Download or read book Inventing Scrooge written by Carlo DeVito and published by Cider Mill Press. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inventing Scrooge uncovers the real-life inspirations from Charles Dickens' own world that led to the fascinating creation of his most beloved tale: A Christmas Carol. When Charles Dickens created the story that would become A Christmas Carol, little did he know that his ghostly little book would reinvent the way we celebrate Christmas. From a graveyard in Edinburgh to the Marshalsea Prison in London to his schoolboy years in Chatham and even his lifelong fascination with dance, so much of Dickens' past and present are woven into the characters and themes of A Christmas Carol. And by understanding the story behind the story, readers will come to embrace the holiday classic all the more. To this day, we look to the Christmas season as a time of warmth and celebration among family, friends, and strangers alike. And every year at Christmastime, not only do our lives get better for all the festivity, but we get better, as people. Just like Ebenezer Scrooge.

Download or read book Transforming Scrooge written by Joseph D. Cusumano and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Christmas Carol is examined from a psycho-spiritual viewpoint in Transforming Scrooge, written by Joseph D. Cusumano, a licensed counselor. Dickens' classic on hope and change is found to contain a message for anyone stuck in the darkness of an ego-driven life. Personal transformation, a key to healing the wounded inner child, and a plan to transform the world are all unearthed by Cusumano. color insert.

Download or read book Mr Dickens and His Carol written by Samantha Silva and published by Flatiron Books. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "CHARMING...I READ IT IN A COUPLE OF EBULLIENT, CHRISTMASSY GULPS." —Anthony Doerr, #1 New York Times bestselling author of All The Light We Cannot See "GRACED BY THE GHOSTLY PRESENCE OF MR. DICKENS HIMSELF...PROMISES TO PUT YOU IN THE HOLIDAY SPIRIT." —USA Today A beloved, irresistible novel that reimagines the story behind Charles Dickens' Christmas classic Charles Dickens is not feeling the Christmas spirit. His newest book is an utter flop, the critics have turned against him, relatives near and far hound him for money. While his wife plans a lavish holiday party for their ever-expanding family and circle of friends, Dickens has visions of the poor house. But when his publishers try to blackmail him into writing a Christmas book to save them all from financial ruin, he refuses. And a serious bout of writer’s block sets in. Frazzled and filled with self-doubt, Dickens seeks solace in his great palace of thinking, the city of London itself. On one of his long night walks, in a once-beloved square, he meets the mysterious Eleanor Lovejoy, who might be just the muse he needs. As Dickens’ deadlines close in, Eleanor propels him on a Scrooge-like journey that tests everything he believes about generosity, friendship, ambition, and love. The story he writes will change Christmas forever.

Download or read book The Man Who Invented Christmas written by Les Standiford and published by Crown. This book was released on 2008-11-04 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As uplifting as the tale of Scrooge itself, this is the story of how Charles Dickens revived the signal holiday of the Western world—now a major motion picture. Just before Christmas in 1843, a debt-ridden and dispirited Charles Dickens wrote a small book he hoped would keep his creditors at bay. His publisher turned it down, so Dickens used what little money he had to put out A Christmas Carol himself. He worried it might be the end of his career as a novelist. The book immediately caused a sensation. And it breathed new life into a holiday that had fallen into disfavor, undermined by lingering Puritanism and the cold modernity of the Industrial Revolution. It was a harsh and dreary age, in desperate need of spiritual renewal, ready to embrace a book that ended with blessings for one and all. With warmth, wit, and an infusion of Christmas cheer, Les Standiford whisks us back to Victorian England, its most beloved storyteller, and the birth of the Christmas we know best. The Man Who Invented Christmas is a rich and satisfying read for Scrooges and sentimentalists alike.

Download or read book Inventing Christmas written by Jock Elliott and published by . This book was released on 2002-10 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at the origins of modern Christmas traditions, which evolved over a twenty-five year period, beginning in 1823 with the publication of Clement Clarke Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas," to 1848.

