EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

Book Intentional Dissonance

    Book Details:
  • Author : Iain S. Thomas
  • Publisher : Central Avenue Publishing
  • Release : 2012-12-07
  • ISBN : 1926760859
  • Pages : 174 pages

Download or read book Intentional Dissonance written by Iain S. Thomas and published by Central Avenue Publishing. This book was released on 2012-12-07 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It’s been 10 years since the world officially ended. In the last city on Earth, Jon Salt is addicted to Sadness, a drug that invokes its name, and obsessed with his lover, Michelle; both of which threaten to drive him insane. Strange creatures and new technologies appeared in the last days of humanity and the widespread adoption of teleportation technology sundered the fabric of time and space, leaving a smattering of looping ghosts. It is a sad, monotone world, but the remaining populace is happy, thanks to the anti-depressants in the water supply. The last government on Earth has taken a special interest in a gift that Jon possesses: the ability to make his thoughts real. Jon must rely on that gift and the help of a few unlikely friends to stay one step ahead of those who desperately want to use him for something far more sinister than even he could dream…

Book The Style of Palestrina and the Dissonance

Download or read book The Style of Palestrina and the Dissonance written by Knud Jeppesen and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-11-16 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic study remains one of the foremost works on the music of Palestrina. Features a rigorous and valuable analysis of the composer's handling of rhythm, line, harmony, and dissonance.

Book The Front Porch Revolution

Download or read book The Front Porch Revolution written by Robert H. Lengel and published by FriesenPress. This book was released on 2018-06-07 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A piece of music is more than the sum and sequence of its notes. The spaces between the notes, the rests or silences, are just as essential. Without those spaces, the notes do not properly relate to each other and even the most profound composition degrades into mere noise. Front porches metaphorically represent those rest-spaces in our lives and they are vanishing. Without them we are denying ourselves access to our music and possibility – and the evidence is clear at all levels of interaction. The social and political discourse in this country has, of late, eroded into noise and acrimony, dialogue having been abandoned for weaponized partisan monologues. Diatribes and rhetoric are gleefully accelerated like charged particles online, and on competing TV news and talk radio shows. In fact, this dynamic is experienced in meetings of any scale where diverse perspectives clash around topics we care about. But ask yourself, what is being accomplished beyond gridlock, frayed relationships and destructive polarization. We need to meet in new ways. The Front Porch Revolution is about the need to reassert true conversation and dialogue and reaffirm an earnest commitment to genuine communication. If anything is to be accomplished (and there is much that needs to be accomplished) we must be able to hear ourselves think and be present with our personal stories that give context to that thinking. This is more likely to happen on front porches than on the floor of Congress, in board rooms, in classrooms or on Facebook or Twitter. Viewing the world from the front porch invites a new way of thinking about our communication challenges, leadership and what we have become in the absence of front porches. Based on decades of research and first-hand experience at the Center for Professional Excellence at the University of Texas at San Antonio, The Front Porch Revolution maps out a lucid thoughtful and hopeful path forward to possibility.

Book TETHER DIATRAECUS

    Book Details:
  • Author : PHETE McBAWLTALMS
  • Publisher : Lulu.com
  • Release : 2010-07-28
  • ISBN : 1257063103
  • Pages : 568 pages

Download or read book TETHER DIATRAECUS written by PHETE McBAWLTALMS and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2010-07-28 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Intellectual cyberpunk without the physical wiring." "DIATRǼCUS" is the first book of the TETHER trilogy-dealing with a fractal-attributed, yet fully realized and resolved, narrative. "DIATRǼCUS" is about self-assertion of identity, as well as the values of integrity, devotion, loyalty, betrayal, and love-mixed with the underlying forces of agenda, 'truth, ' and perspective. The novel combines multiple fictional and non-fictional genres, into what some now call "trans-humanism." This sci-fi/fantasy (cyberpunk) novel might best be described as Isaac Asimov meets J.R.R. Tolkien meets C.S. Lewis meets Ayn Rand meets William Gibson-on steroids. It comprises multiple sub-narratives folded into a matrixed super narrative, with plots and actions and characters and agendas threaded throughout. Or, in a word, "DIATRǼCUS" is simply: 'transcendent.'

