Download or read book The Name of the World written by Denis Johnson and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-03 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed author of Jesus' Son and Already Dead returns with a beautiful, haunting, and darkly comic novel. The Name of the World is a mesmerizing portrait of a professor at a Midwestern university who has been patient in his grief after an accident takes the lives of his wife and child and has permitted that grief to enlarge him. Michael Reed is living a posthumous life. In spite of outward appearances -- he holds a respectable university teaching position; he is an articulate and attractive addition to local social life -- he's a dead man walking. Nothing can touch Reed, nothing can move him, although he observes with a mordant clarity the lives whirling vigorously around him. Of his recent bereavement, nearly four years earlier, he observes, "I'm speaking as I'd speak of a change in the earth's climate, or the recent war." Facing the unwelcome end of his temporary stint at the university, Reed finds himself forced "to act like somebody who cares what happens to him. " Tentatively he begins to let himself make contact with a host of characters in this small academic town, souls who seem to have in common a tentativeness of their own. In this atmosphere characterized, as he says, "by cynicism, occasional brilliance, and small, polite terror," he manages, against all his expectations, to find people to light his way through his private labyrinth. Elegant and incisively observed, The Name of the World is Johnson at his best: poignant yet unsentimental, replete with the visionary imaginative detail for which his work is known. Here is a tour de force by one of the most astonishing writers at work today.
Download or read book The World s Greatest Name written by Charles Jubilee Rolls and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Village with My Name written by Scott Tong and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-11-17 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An “immensely readable” journey through modern Chinese history told through the experiences of the author’s extended family (Christian Science Monitor). When journalist Scott Tong moved to Shanghai, his assignment was to start the first full-time China bureau for “Marketplace,” the daily business and economics program on public radio stations across the US. But for Tong the move became much more: an opportunity to reconnect with members of his extended family who’d remained there after his parents fled the communists six decades prior. Uncovering their stories gave him a new way to understand modern China’s defining moments and its long, interrupted quest to go global. A Village with My Name offers a unique perspective on China’s transitions through the eyes of regular people who witnessed such epochal events as the toppling of the Qing monarchy, Japan’s occupation during WWII, exile of political prisoners to forced labor camps, mass death and famine during the Great Leap Forward, market reforms under Deng Xiaoping, and the dawn of the One Child Policy. Tong focuses on five members of his family, who each offer a specific window on a changing country: a rare American-educated girl born in the closing days of the Qing Dynasty, a pioneer exchange student, a toddler abandoned in wartime who later rides the wave of China’s global export boom, a young professional climbing the ladder at a multinational company, and an orphan (the author’s daughter) adopted in the middle of a baby-selling scandal fueled by foreign money. Through their stories, Tong shows us China anew, visiting former prison labor camps on the Tibetan plateau and rural outposts along the Yangtze, exploring the Shanghai of the 1930s, and touring factories across the mainland—providing a compelling and deeply personal take on how China became what it is today. “Vivid and readable . . . The book’s focus on ordinary people makes it refreshingly accessible.” —Financial Times “Tong tells his story with humor, a little snark, [and] lots of love . . . Highly recommended, especially for those interested in Chinese history and family journeys.” —Library Journal (starred review)
Download or read book Inspired Baby Names from Around the World written by Neala Shane and published by New World Library. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 714 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thousands of Names and the Blessings They Can Impart This unique guide includes 6,000-plus names from all corners of the globe, and each entry illuminates the name’s distinctive spiritual, historical, and cultural background — its poetry. Names, from the traditional to the newly coined, are fully explained. Pronunciation guide, origin, alternate spellings, and meaning are enhanced by the affirmation carefully chosen for each name. Lists of names by meaning, names by ethnicity, and most popular names by decade provide easy reference. Whether your aim is to honor ancestors, capture a child’s essence, or convey parental hopes, Inspired Baby Names from Around the World will help you greet and bless your new baby with heartfelt meaning.
Download or read book Can You Guess My Name written by and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2002 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description
Download or read book Their Name Is Today written by Johann Christoph Arnold and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There's hope for childhood. Despite a perfect storm of hostile forces that are robbing children of a healthy childhood, courageous parents and teachers who know what's best for children are turning the tide. Johann Christoph Arnold, whose books on education, parenting, and relationships have helped more than a million readers through life's challenges, draws on the stories and voices of parents and educators on the ground, and a wealth of personal experience. He surveys the drastic changes in the lives of children, but also the groundswell of grassroots advocacy and action that he believes will lead to the triumph of common sense and time-tested wisdom. Arnold takes on technology, standardized testing, overstimulation, academic pressure, marketing to children, over-diagnosis and much more, calling on everyone who loves children to combat these threats to childhood and find creative ways to help children flourish. Every parent, teacher, and childcare provider has the power to make a difference, by giving children time to play, access to nature, and personal attention, and most of all, by defending their right to remain children.
Download or read book The World Book Encyclopedia written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An encyclopedia designed especially to meet the needs of elementary, junior high, and senior high school students.