Download or read book Payback written by Margaret Atwood and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2008 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores debt as a central historical component of religion, literature, and societal structure, while examining the idea of humanity's debt to the natural world.

Download or read book The Mystery of Charles Dickens written by A.N. Wilson and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography A lively and insightful biographical celebration of the imaginative genius of Charles Dickens, published in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of his death. Charles Dickens was a superb public performer, a great orator and one of the most famous of the Eminent Victorians. Slight of build, with a frenzied, hyper-energetic personality, Dickens looked much older than his fifty-eight years when he died—an occasion marked by a crowded funeral at Westminster Abbey, despite his waking wishes for a small affair. Experiencing the worst and best of life during the Victorian Age, Dickens was not merely the conduit through whom some of the most beloved characters in literature came into the world. He was one of them. Filled with the twists, pathos, and unusual characters that sprang from this novelist’s extraordinary imagination, The Mystery of Charles Dickens looks back from the legendary writer’s death to recall the key events in his life. In doing so, he seeks to understand Dickens’ creative genius and enduring popularity. Following his life from cradle to grave, it becomes clear that Dickens’s fiction drew from his life—a fact he acknowledged. Like Oliver Twist, Dickens suffered a wretched childhood, then grew up to become not only a respectable gentleman but an artist of prodigious popularity. Dickens knew firsthand the poverty and pain his characters endured, including the scandal of a failed marriage. Going beyond standard narrative biography, A. N. Wilson brilliantly revisits the wellspring of Dickens’s vast and wild imagination, to reveal at long last why his novels captured the hearts of nineteenth century readers—and why they continue to resonate today. The Mystery of Charles Dickens is illustrated with 30 black-and-white images.

Download or read book Christmas in America written by Penne L. Restad and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996-12-05 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The manger or Macy's? Americans might well wonder which is the real shrine of Christmas, as they take part each year in a mix of churchgoing, shopping, and family togetherness. But the history of Christmas cannot be summed up so easily as the commercialization of a sacred day. As Penne Restad reveals in this marvelous new book, it has always been an ambiguous meld of sacred thoughts and worldly actions-- as well as a fascinating reflection of our changing society. In Christmas in America, Restad brilliantly captures the rise and transformation of our most universal national holiday. In colonial times, it was celebrated either as an utterly solemn or a wildly social event--if it was celebrated at all. Virginians hunted, danced, and feasted. City dwellers flooded the streets in raucous demonstrations. Puritan New Englanders denounced the whole affair. Restad shows that as times changed, Christmas changed--and grew in popularity. In the early 1800s, New York served as an epicenter of the newly emerging holiday, drawing on its roots as a Dutch colony (St. Nicholas was particularly popular in the Netherlands, even after the Reformation), and aided by such men as Washington Irving. In 1822, another New Yorker named Clement Clarke Moore penned a poem now known as "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," virtually inventing the modern Santa Claus. Well-to-do townspeople displayed a German novelty, the decorated fir tree, in their parlors; an enterprising printer discovered the money to be made from Christmas cards; and a hodgepodge of year-end celebrations began to coalesce around December 25 and the figure of Santa. The homecoming significance of the holiday increased with the Civil War, and by the end of the nineteenth century a full- fledged national holiday had materialized, forged out of borrowed and invented custom alike, and driven by a passion for gift-giving. In the twentieth century, Christmas seeped into every niche of our conscious and unconscious lives to become a festival of epic proportions. Indeed, Restad carries the story through to our own time, unwrapping the messages hidden inside countless movies, books, and television shows, revealing the inescapable presence--and ambiguous meaning--of Christmas in contemporary culture. Filled with colorful detail and shining insight, Christmas in America reveals not only much about the emergence of the holiday, but also what our celebrations tell us about ourselves. From drunken revelry along colonial curbstones to family rituals around the tree, from Thomas Nast drawing the semiofficial portrait of St. Nick to the making of the film Home Alone, Restad's sparkling account offers much to amuse and ponder.