Book The Blue Plateau

    Book Details:
  • Author : Mark Tredinnick
  • Publisher : Milkweed Editions
  • Release : 2011-12-28
  • ISBN : 1571318658
  • Pages : 274 pages

Download or read book The Blue Plateau written by Mark Tredinnick and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2011-12-28 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of The Land’s Wild Music depicts Australia’s Blue Mountains through stories of the land and the lives within it. At the farthest extent of Australia’s Blue Mountains, on the threshold of the country’s arid interior, the Blue Plateau reveals the vagaries of a hanging climate: the droughts last longer, the seasons change less, and the wildfires burn hotter and more often. In The Blue Plateau, Mark Tredinnick tries to learn what it means to fall in love with a home that is falling away. A landscape memoir in the richest sense, Tredinnick’s story reveals as much about this contrary collection of canyons and ancient rivers, cow paddocks and wild eucalyptus forests as it does about the myriad generations who struggled to remain in the valley they loved. It captures the essence of a wilderness beyond subjugation, the spirit of a people just barely beyond defeat. Charting a lithology of indigenous presence, faltering settlers, failing ranches, floods, tragedy, and joy that the place constantly warps and erodes, The Blue Plateau reminds us that, though we may change the landscape around us, it works at us inexorably, with wind and water, heat and cold, altering who and what we are. The result is an intimate and illuminating portrayal of tenacity, love, grief, and belonging. In the tradition of James Galvin, William Least Heat-Moon, and Annie Dillard, Tredinnick plumbs the depths of people’s relationship to a world in transition. Praise for The Blue Plateau “One of the wisest, most gifted and ingenious writers you could hope to find.” —Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma “I’ve never been to Australia, but now—after this book—it comes up in my dreams. The landscape in the language of this work is alive and conscious, and Tredinnick channels it in prose both wild and inspired. . . . Part nonfiction novel, part classic pastoral, part nature elegy, part natural history, the whole of The Blue Plateau conveys a deep sense, rooted in the very syntax of a lush prose about an austere land, that there can be no meaningful division between nature and culture, between humans and all the other life that interdepends with us, not in the backcountry of southeastern Australia, nor anywhere else.” —Orion “Absorbed slowly, as a pastoral landscape of loss and experiment in seeing and listening, the book richly rewards that patience.” —Publishers Weekly

Book Love

    Book Details:
  • Author : Simon May
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 2019
  • ISBN : 0190884835
  • Pages : 305 pages

Download or read book Love written by Simon May and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is love's real aim? Why is it so ruthlessly selective in its choice of loved ones? Why do we love at all? In addressing these questions, Simon May develops a radically new understanding of love as the emotion we feel towards whomever or whatever we experience as grounding our life--as offering us a possibility of home in a world that we supremely value. He sees love as motivated by a promise of "ontological rootedness," rather than, as two thousand years of tradition variously asserts, by beauty or goodness, by a search for wholeness, by virtue, by sexual or reproductive desire, by compassion or altruism or empathy, or, in one of today's dominant views, by no qualities at all of the loved one. After arguing that such founding Western myths as the Odyssey and Abraham's call by God to Canaan in the Bible powerfully exemplify his new conception of love, May goes on to re-examine the relation of love to beauty, sex, and goodness in the light of this conception, offering among other things a novel theory of beauty--and suggesting, against Plato, that we can love others for their ugliness (while also seeing them as beautiful). Finally, he proposes that, in the Western world, romantic love is gradually giving way to parental love as the most valued form of love: namely, the love without which one's life is not deemed complete or truly flourishing. May explains why childhood has become sacred and excellence in parenting a paramount ideal--as well as a litmus test of society's moral health. In doing so, he argues that the child is the first genuinely "modern" supreme object of love: the first to fully reflect what Nietzsche called "the death of God."

Book In Search of Certainty

    Book Details:
  • Author : Josh McDowell
  • Publisher : Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
  • Release : 2003
  • ISBN : 9780842379724
  • Pages : 180 pages

Download or read book In Search of Certainty written by Josh McDowell and published by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.. This book was released on 2003 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This seeker-friendly book invites readers to discover that certainty involves some absolutes. It addresses postmodernists' view of truth, pointing to the absolute truth in the person of Jesus.