Download or read book The World According to Garp written by John Irving and published by Random House Digital, Inc.. This book was released on 1978 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: T.S. Garp, a man with high ambitions for an artistic career and with obsessive devotion to his wife and children, and Jenny Fields, his famous feminist mother, find their lives surrounded by an assortment of people including teachers, whores, and radicals
Download or read book The Fourth Part of the World written by Toby Lester and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-11-03 with total page 726 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Old maps lead you to strange and unexpected places, and none does so more ineluctably than the subject of this book: the giant, beguiling Waldseemüller world map of 1507.” So begins this remarkable story of the map that gave America its name. For millennia Europeans believed that the world consisted of three parts: Europe, Africa, and Asia. They drew the three continents in countless shapes and sizes on their maps, but occasionally they hinted at the existence of a "fourth part of the world," a mysterious, inaccessible place, separated from the rest by a vast expanse of ocean. It was a land of myth—until 1507, that is, when Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann, two obscure scholars working in the mountains of eastern France, made it real. Columbus had died the year before convinced that he had sailed to Asia, but Waldseemüller and Ringmann, after reading about the Atlantic discoveries of Columbus’s contemporary Amerigo Vespucci, came to a startling conclusion: Vespucci had reached the fourth part of the world. To celebrate his achievement, Waldseemüller and Ringmann printed a huge map, for the first time showing the New World surrounded by water and distinct from Asia, and in Vespucci’s honor they gave this New World a name: America. The Fourth Part of the World is the story behind that map, a thrilling saga of geographical and intellectual exploration, full of outsize thinkers and voyages. Taking a kaleidoscopic approach, Toby Lester traces the origins of our modern worldview. His narrative sweeps across continents and centuries, zeroing in on different portions of the map to reveal strands of ancient legend, Biblical prophecy, classical learning, medieval exploration, imperial ambitions, and more. In Lester’s telling the map comes alive: Marco Polo and the early Christian missionaries trek across Central Asia and China; Europe’s early humanists travel to monastic libraries to recover ancient texts; Portuguese merchants round up the first West African slaves; Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci make their epic voyages of discovery; and finally, vitally, Nicholas Copernicus makes an appearance, deducing from the new geography shown on the Waldseemüller map that the earth could not lie at the center of the cosmos. The map literally altered humanity’s worldview. One thousand copies of the map were printed, yet only one remains. Discovered accidentally in 1901 in the library of a German castle it was bought in 2003 for the unprecedented sum of $10 million by the Library of Congress, where it is now on permanent public display. Lavishly illustrated with rare maps and diagrams, The Fourth Part of the World is the story of that map: the dazzling story of the geographical and intellectual journeys that have helped us decipher our world.
Download or read book Sophie s World written by Jostein Gaarder and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-03-20 with total page 735 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.
Download or read book The Savior s Champion written by Jenna Moreci and published by . This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hoping to save his family, one man enters his realm's most glorious tournament and finds himself in the middle of a political chess game, unthinkable bloodshed, and an unexpected romance with a woman he's not supposed to want.
Download or read book No Other Name written by Paul F. Knitter and published by Orbis Books. This book was released on 1985-01-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Name of the Rose written by Umberto Eco and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1327, finding his sensitive mission at an Italian abbey further complicated by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William of Baskerville turns detective.
Download or read book News of the World written by Paulette Jiles and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soon to be a Major Motion Picture National Book Award Finalist—Fiction In the aftermath of the Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this exquisitely rendered, morally complex, multilayered novel of historical fiction from the author of Enemy Women that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust. In the wake of the Civil War, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings from newspapers to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his rootless, solitary existence. In Wichita Falls, he is offered a $50 gold piece to deliver a young orphan to her relatives in San Antonio. Four years earlier, a band of Kiowa raiders killed Johanna’s parents and sister; sparing the little girl, they raised her as one of their own. Recently rescued by the U.S. army, the ten-year-old has once again been torn away from the only home she knows. Their 400-mile journey south through unsettled territory and unforgiving terrain proves difficult and at times dangerous. Johanna has forgotten the English language, tries to escape at every opportunity, throws away her shoes, and refuses to act “civilized.” Yet as the miles pass, the two lonely survivors tentatively begin to trust each other, forming a bond that marks the difference between life and death in this treacherous land. Arriving in San Antonio, the reunion is neither happy nor welcome. The captain must hand Johanna over to an aunt and uncle she does not remember—strangers who regard her as an unwanted burden. A respectable man, Captain Kidd is faced with a terrible choice: abandon the girl to her fate or become—in the eyes of the law—a kidnapper himself.
Download or read book Revelation written by and published by Canongate Books. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The final book of the Bible, Revelation prophesies the ultimate judgement of mankind in a series of allegorical visions, grisly images and numerological predictions. According to these, empires will fall, the "Beast" will be destroyed and Christ will rule a new Jerusalem. With an introduction by Will Self.
Download or read book Bobby s World written by Ronald Kidd and published by Andrews McMeel Pub. This book was released on 1995 with total page 14 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduces Bobby and his mother, father, Uncle Ted, brother Derek, and sister Kelly
Download or read book The Brilliant Book of Baby Names What s best what s hot and what s not written by Pamela Redmond Satran and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2010-06-10 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the authors of Cool Names for Babies, and with over 50,000 hugely imaginative entries from around the world, this is the ultimate book of baby names.