Download or read book England s Elizabeth written by Michael Dobson, Nicola Watson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No monarch is more glamorous or more controversial than Elizabeth I. The stories by which successive generations have sought to extol, explain, or excoriate Elizabeth supply a rich index to the cultural history of English nationalism - whether they represent her as Anne Boleyn's suffering orphan or as the implacable nemesis of Mary, Queen of Scots, as learned stateswoman or as frustrated lover, persecuted princess or triumphant warrior queen. This book examines the many afterlives the Virgin Queen has lived in drama, poetry, fiction, painting, propaganda, and the cinema over the four centuries since her death, from the aspiringly epic to the frankly kitsch. Exploring the Elizabeths of Shakespeare and Spenser, of Sophia Lee and Sir Walter Scott, of Bette Davis and of Glenda Jackson, of Shakespeare in Love and Blackadder II, this is a lively, lavishly-illustrated investigation of England's perennial fascination with a queen who is still engaged in a posthumous progress through the collective pysche of her country.

Download or read book Bracebridge Hall The Humorists A Medley Illustrated written by Washington Irving and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Shivering Babe Glorious Lord written by Douglas Wirth and published by WestBow Press. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nativity Stories from Matthew and Lukes gospels have endured through the centuries, but the way Christmas is celebrated has been dramatically reshaped. In the modern era the story of Christs birth has been overshadowed by fanciful tales of Santa, Frosty, and Rudolph. Holiday customs designed to enhance the enjoyment of Christmas have often come to obscure the message of the Saviors birth. The Christmas season now exists primarily to foster the urge to shop rather than a desire to pause and reflect on the good news of Christs coming. Today the Nativity Stories are seldom considered as a whole, and the theological riches of these sacred texts have regrettably been reduced to The Christmas Story. The biblical narratives that have inspired poets and artists for centuries warrant more careful study. Shivering Babe, Glorious Lord surveys the Nativity Stories through twenty centuries of Christian tradition: their composition by Matthew and Luke; their relationship to the larger biblical narrative; their profound influence on theology and worship; their modern decline and the reemergence of Christmas in a secular guise in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Readers yearning for a more Christ-centered Christmas will find helpful resources here.

Download or read book The Happy Prisoner written by Monica Dickens and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is the end of WW II and the household of Mrs. North, a well-to-do widow with a country cottage, is very busy. War circumstances brought both of her daughters home: loud but good-hearted tomboy, Violet, and highly-strung and over sensitive Heather with her two small children. Mrs. North is also taking care of her young niece, Evelyn, a lively child who loves to play on the local farm and has a great passion for animals. But at the center of all this is Oliver, Mrs. North's only son who lost his leg during the war service abroad. Recovering from his injuries, bed-ridden Oliver has nothing better to do but observe the busy lives of the people around him. Treated as a hero and a confidant by all the women in his family, Oliver begins to enjoy his new role as a self-proclaimed counselor. Due to his advice, Violet, an independent spinster, unexpectedly accepts the marriage proposal from a local farmer. Her wedding is a success and Violet finds a new happiness in her marriage, but soon Oliver's meddling in his family affairs goes too far. Will his risky instructions save or ruin Heather's marriage, which is at the brink of crisis, when her husband comes back from Australia after a few years of separation? Will Oliver learn to accept his new circumstances? Will he finally face to the reality and start to rebuild his own life? In this compendium plot, Monica Dickens, with her typical attention to detail, humor and talent for creating vivid characters, explores complicated life stories of the close-knit family and their friends at the end of the war. The Happy Prisoner was first published in 1946.

Download or read book A Christmas Carol One Man Show written by Derek Grant and published by . This book was released on 2020-02-29 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "If I could work my will," said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!"In this cleverly abridged version of Charles Dickens' heart-warming story of the mean-spirited and curmudgeonly Ebenezer Scrooge who is transformed by several ghostly overnight encounters, the narrative has been adapted for use as a solo theatrical performance. This is a terrific one-man show that can be enjoyed by people of all ages."I have endeavoured in this ghostly little book, to raise the ghost of an idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no-one wish to lay it." So said Charles Dickens in the preface to A Christmas Carol, when it was first published in 1843. Now it can be performed for a whole new generation to enjoy, in this captivating and involving one-person adaptation by professional theatre producer Derek Grant.