Book In Tune

    Book Details:
  • Author : Richard Wolf
  • Publisher : The Experiment
  • Release : 2019-04-02
  • ISBN : 1615195351
  • Pages : 240 pages

Download or read book In Tune written by Richard Wolf and published by The Experiment. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In our noisy world, music is the key to inner silence Richard Wolf first tried Zen meditation in his teens, but no matter in what posture or for how long he sat, transcendence proved stubbornly out of reach. It was only years later that he found the bridge that could take him there: music. In Tune charts twelve “bridges”—skills and sensibilities refined in musical practice that carry over to mindfulness and meditation, among them: Concentration Posture Harmony Silence The Art of Deep Listening Transcending the Self This inspirational guide offers a wealth of music-based exercises to enhance daily meditation and creativity. Plus, Wolf shares personal anecdotes of eminent musicians—from Miles Davis to Dr. Dre—to illuminate points along the intersection of music and mindful living. As you begin to move fluidly between these two transformative disciplines, you’ll notice the focus, composure, and peacefulness that comes from practice—as well as the joys of tuning in to the music all around you, and to the symphony that plays silently from within.

Book Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music

Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music written by Nicole V. Gagné and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last decade of the 19th century, modernist sensibilities reached a critical mass and emerged more frequently in music as composers began employing dissonance, polyrhythm, atonality, and densities. Conversely, many 20th-century composers eschewed modernist devices and wrote accessible works in a tonal idiom, which drew chiefly on classical, romantic, and folk models. Then the postmodern sensibility followed, with its enthusiasm for the unprecedented availability of virtually every type of music, andit engendered numerous sub-groups, including multiculturalism, minimalism, multimedia, and free improvisation. Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music focuses on modernist and postmodern classical music worldwide from 1890to the present. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, an extensive bibliography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries, with more than 60 entries explaining the methods, styles, and acoustic and electronic media peculiar tonew music, and over 350 entries giving essential information on the lives and work of the people who have composed and performed that music. Those entries also include pop, jazz, and rock composer/musicians whose work either overlaps the realm of classical music or else is so radical within its own field that it merits discussion in this context. This book is a must for anyone, musician or non-musician, student or professional, who seeks to research and learn more about any significant aspect of modern and contemporary classical music worldwide.

Book The Success of Open Source

Download or read book The Success of Open Source written by Steve WEBER and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of the innovative programming that powers the Internet, creates operating systems, and produces software is the result of "open source" code, that is, code that is freely distributed--as opposed to being kept secret--by those who write it. Leaving source code open has generated some of the most sophisticated developments in computer technology, including, most notably, Linux and Apache, which pose a significant challenge to Microsoft in the marketplace. As Steven Weber discusses, open source's success in a highly competitive industry has subverted many assumptions about how businesses are run, and how intellectual products are created and protected. Traditionally, intellectual property law has allowed companies to control knowledge and has guarded the rights of the innovator, at the expense of industry-wide cooperation. In turn, engineers of new software code are richly rewarded; but, as Weber shows, in spite of the conventional wisdom that innovation is driven by the promise of individual and corporate wealth, ensuring the free distribution of code among computer programmers can empower a more effective process for building intellectual products. In the case of Open Source, independent programmers--sometimes hundreds or thousands of them--make unpaid contributions to software that develops organically, through trial and error. Weber argues that the success of open source is not a freakish exception to economic principles. The open source community is guided by standards, rules, decisionmaking procedures, and sanctioning mechanisms. Weber explains the political and economic dynamics of this mysterious but important market development. Table of Contents: Preface 1. Property and the Problem of Software 2. The Early History of Open Source 3. What Is Open Source and How Does It Work? 4. A Maturing Model of Production 5. Explaining Open Source: Microfoundations 6. Explaining Open Source: Macro-Organization 7. Business Models and the Law 8. The Code That Changed the World? Notes Index Reviews of this book: In the world of open-source software, true believers can be a fervent bunch. Linux, for example, may act as a credo as well as an operating system. But there is much substance beyond zealotry, says Steven Weber, the author of The Success of Open Source...An open-source operating system offers its source code up to be played with, extended, debugged, and otherwise tweaked in an orgy of user collaboration. The author traces the roots of that ethos and process in the early years of computers...He also analyzes the interface between open source and the worlds of business and law, as well as wider issues in the clash between hierarchical structures and networks, a subject with relevance beyond the software industry to the war on terrorism. --Nina C. Ayoub, Chronicle of Higher Education Reviews of this book: A valuable new account of the [open-source software] movement. --Edward Rothstein, New York Times We can blindly continue to develop, reward, protect, and organize around knowledge assets on the comfortable assumption that their traditional property rights remain inviolate. Or we can listen to Steven Weber and begin to make our peace with the uncomfortable fact that the very foundations of our familiar "knowledge as property" world have irrevocably shifted. --Alan Kantrow, Chief Knowledge Officer, Monitor Group Ever since the invention of agriculture, human beings have had only three social-engineering tools for organizing any large-scale division of labor: markets (and the carrots of material benefits they offer), hierarchies (and the sticks of punishment they impose), and charisma (and the promises of rapture they offer). Now there is the possibility of a fourth mode of effective social organization--one that we perhaps see in embryo in the creation and maintenance of open-source software. My Berkeley colleague Steven Weber's book is a brilliant exploration of this fascinating topic. --J. Bradford DeLong, Department of Economics, University of California at Berkeley Steven Weber has produced a significant, insightful book that is both smart and important. The most impressive achievement of this volume is that Weber has spent the time to learn and think about the technological, sociological, business, and legal perspectives related to open source. The Success of Open Source is timely and more thought provoking than almost anything I've come across in the past several years. It deserves careful reading by a wide audience. --Jonathan Aronson, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California

