Download or read book Sweet Heaven When I Die written by Jeff Sharlet and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Linked narrative nonfiction from the best-selling author of The Family. No one explores the borderlands of belief and skepticism quite like Jeff Sharlet. He is ingenious, farsighted, and able to excavate the worlds of others, even the flakiest and most fanatical, with uncanny sympathy. Here, he reports back from the far reaches of belief, whether in the clear mountain air of "Sweet Fuck All, Colorado" or in a midnight congregation of urban anarchists celebrating a victory over police. From Dr. Cornel West to legendary banjo player Dock Boggs, from the youth evangelist Ron Luce to America's largest "Mind, Body, Spirit Expo," Sharlet profiles religious radicals, realists, and escapists. Including extended journeys published here for the first time, Sweet Heaven When I Die offers a portrait of our spiritual landscape that calls to mind Joan Didion's classic Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
Download or read book Sweet Heaven When I Die Faith Faithlessness and the Country In Between written by Jeff Sharlet and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A master investigative stylist and one of the shrewdest commentators on religion’s underexplored realms.”—Michael Washburn, Washington Post In this gorgeous collection of essays that has drawn comparisons to the work of Joan Didion, John McPhee, and Norman Mailer, best-selling author Jeff Sharlet reports back from the far reaches of belief, whether in the clear mountain air of “Sweet Fuck All, Colorado” or in a midnight congregation of anarchists celebrating a victory over police. Like movements in a complex piece of music, Sharlet’s dispatches vibrate with all the madness and beauty, the melancholy and aspirations for transcendence, of American life.
Download or read book Black Gods of the Asphalt written by Onaje X. O. Woodbine and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-24 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: J-Rod moves like a small tank on the court, his face mean, staring down his opponents. "I play just like my father," he says. "Before my father died, he was a problem on the court. I'm a problem." Playing basketball for him fuses past and present, conjuring his father's memory into a force that opponents can feel in each bone-snapping drive to the basket. On the street, every ballplayer has a story. Onaje X. O. Woodbine, a former streetball player who became an all-star Ivy Leaguer, brings the sights and sounds, hopes and dreams of street basketball to life. He shows that big games have a trickster figure and a master of black talk whose commentary interprets the game for audiences. The beats of hip-hop and reggae make up the soundtrack, and the ballplayers are half-men, half-heroes, defying the ghetto's limitations with their flights to the basket. Basketball is popular among young black American men but not because, as many claim, they are "pushed by poverty" or "pulled" by white institutions to play it. Black men choose to participate in basketball because of the transcendent experience of the game. Through interviews with and observations of urban basketball players, Onaje X. O. Woodbine composes a rare portrait of a passionate, committed, and resilient group of athletes who use the court to mine what urban life cannot corrupt. If people turn to religion to reimagine their place in the world, then black streetball players are indeed the hierophants of the asphalt.
Download or read book Write Choices written by Sue Hertz and published by CQ Press. This book was released on 2015-02-16 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Developing narrative nonfiction writers at any stage of their career Write Choices: Elements of Nonfiction Storytelling helps writers cultivate their nonfiction storytelling skills by exploring the universal decisions writers confront when crafting factual narratives. Rather than isolating various forms of narrative nonfiction into categories or genres, Sue Hertz focuses on examining the common choices all true storytellers encounter, whether they are writing memoir, literary journalism, personal essays, or travel stories. Write Choices also includes digital storytelling. No longer confined to paper, today′s narrative nonfiction writers must learn to write for electronic media, which may also demand photos, videos, and/or audio. Integrating not only her own insights and experience as a journalist, nonfiction book author, and writing instructor, but also those of other established nonfiction storytellers, both print and digital, Hertz aims to guide emerging writers through key decisions to tell the best story possible. Blending how-to instruction with illuminating examples and commentaries drawn from original interviews with master storytellers, Write Choices is a valuable resource for all nonfiction writers, from memoirists to essayists to literary journalists, at any stage of their career.
Download or read book Postmarks from a Political Traveler written by Phil Karber and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As spring and summer vacations beckon, this book invites and incites a whole new approach to travel. "Postmarks from a Political Traveler" is a series of travel recollections confronting the troubling topics of roots and racism, polar bears and climate change, anti-Americanism, and the war in Afghanistan. The book opens with the story of the author s experience growing up in the Jim Crow South, traveling in apartheid South Africa, and living in the post-apartheid South Africa of 2009 and 2010. It explores the not-so-dissimilar roots and racism of the United States and South Africa, as well as the cross-fertilization of ideas between the two countries. The next installment chronicles two trips to Churchill, Manitoba, where the planet s largest population of polar bears congregate each October. It recounts the dramatic changes that have occurred in both the human and the polar bear communities in just the last decade and shows how the bears have become an Arctic version of the proverbial canary in the coalmine. Then the book shifts to the author s journey back to the United States on a German freighter with a rabidly anti-American captain. Woven into this account of life aboard a long haul ship are threads of the author s travels and anti-American encounters over a decade of living in Africa and Asia. The book concludes with reflections on trips to Afghanistan in 2004 and in 2012, describing the effects of war and conflict zone politics on women, education, refugees, and aid workers. What ties these episodes together is the author s commitment to social justice and to changing the world through travel and writing that is, affirming travel as a political act."
