Download or read book The Story of the Madman written by Mongo Beti and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely acclaimed when first published in French in 1994, Mongo Beti's tenth novel, L'histoire du fou, continues the author's humorous yet fierce criticism of the colonial system in Africa and its legacy of governmental corruption. Translated here as The Story of the Madman, the novel gives the English-speaking world Beti's comic satire of the fictional Chief Zoaételeu and his favorite sons Zoaétoa and Narcisse. In a modern fable that Beti uses to illustrate the problems of a people's disintegrating values in a postcolonial state, Chief Zoaételeu, a puppet under two dictatorial regimes, is swept into the frontline of politics, where his fortunes unravel. Along with his caustic portrayal of failed government--clearly a reflection of his native Cameroon--Beti's realism provides an intriguing view of the struggle for balance between traditional life and imminent change in African culture.
Download or read book The Madman of Piney Woods written by Christopher Paul Curtis and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this poignant companion to Elijah of Buxton, two boys united by tragedy find friendship and adventure in the Canadian woods. Benji and Red couldn’t be more different. They aren’t friends. They don’t even live in the same town. But their fates are entwined. A chance meeting leads the boys to discover that they have more in common than meets the eye. Both of them have encountered a strange presence in the forest, watching them, tracking them. Could the Madman of Piney Woods be real? In a tale brimming with intrigue and adventure, Christopher Paul Curtis returns to the vibrant world he brought to life in Elijah of Buxton. Here is another novel that will break your heart—and expand it, too. This critically acclaimed story by National Book Award finalist Christopher Paul Curtis joins the Scholastic Gold line, which features award-winning and beloved novels. Includes extra bonus content! Praise for The Madman of Piney Woods “Humor and tragedy are often intertwined, and readers will find themselves sobbing and chuckling, sometimes in the same scene.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review “A delight, featuring the author’s obvious love for his characters, his skillful use of sentiment, and his often hyperbolic humor.” —Booklist, Starred Review “Heady stuff. Funny stuff. Smart stuff. Good stuff. Better get your hands on this stuff.” —School Library Journal “So suspenseful . . . Curtis deftly makes what might have been simply heart-rending hopeful and redeeming instead . . . A thrill ride of a plot.” —TheNew York Times
Download or read book The Life of the Madman of written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Life of the Madman of Ü is a complete English translation of the biography of the Tibetan Buddhist ascetic Künga Zangpo (1458-1532), who was renowned for adopting an extreme and unique form of tantric asceticism.
Download or read book The Divine Madman written by Brag-phug Dge-bśes Dge-ʼdun-rin-chen and published by Pilgrims Book House. This book was released on 2000 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The secret biography of one of the Tibet's foremost saints, The Buddha Drukpa Kunley who is recognised as an incarnation of the great Mahasiddha, Saraha
Download or read book Madman in the Woods written by Jamie Gehring and published by Diversion Books. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One woman’s haunting sixteen-year account of her youth when she and her family lived closer than anyone to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. As a child in Lincoln, Montana, Jamie Gehring and her family shared their land, their home, and their dinner table with a hermit with a penchant for murder. But they had no idea that the odd recluse living in the adjacent cabin was anything more than a disheveled man who brought young Jamie painted rocks as gifts. Ted was simply Ted, and erratic behavior, surprise visits, and chilling events while she was riding horses or helping her dad at his sawmill were dismissed because he was “just the odd hermit.” In fact, he was much more—Ted eluded the FBI for seventeen years while mailing explosives to strangers, earning the infamous title of Unabomber. In Gehring’s investigative quest twenty-five years later to reclaim a piece of her childhood and to answer the questions, why, how, she recalls what were once innocent memories and odd circumstances that become less puzzling in hindsight. The innocence of her youth robbed, Gehring needed to reconcile her lived experience with the evil that hid in plain sight. In this book, through years of research probing Ted’s personal history, his writings, his secret coded crime journals, her own correspondence with him in his Supermax prison cell, plus interviews with others close to Kaczynski, Gehring unearths the complexity, mystery, and tragedy of her childhood with