Download or read book Samurai Rising written by Pamela S. Turner and published by Charlesbridge Publishing. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Minamoto Yoshitsune should not have been a samurai. But his story is legend in this real-life saga. This epic warrior tale reads like a novel, but this is the true story of the greatest samurai in Japanese history. When Yoshitsune was just a baby, his father went to war with a rival samurai family—and lost. His father was killed, his mother captured, and his surviving half-brother banished. Yoshitsune was sent away to live in a monastery. Skinny, small, and unskilled in the warrior arts, he nevertheless escaped and learned the ways of the samurai. When the time came for the Minamoto clan to rise up against their enemies, Yoshitsune answered the call. His daring feats and impossible bravery earned him immortality.

Download or read book Some Writer written by Melissa Sweet and published by Clarion Books. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this stunning, first-ever fully-illustrated biography of legendary author E.B. White, Sibert medalist and Caldecott Honor winner Melissa Sweet uses White's letters, photos, and mementos, as well as her original collaged art, to tell the true story of one of the most beloved authors of all time.

Download or read book The Genius of Japanese Carpentry written by Azby Brown and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Genius of Japanese Carpentry tells the story of the 1200-year-old Yakushiji monastery in Nara and the dedicated modern-day craftsmen who are working to restore what has been lost to the depredations of time, fire and warfare. Although the full monastery reconstruction will not be completed until 2030, one of the main temples, the Picture Hall, has been completely restored employing the same woodworking technology used to create the original building. This new edition of an architectural classic is by Azby Brown—one of the world's leading experts on Japanese architecture. It contains a new preface and many new text materials and photographs—most of them now available in color for the first time. Azby Brown chronicles the painstaking restoration of the temple through extensive interviews with the carpenters and woodworkers along with original drawings based on the plans of master carpenter Tsunekazu Nishioka. An inspiring testament to the dedication of these craftsmen and their philosophy of carpentry work as a form of personal fulfillment, The Genius of Japanese Carpentry offers detailed documentation of this singular project and a moving reminder of the unique cultural continuity found in Japan.

Download or read book The Last Samurai written by Helen DeWitt and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Called “remarkable” (The Wall Street Journal) and “an ambitious, colossal debut novel” (Publishers Weekly), Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai is back in print at last Helen DeWitt’s 2000 debut, The Last Samurai, was “destined to become a cult classic” (Miramax). The enterprising publisher sold the rights in twenty countries, so “Why not just, ‘destined to become a classic?’” (Garth Risk Hallberg) And why must cultists tell the uninitiated it has nothing to do with Tom Cruise? Sibylla, an American-at-Oxford turned loose on London, finds herself trapped as a single mother after a misguided one-night stand. High-minded principles of child-rearing work disastrously well. J. S. Mill (taught Greek at three) and Yo Yo Ma (Bach at two) claimed the methods would work with any child; when these succeed with the boy Ludo, he causes havoc at school and is home again in a month. (Is he a prodigy, a genius? Readers looking over Ludo’s shoulder find themselves easily reading Greek and more.) Lacking male role models for a fatherless boy, Sibylla turns to endless replays of Kurosawa’s masterpiece Seven Samurai. But Ludo is obsessed with the one thing he wants and doesn’t know: his father’s name. At eleven, inspired by his own take on the classic film, he sets out on a secret quest for the father he never knew. He’ll be punched, sliced, and threatened with retribution. He may not live to see twelve. Or he may find a real samurai and save a mother who thinks boredom a fate worse than death.

Download or read book The Abstract Wild written by Jack Turner and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2021-12-21 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If anything is endangered in America it is our experience of wild nature—gross contact. There is knowledge only the wild can give us, knowledge specific to it, knowledge specific to the experience of it. These are its gifts to us. How wild is wilderness and how wild are our experiences in it, asks Jack Turner in the pages of The Abstract Wild. His answer: not very wild. National parks and even so-called wilderness areas fall far short of offering the primal, mystic connection possible in wild places. And this is so, Turner avows, because any managed land, never mind what it's called, ceases to be wild. Moreover, what little wildness we have left is fast being destroyed by the very systems designed to preserve it. Natural resource managers, conservation biologists, environmental economists, park rangers, zoo directors, and environmental activists: Turner's new book takes aim at these and all others who labor in the name of preservation. He argues for a new conservation ethic that focuses less on preserving things and more on preserving process and "leaving things be." He takes off after zoos and wilderness tourism with a vengeance, and he cautions us to resist language that calls a tree "a resource" and wilderness "a management unit." Eloquent and fast-paced, The Abstract Wild takes a long view to ask whether ecosystem management isn't "a bit of a sham" and the control of grizzlies and wolves "at best a travesty." Next, the author might bring his readers up-close for a look at pelicans, mountain lions, or Shamu the whale. From whatever angle, Turner stirs into his arguments the words of dozens of other American writers including Thoreau, Hemingway, Faulkner, and environmentalist Doug Peacock. We hunger for a kind of experience deep enough to change our selves, our form of life, writes Turner. Readers who take his words to heart will find, if not their selves, their perspectives on the natural world recast in ways that are hard to ignore and harder to forget.

