy, confront in the wake of their daughter's trauma and the hours leading up to her death, Once More We Saw Stars quickly becomes a narrative that is as much about hope and healing as it is about grief and loss. Jayson recognizes, even in the midst of his ordeal, that there will be a life for him beyond it--that if only he can continue moving forward, from one moment to the next, he will survive what seems unsurvivable. With raw honesty, deep emotion, and exquisite tenderness, he captures both the fragility of life and absoluteness of death, and most important of all, the unconquerable power of love. This is an unforgettable memoir of courage and transformation--and a book that will change the way you look at the world.
Download or read book Death by Petticoat written by Mary Miley Theobald and published by Andrews Mcmeel+ORM. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This myth-busting compendium sets the record straight on American history, from famous-but-false legends to weird-but-true stories. American history is full of oft-repeated errors and outright fabrications—as well as truths that are stranger than fiction. Collaborating with The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Mary Miley Theobald has uncovered the real stories behind many well-known myth-understandings. Did pregnant women really seclude themselves indoors? Were uneven stairs made to trip up burglars? Did people only bathe once a year? Death by Petticoat reveals the truth about these and many other funny, surprising, and strange misapprehensions of history.
Download or read book The Secret of the Yellow Death written by Suzanne Jurmain and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014-05-20 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Extremely interesting . . . Young people interested in medicine or scientific discovery will find this book engrossing, as will history students” (School Library Journal). [He had] a fever that hovered around 104 degrees. His skin turned yellow. The whites of his eyes looked like lemons. Nauseated, he gagged and threw up again and again . . . Here is the true story of how four Americans and one Cuban tracked down a killer, one of the word’s most vicious plagues: yellow fever. Journeying to fever-stricken Cuba in the company of Walter Reed and his colleagues, the reader feels the heavy air, smells the stench of disease, hears the whine of mosquitoes biting human volunteers during surreal experiments. Exploring themes of courage, cooperation, and the ethics of human experimentation, this gripping account is ultimately a story of the triumph of science. “[A] powerful exploration of a disease that killed 100,000 U.S. citizens in the 1800s.” —Kirkus Reviews Includes photos