Download or read book Thinking Fast and Slow written by Daniel Kahneman and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-10-25 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Major New York Times Bestseller *More than 2.6 million copies sold *One of The New York Times Book Review's ten best books of the year *Selected by The Wall Street Journal as one of the best nonfiction books of the year *Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient *Daniel Kahneman's work with Amos Tversky is the subject of Michael Lewis's best-selling The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions. Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Topping bestseller lists for almost ten years, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a contemporary classic, an essential book that has changed the lives of millions of readers.

Download or read book The Friendly Dickens written by Norrie Epstein and published by Viking Adult. This book was released on 1998 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You might have read him in class, but the Victorians read Charles Dickens like we watch Melrose Place, and The Friendly Dickens will show you why. It is the ultimate pop reference to the Dickensian world of shrouded sex and ostentatious death, a book that will have you running in delight to dust off your Dickens.Norrie Epstein--whose The Friendly Shakespeare was called by The New York Times "spirited, informative and provocative"--opens up Dickens's life and times in all its squalor and glory, including his rise to greatness and occasional lapses from grace. She considers his works, major and minor, in decided lively fashion, not just reading, but reading between the lines:* Was Oliver Twist's Fagin a pederast?* What made A Christmas Carol's Tiny Tim so darn tiny?* How many of Dickens's child characters met an untimely end? (Hint: plenty.)Full of humor, skepticism, and expert opinions, with eye- catching illustrations, plenty of quotes, and sidebars on nearly every page, you will quickly become a Dickens authority--even if you've never read a word.

Download or read book Charles Dickens written by Claire Tomalin and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2011-10-06 with total page 633 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE ACCLAIMED DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY OF ONE OF THE GREATEST BRITISH WRITERS OF ALL TIME Charles Dickens was a phenomenon: a journalist, a father of ten, a supporter of liberal social causes, but most of all, a great novelist. From unpromising beginnings sent to work a black factory age twelve, he rose to such social and literary heights that when he died, the world mourned. Yet the brilliance concealed a divided character: a republican, he disliked America; sentimental about the family, he took up with a young actress; usually generous, he cut off his impecunious children. From the award-winning author Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life paints an unforgettable portrait of Dickens, capturing brilliantly the complex character of this great genius. If you loved Great Expectations, Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, this book is invaluable reading. 'By far the most humane and imaginatively sympathetic account yet for the general reader' Amanda Craig, New Statesman

Download or read book A Modern Christmas Carol written by Bob Seidensticker and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2013-08-16 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a thought-provoking retelling of the Dickens classic, a shrewdly successful televangelist receives unexpected Christmas visitors: first, his long-dead partner, and then three ghostly guides. Finally able to acknowledge the shallowness of his message and doubts he has long suppressed, he makes amends with far-reaching consequences. "[A] masterful retelling ... Well done!" - Tom Flynn, editor of Free Inquiry magazine and author of The Trouble with Christmas "Consistently ingenious and beautifully written ... thought-provoking!" - Dr. Robert M. Price, The Bible Geek "A clever little book, filled with insights, that takes the conceptual framework of Dickens's Christmas Carol to new heights of rationality without sacrificing any of its compassion." - Paul Gabel, author of And God Created Lenin and Inventing Jesus "In this retelling of the Dickens classic, Bob Seidensticker gives age-old vices and values a modern face, one that is as familiar and clichéd-and yet also as engaging and provocative-as the crotchety old Dickens banker himself." - Dr. Valerie Tarico, author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light "The author does all atheists a service by having his characters express profound arguments against the claims of traditional religion. He does all Christians a service by providing them the safe environment of a novel as an impetus to begin to question their faith within the privacy of their own minds." - Edward Tabash, Constitutional lawyer, atheist and church/state separation activist