the madman in the woods. And she discovers a shocking revelation—she and her family were in Kaczynski’s crosshairs. A work of intricately braided research, journalism, and personal memories, this book is a chilling response to the question: Do you really know your neighbor? Praise for Madman in the Woods “Combining the observations of a one-time close neighbor with extensive research and empathy for the many lives affected, Jamie Gehring’s book might well be the best attempt yet to understand the strange life and mind of my brother, Theodore J. Kaczynski.” —David Kaczynski,?author of?Every Last Tie: The Story of the Unabomber and His Family “A captivating look at Ted Kaczynski—the Unabomber—from a perspective that no one else on the planet has.?It is insightful, unique, and fascinating!? A must read for all true crime fans and anyone who loves to know the real story behind the story.” —Jim Clemente, retired FBI supervisory special agent/profiler and writer/producer of the Audible Original Series Where the Devil Belongs
Download or read book The Yogin and the Madman written by Andrew Quintman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tibetan biographers began writing Jetsun Milarepa's (1052–1135) life story shortly after his death, initiating a literary tradition that turned the poet and saint into a model of virtuosic Buddhist practice throughout the Himalayan world. Andrew Quintman traces this history and its innovations in narrative and aesthetic representation across four centuries, culminating in a detailed analysis of the genre's most famous example, composed in 1488 by Tsangnyön Heruka, or the "Madman of Western Tibet." Quintman imagines these works as a kind of physical body supplanting the yogin's corporeal relics.
Download or read book Tales of the Madman Underground written by John Barnes and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-06-25 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wednesday, September 5, 1973: The first day of Karl Shoemaker's senior year in stifling Lightsburg, Ohio. For years, Karl's been part of what he calls "the Madman Underground" - a group of kids forced (for no apparent reason) to attend group therapy during school hours. Karl has decided that senior year is going to be different. He is going to get out of the Madman Underground for good. He is going to act - and be - Normal. But Normal, of course, is relative. Karl has five after-school jobs, one dead father, one seriously unhinged drunk mother . . . and a huge attitude. Welcome to a gritty, uncensored rollercoaster ride, narrated by the singular Karl Shoemaker.
Download or read book Madman written by Tracy Groot and published by NavPress. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If there is a way into madness, logic says there is a way out. Logic says. Tallis, a philosopher’s servant, is sent to a Greek academy in Palestine only to discover that it has silently, ominously, disappeared. No one will tell him what happened, but he learns what has become of four of its scholars. One was murdered. One committed suicide. One worships in the temple of Dionysus. And one . . . one is a madman. From Christy Award–winning author Tracy Groot comes a tale of mystery, horror, and hope in the midst of unimaginable darkness: the story behind the Gerasene demoniac of the Gospels of Mark and Luke.
Download or read book The Holy Madmen of Tibet written by David M. DiValerio and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the past millennium, certain Tibetan Buddhist yogins have taken on profoundly norm-overturning modes of dress and behavior, including draping themselves in human remains, consuming filth, provoking others to violence, and even performing sacrilege. They became known far and wide as "madmen" (smyon pa, pronounced nyönpa), achieving a degree of saintliness in the process. This book offers the first comprehensive study of Tibet's "holy madmen" drawing on their biographies and writings, as well as tantric commentaries, later histories, oral traditions, and more. Much of The Holy Madmen of Tibet is dedicated to examining the lives and legacies of the three most famous "holy madmen" who were all of the Kagyü sect: the Madman of Tsang (author of The Life of Milarepa), the Madman of Ü, and Drukpa Künlé, Madman of the Drukpa Kagyü. Each born in the 1450s, they rose to prominence during a period of civil war and of great shifts in Tibet's religious culture. By focusing on literature written by and about the "holy madmen" and on the yogins' relationships with their public, this book offers in-depth looks at the narrative and social processes out of which sainthood arises, and at the role biographical literature can play in the formation of sectarian identities. By showing how understandings of the "madmen" have changed over time, this study allows for new insights into current notions of "crazy wisdom." In the end, the "holy madmen" are seen as self-aware and purposeful individuals who were anything but insane.