Book A Companion to Nietzsche

Download or read book A Companion to Nietzsche written by Keith Ansell-Pearson and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-02-24 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Nietzsche provides a comprehensive guide to all the main aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy, profiling the most recent research and trends in scholarship. Brings together an international roster of both rising stars and established scholars, including many of the leading commentators and interpreters of Nietzsche. Showcases the latest trends in Nietzsche scholarship, such as the renewed focus on Nietzsche’s philosophy of time, of nature, and of life. Includes clearly organized sections on Art, Nature, and Individuation; Nietzsche's New Philosophy of the Future; Eternal Recurrence, the Overhuman, and Nihilism; Philosophy of Mind; Philosophy and Genealogy; Ethics; Politics; Aesthetics; Evolution and Life. Features fresh treatments of Nietzsche’s core and enigmatic doctrines.

Book Shaped by the West Wind

    Book Details:
  • Author : Claire Elizabeth Campbell
  • Publisher : UBC Press
  • Release : 2005
  • ISBN : 9780774810999
  • Pages : 324 pages

Download or read book Shaped by the West Wind written by Claire Elizabeth Campbell and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Claire Campbell draws from recent work in cultural history, landscape studies in geography and art history, and environmental history to explore what happens when external agendas confront local realities - a story central to the Canadian experience. Explorers, fishers, artists, and park planners all were forced to respond to the unique contours of this inland sea; their encounters defined a regional identity even as they constructed a popular image for the Bay in the national imagination."--Jacket.

Book Knowledge and Cosmos

    Book Details:
  • Author : Robert K. DeKosky
  • Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
  • Release : 2023-10-10
  • ISBN : 0761874038
  • Pages : 533 pages