Download or read book The Utopia of Rules written by David Graeber and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence? To answer these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber—one of our most important and provocative thinkers—traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today, and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice…though he also suggests that there may be something perversely appealing—even romantic—about bureaucracy. Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings behind Sherlock Holmes and Batman, The Utopia of Rules is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx, and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible. An essential book for our times, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us—and the better, freer world we should, perhaps, begin to imagine for ourselves.
Download or read book Poesis in Extremis written by Daniel Feldman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2024-02-08 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can genocide be witnessed through imaginative literature? How can the Holocaust affect readers who were not there? Reading the work of major figures such as Elie Wiesel, Paul Celan, Avrom Sutzkever, Ida Fink, Wladyslaw Szlengel, Itzhak Katzenelson, and Czeslaw Milosz, Poesis in Extremis poses fundamental questions about how prose and poetry are written under extreme conditions, either in real time or immediately after the Holocaust. Framed by discussion of literary testimony, with Wiesel's literary memoir Night as an entry point, this innovative study explores the blurred boundary of fact and fiction in Holocaust literature. It asks whether there is a poetics of the Holocaust and what might be the criteria for literary witnessing. Wartime writing in particular tests the limits of “poesis in extremis” when poets faced their own annihilation and wrote in the hope that their words, like a message in a bottle, would somehow reach readers. Through Poesis in Extremis, Daniel Feldman and Efraim Sicher probe the boundaries of Holocaust literature, as well as the limits of representation.
Download or read book The Writers Directory written by and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book This Brilliant Darkness A Book of Strangers written by Jeff Sharlet and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A luminous, moving and visual record of fleeting moments of connection.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice A visionary work of radical empathy. Known for immersion journalism that is more immersed than most people are willing to go, and for a prose style that is somehow both fierce and soulful, Jeff Sharlet dives deep into the darkness around us and awaiting us. This work began when his father had a heart attack; two years later, Jeff, still in his forties, had a heart attack of his own. In the grip of writerly self-doubt, Jeff turned to images, taking snapshots and posting them on Instagram, writing short, true stories that bloomed into documentary. During those two years, he spent a lot of time on the road: meeting strangers working night shifts as he drove through the mountains to see his father; exploring the life and death of Charley Keunang, a once-aspiring actor shot by the police on LA’s Skid Row; documenting gay pride amidst the violent homophobia of Putin’s Russia; passing time with homeless teen addicts in Dublin; and accompanying a lonely woman, whose only friend was a houseplant, on shopping trips. Early readers have called this book “incantatory,” the voice “prophetic,” in “James Agee’s tradition of looking at the reality of American lives.” Defined by insomnia and late-night driving and the companionship of other darkness-dwellers—night bakers and last-call drinkers, frightened people and frightening people, the homeless, the lost (or merely disoriented), and other people on the margins—This Brilliant Darkness erases the boundaries between author, subject, and reader to ask: how do people live with suffering?