Download or read book Pale Blue Dot written by Carl Sagan and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2011-07-06 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Fascinating . . . memorable . . . revealing . . . perhaps the best of Carl Sagan’s books.”—The Washington Post Book World (front page review) In Cosmos, the late astronomer Carl Sagan cast his gaze over the magnificent mystery of the Universe and made it accessible to millions of people around the world. Now in this stunning sequel, Carl Sagan completes his revolutionary journey through space and time. Future generations will look back on our epoch as the time when the human race finally broke into a radically new frontier—space. In Pale Blue Dot, Sagan traces the spellbinding history of our launch into the cosmos and assesses the future that looms before us as we move out into our own solar system and on to distant galaxies beyond. The exploration and eventual settlement of other worlds is neither a fantasy nor luxury, insists Sagan, but rather a necessary condition for the survival of the human race. “Takes readers far beyond Cosmos . . . Sagan sees humanity’s future in the stars.”—Chicago Tribune

Download or read book The 4 hour Workweek written by Timothy Ferriss and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to reconstruct your life? Whether your dream is experiencing high-end world travel, earning a monthly five-figure income with zero management, or just living more and working less, this book teaches you how to double your income, and how to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want.

Download or read book Teewinot written by Jack Turner and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2001-11-10 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jack Turner grew up with an image of the Tetons engraved in his mind. As a young man, he climbed the peaks of this singular range with basic climbing gear and friends. Later in life, he led treks in India, Pakistan, Nepal, China, Tibet, and Peru, but he always returned to the mountains of his youth: the Tetons. Teewinot is his ode to forty years in the mountains that he loves. this is a book about a mountain range, its climbs, its weather, and the glory of the wild. It is also about a small group of climbers-nomads who inhabit the Teton Range each summer, and who know it as intimately as it will ever be known. Teewinot is a remarkable account of what it is like to live and work in these spectacular mountains. It has something for everyone-spellbinding accounts of dangerous and deadly climbs, unbridled awe at the beauty of nature, and an extreme passion for the environmental issues facing America today. In this series of recollections, one of America's most beautiful national parks comes alive with beauty, mystery, and power.

Download or read book Fighting to Win written by David J. Rogers and published by Doubleday Books. This book was released on 1984 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Applies the precepts of samurai philosophy and practice to the problems of doing business and of daily living and shows how to defeat opponents by overcoming the "inner opponents"

Download or read book Shinju written by Laura Joh Rowland and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-12-14 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When beautiful, wealthy Yukiko and low-born artist Noriyoshi are found drowned together in a shinju, or ritual double suicide, everyone believes the culprit was forbidden love. Everyone but newly appointed yoriki Sano Ichiro. Despite the official verdict and warnings from his superiors, the shogun's Most Honorable Investigator of Events, Situations, and People suspects the deaths weren't just a tragedy -- they were murder. Risking his family's good name and his own life, Sano will search for a killer across every level of society -- determined to find answers to a mystery no one wants solved. No one but Sano... As subtle and beautiful as the culture it evokes, Shinju vividly re-creates a world of ornate tearooms and guady pleasure-palaces, cloistered mountaintop convents and dealthy prisons. Part love story, part myster, Shinju is a tour that will dazzle and entertain all who enter its world. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Laura Joh Rowland's The Shogun's Daughter.