Download or read book Knowledge and Cosmos written by Robert K. DeKosky and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Knowledge and Cosmos: Development and Decline of the Medieval Perspective, 2nd Edition, Robert K. DeKosky focuses on issues in astronomy, cosmology, physics, matter theory, philosophy, and theology vital to the “Copernican Revolution.” This book describes efforts among individuals advocating different world views to fit new ideas compatibly into broad perspectives reflecting four traditional patterns of interpretation: teleological, mechanical, occultist, and mathematico-descriptive. These four modes had guided medieval accounts of heavenly phenomena, material process, and motion. The teleological explanation, prevalent in Aristotle’s natural philosophy, posited “final causes” (ends or goals toward which objects strove or attempted to become). Ancient classical atomists had emphasized strictly mechanical explanations, invoking direct material contact and collision of moving matter as agents of physical change. Traditions of astrology, magic, and alchemy embraced an occultist pattern of interpretation—citing hidden forces opaque to both sensual detection and rational understanding as explanations of various phenomena. Finally, the mathematico-descriptive approach interpreted natural phenomena according to geometric or arithmetic relationships; unlike the other three, this did not involve causal explanation of a process. Part I discusses development of the four patterns in the ancient period and their uneasy medieval relationships with each other and with basic Judaeo-Muslim-Christian exigencies of faith. Theory of the heavens follows, including the mathematico-descriptive approach of Ptolemaic astronomy, the teleological and mechanical cosmology of Aristotle, and occultist interpretations of astrologers and magicians. Part I then turns to matter and materiality, discussing differences among the mechanical philosophy of classical atomism, teleological emphases in Aristotle’s material theory, and occultist assumptions of some alchemists. Finally, Part I analyzes conceptions of motion, focusing on Aristotelian interpretations and critical commentaries thereon during the Middle Ages. Part II relates struggles of leading early-modern figures to adapt new concepts (e.g., Copernicus’ heliocentric astronomy/cosmology, Galileo’s inertial theories of motion, and Kepler’s elliptical planetary orbit) to an allegiance to two or more of the four patterns of interpretation. By this approach, it identifies decreasing dependence on teleological explanation of physical phenomena as crucial to decline of medieval interpretations of those phenomena, followed by rejection of teleology in the natural philosophy of Descartes, and subsequent fruitful confluence of the mechanical, mathematico-descriptive, and occultist patterns in the physics and cosmology of Isaac Newton.

Book Color for Interior Architecture

Download or read book Color for Interior Architecture written by Mary C. Miller and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 1997-04-21 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the major considerations involved in color choice for interior spaces.

Book HeartStrings

Download or read book HeartStrings written by Saurav Suman and published by Saurav Suman. This book was released on 2024-03-05 with total page 2073 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Forget cheesy fairytales and outdated advice, "Heartstrings: A Relationship & Love Field Guide" is your down-to-earth guide to navigating the wild world of love in the 21st century. Think of it as a mix tape of juicy insights from psychology, relatable stories from literature, and real-world tips for tackling modern relationship challenges. This book doesn't promise a picture-perfect ending, but it equips you with the tools to write your own love story – from mastering communication to spicing things up in the bedroom and navigating the ever-present glow of your phone. So, grab a cup of coffee, curl up, and get ready to unlock the secrets to deeper connections, personal growth, and a whole lot of love."

Book Anthropology and Beauty

Download or read book Anthropology and Beauty written by Stephanie Bunn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-17 with total page 531 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Organised around the theme of beauty, this innovative collection offers insight into the development of anthropological thinking on art, aesthetics and creativity in recent years. The volume incorporates current work on perception and generative processes, and seeks to move beyond a purely aesthetic and relativist stance. The chapters invite readers to consider how people sense and seek out beauty, whether through acts of human creativity and production; through sensory experience of sound, light or touch, or experiencing architecture; visiting heritage sites or ancient buildings; experiencing the environment through ‘places of outstanding natural beauty’; or through cooperative action, machine-engineering or designing for the future.

Book Horton Foote

    Book Details:
  • Author : Gerald C. Wood
  • Publisher : Routledge
  • Release : 2014-07-16
  • ISBN : 1135636028
  • Pages : 243 pages

Download or read book Horton Foote written by Gerald C. Wood and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-16 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is the first general critical introduction to the writing of Horton Foote, recipient of two Academy Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. These original essays survey Foote's career, his work for theater, television, and film, with analysis of Foote's major themes and characteristic style in all three media. The casebook concludes with a list of Foote's produced work, as well as a selective annotated bibliography of primary criticism on the playwright. This book demonstrates the influence of personal biography and Southern literature on Foote's career. The essayists also investigate the writer's contribution to American dramatic realism and independent filmmaking, emphasizing his experimentation with musical structure, dedramatization, and complex subtexts. Foote's disarmingly simple stories, with their radically understated language, are explained in many articles as the product of the subtle influence of the psychological and religious views of the author.