Download or read book Apocalypse Culture written by Adam Parfrey and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ""Apocalypse Culture" is compulsory reading for all those concerned with the crisis of our times. An extraordinary collection unlike anything I have ever encountered. These are the terminal documents of the twentieth century."-J.G. Ballard
Download or read book Radiant Truths written by Jeff Sharlet and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-28 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with Walt Whitman singing hymns at a wounded soldier’s bedside during the Civil War, this surprising and vivid anthology ranges straight through to the twenty-first century to end with Francine Prose crying tears of complicated joy at the sight of Whitman’s words in Zuccotti Park during the brief days of the Occupy movement. The first anthology of its kind, Radiant Truths gathers an exquisite selection of writings by both well-known and forgotten American authors and thinkers, each engaged in the challenges of writing about religion, of documenting “things unseen.” Their contributions to the genre of literary journalism—the telling of factual stories using the techniques of fiction and poetry—make this volume one of the most exciting anthologies of creative nonfiction to have emerged in years. Jeff Sharlet presents an evocative selection of writings that illuminate the evolution of the American genre of documentary prose. Each entry may be savored separately, but together the works enrich one another, engaging in an implicit and continuing conversation that reaches across time and generations. Including works by: Walt Whitman • Henry David Thoreau • Mark Twain • Meridel Le Sueur • Zora Neale Hurston • Mary McCarthy • James Baldwin • Norman Mailer • Ellen Willis • Anne Fadiman • John Jeremiah Sullivan • Francine Prose • Garry Wills • and many others
Download or read book C Street written by Jeff Sharlet and published by Univ. of Queensland Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A gripping political thriller, a masterpiece of investigative journalism' Peter Manseau, author of Rag and Bone The secretive Christian fundamentalist group known as 'The Family' is leading a new crusade for 'God-led government'.Jeff Sharlet, authorThe Family (more than 100,000 copies sold worldwide), is the only journalist to have reported from insidethe organisation. The Family garnered intense media coverage in 2009 when theirtownhouse on Washington's C Street was central to three Republican sex scandals. Now Sharlet uncovers the convert efforts of C Street to transform the very fabric of Western democracy, with the Family, steeped in the influence and corruption usually associated with the notorious lobbing industry, fueling political fundamentalism from within government. When Barack Obama took office, headlines declared the age of culture wars over. In C Street, Sharlet show why these conflicts endure and why they matter now-from Uganda, where culture warriors are determined to eradicate homosexuality, to the battle for the soul of America's armed forces. Reporting with exclusive sources and explosives documents, Sharlet reveals the terrifying new front-lines of fundamentalism. PRAISE FOR THE FAMILY 'This expose of the hidden face of Christian fundamentalism is authoritative and alarming.' The Age 'One of the most compelling and brilliantly researched exposes you'll ever read.' Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Smile or Die
Download or read book Autopsy of a Crime Lab written by Brandon L. Garrett and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book exposes the dangerously imperfect forensic evidence that we rely on for criminal convictions. "That's not my fingerprint, your honor," said the defendant, after FBI experts reported a "100-percent identification." The FBI was wrong. It is shocking how often they are. Autopsy of a Crime Lab is the first book to catalog the sources of error and the faulty science behind a range of well-known forensic evidence, from fingerprints and firearms to forensic algorithms. In this devastating forensic takedown, noted legal expert Brandon L. Garrett poses the questions that should be asked in courtrooms every day: Where are the studies that validate the basic premises of widely accepted techniques such as fingerprinting? How can experts testify with 100-percent certainty about a fingerprint, when there is no such thing as a 100 percent match? Where is the quality control at the crime scenes and in the laboratories? Should we so readily adopt powerful new technologies like facial recognition software and rapid DNA machines? And why have judges been so reluctant to consider the weaknesses of so many long-accepted methods? Taking us into the lives of the wrongfully convicted or nearly convicted, into crime labs rocked by scandal, and onto the front lines of promising reform efforts driven by professionals and researchers alike, Autopsy of a Crime Lab illustrates the persistence and perniciousness of shaky science and its well-meaning practitioners.
Download or read book Glimpses of Heaven written by Maria Sandberg and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-09-28 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reprint of the original, first published in 1857.
Download or read book Meditations of John Muir written by Chris Highland and published by Wilderness Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carry John Muir’s wisdom with you in this inspirational guide that features 60 of his most insightful quotes. As a patriarch of the American environmental movement, John Muir helped to give birth to the national park system, the Sierra Club, and a myriad of smaller groups devoted to saving rivers, redwoods, and wildlife. Yet, he is also a spiritual parent who leads us down unmarked trails of the spirit. By urging us to simply be present in the world around us, loving and honoring it as our garden home, his poetic insight liberates life. In Meditations of John Muir, editor Chris Highland pairs 60 Muir quotes with selections from other celebrated thinkers and spiritual texts. Take this pocket-size guide with you on backpacks, nature hikes, and camping trips. Let Muir’s words enrich your experience as you ponder the wilderness from riverbank, mountaintop, or as you relax beside your campfire. Inside you’ll find: 60 inspiring John Muir quotes Selections of text from other philosophical minds Short excerpts for convenient reading Muir’s exuberance for nature was the touchstone for his commitment to the earth and all of its creatures. Let him lead you along the ultimate adventure that treks every range of light. Then venture off on your own deertrails of the heart, harkening to his granite gospel that calls for you “to get as near to the heart of the world” as you can.
Download or read book Stories from the Bible written by Walter de la Mare and published by Rare Treasure Editions. This book was released on 2021-11-05T13:55:00Z with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of major Bible stories of the Old Testament, delightfully re-told in modern English, from the Garden of Eden to David and Goliath! Although geared towards the young, this book is a delight for all ages...
Download or read book All Night in the New Country written by Miriam Bird Greenberg and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. In this latest chapbook from Sixteen Rivers Press, Miriam Bird Greenberg takes us on a dark ride through a dystopian landscape, where the comforts of civilization and the consolations of art are few. "Each poem catalogs a truth both ravished and ravishing....I could not put the pages down." Camille Dungy"