Download or read book A Modern Utopia written by Herbert George Wells and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1967-01-01 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Well's uncanny ability to highlight the problems which are now most acute and supply tentative solutions that allow a maximum of individual freedom merits serious consideration. Recommended reading for students and teachers dealing with government, science, and the contemporary dilemma of a world facing war, famine, and racial unrest."--Choice A Modern Utopia is one of the first important blueprints for the modern welfare state and an early major statement of Wells's idea of the World State, an idea that is perhaps his greatest contribution to the intellectual history of this century. In this "quintessential utopia," as Lewis Mumford calls it, Wells "sums up and clarifies the utopias of the past, and brings them into contact with the world of the present." The Bison Books edition, with an introduction by Mark R. Hillegas, associate professor of English at Southern Illinois University, brings back into print a work that has stimulated three generations of thinkers. "This is not flight into fancy no voyage into whimsy. It is a sober attempt to imagine what kind of society men would create if they really used their heads and worked at it. The result is one of the most plausible utopias ever written."--Chad Walsh, From Utopia to Nightmare "It is a beautiful Utopia beautifully seen and beautifully thought: and it has in it some of that flavor of airy unrestraint one finds in News from Nowhere."--Van Wyck Brooks, The World of H.G. Wells

Download or read book Los Angeles Magazine written by and published by . This book was released on 2003-03 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Los Angeles magazine is a regional magazine of national stature. Our combination of award-winning feature writing, investigative reporting, service journalism, and design covers the people, lifestyle, culture, entertainment, fashion, art and architecture, and news that define Southern California. Started in the spring of 1961, Los Angeles magazine has been addressing the needs and interests of our region for 48 years. The magazine continues to be the definitive resource for an affluent population that is intensely interested in a lifestyle that is uniquely Southern Californian.

Download or read book Sculpting in Time written by Andrey Tarkovsky and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 1989-04 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A director reveals the original inspirations for his films, their history, his methods of work, and the problems of visual creativity

Download or read book Samak the Ayyar written by and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The adventures of Samak, a trickster-warrior hero of Persia’s thousand-year-old oral storytelling tradition, are beloved in Iran. Samak is an ayyar, a warrior who comes from the common people and embodies the ideals of loyalty, selflessness, and honor—a figure that recalls samurai, ronin, and knights yet is distinctive to Persian legend. His exploits—set against an epic background of palace intrigue, battlefield heroics, and star-crossed romance between a noble prince and princess—are as deeply rooted in Persian culture as are the stories of Robin Hood and King Arthur in the West. However, this majestic tale has remained little known outside Iran. Translated from the original Persian by Freydoon Rassouli and adapted by Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner, this timeless masterwork can now be enjoyed by English-speaking readers. A thrilling and suspenseful saga, Samak the Ayyar also offers a vivid portrait of Persia a thousand years ago. Within an epic quest narrative teeming with action and supernatural forces, it sheds light on the lives of ordinary people and their social worlds. This is the first complete English-language version of a treasure of world culture. The translation is grounded in the twelfth-century Persian text while paying homage to the dynamic culture of storytelling from which it arose.

Download or read book Albion s Seed written by David Hackett Fischer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1991-03-14 with total page 981 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

Download or read book Earth s Wild Music written by Kathleen Dean Moore and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At once joyous and somber, this thoughtful gathering of new and selected essays spans Kathleen Dean Moore's distinguished career as a tireless advocate for environmental activism in the face of climate change. In this meditation on the music of the natural world, Moore celebrates the call of loons, howl of wolves, bellow of whales, laughter of children, and shriek of frogs, even as she warns of the threats against them. Each group of essays moves, as Moore herself has been moved, from celebration to lamentation to bewilderment and finally to the determination to act in defense of wild songs and the creatures who sing them. Music is the shivering urgency and exuberance of life ongoing. In a time of terrible silencing, Moore asks, who will forgive us if we do not save nature's songs?

Download or read book Superfudge written by Judy Blume and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-04-05 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of the classic Fudge series from Judy Blume, bestselling author of Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing! Farley Drexel Hatcher—otherwise known as Fudge—thinks he’s a superhero, but his older brother, Peter, knows Fudge is nothing but a big pain! Dealing with Fudge is hard enough, but now Peter’s parents have decided to move to New Jersey for an entire year! Even worse, Peter’s mom is going to have a new baby. And if this baby is anything like Fudge—help! How will Peter ever survive? “As a kid, Judy Blume was my favorite author, and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing was my favorite book.”—Jeff Kinney, author of the bestselling Wimpy Kid series Love Fudge, Peter, and Sheila? Read all these books featuring your favorite characters: Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great Fudge-a-Mania Double Fudge