Download or read book The Mad Man written by Samuel R. Delany and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A philosophy student’s research draws him into the sexual underground of 1980s and early nineties New York John Marr is surprised he doesn’t have AIDS. He has been having near-daily sexual encounters with strange men since before the dawn of HIV, but he remains healthy. His initiation began in the bathroom of the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, and since then he has found himself at home in the darkest corners of Manhattan’s culture of anonymous gay sex. During the day, it is a different story, as Marr works on his graduate thesis—an analysis of the work of a brilliant 1970s philosopher who died mysteriously in one of the gay bars of Hell’s Kitchen. As his research and his sex life begin to converge, Marr senses that if AIDS doesn’t get him, something darker will. The Mad Man, which the author dubbed a “pornotopic fantasy,” is more than a powerful work of philosophical erotica; it is a snapshot of a vanished moment in New York City’s gay history, when fear and lust commingled in a single powerful force.
Download or read book The Madman of Freedom Square written by Hassan Blasim and published by Comma Press. This book was released on 2013-12-03 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **Long-Listed for the 2010 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize** From hostage-video makers in Baghdad, to human trafficking in the forests of Serbia, institutionalised paranoia in the Saddam years, to the nightmares of an exile trying to embrace a new life in Amsterdam... Blasim’s stories present an uncompromising view of the West's relationship with Iraq, spanning over twenty years and taking in everything from the Iran-Iraq War through to the Occupation, as well as offering a haunting critique of the post-war refugee experience. Blending allegory with historical realism, and subverting readers’ expectations in an unflinching comedy of the macabre, these stories manage to be both phantasmagoric and shockingly real, light in touch yet steeped in personal nightmare. For all their despair and darkness, though, what lingers more than the haunting images of war, or the insanity of those who would benefit from it, is the spirit of defiance, the indefatigable courage of those few characters keeping faith with what remains of human intelligence. Together these stories represent the first major literary work about the war from an Iraqi perspective. 'Perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive...' – The Guardian, 12 Jun 10.
Download or read book The Madman s Tale written by John Katzenbach and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2004-06-15 with total page 687 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It’s been twenty years since Western State Hospital was closed down and the last of its inmates reintegrated into society. Francis Petrel was barely out of his teens when his family committed him to the asylum, after his erratic behavior culminated in a terrifying outburst. Now middle-aged, he leads an aimless, solitary life housed in a cheap apartment, periodically tended to by his sisters, and perpetually medicated to quiet the chorus of voices in his head. But a reunion on the grounds of the shuttered institution stirs something deep in Francis’s troubled mind: dark memories he thought he had laid to rest, about the grisly events that led to Western State Hospital’s demise. It begins in 1979, when twenty-one-year-old Petrel descends into the state-run purgatory of an overcrowded, understaffed Massachusetts mental hospital. Surrounded by inmates roaming the halls like drugged zombies and raving behind locked doors, well-meaning orderlies, jaded nurses, and patronizing doctors, Francis finds friendship with a motley assortment of fellow patients: a would-be Napoleon, a wise ex-firefighter, and a man obsessed with battling imagined devils. But there’s nothing imaginary about the young nurse found sexually assaulted and brutally murdered late one night after lights-out. The police suspect an inmate, while patients whisper about visions of a white-shrouded “angel.” But the striking and mysterious prosecuting attorney who arrives to investigate has her own chilling theory—about the grim, telltale “signature” left on the victim’s body, a string of unsolved sex killings, and a very real devil who, by chance or design, has come to turn a madhouse into a slaughterhouse. Now, with the past creeping back to haunt his thoughts, and nothing but a pencil and the bare walls of his bleak apartment, Francis surrenders to the overwhelming need to tell the story of those nightmarish days. But because the crime was never solved, it’s a story doomed to remain unfinished. Until, like Francis’s long-buried recollections, the killer resurfaces . . . with a vengeance. A tour de force narrative journey through the eerily unpredictable mind of an utterly unusual hero, The Madman’s Tale will keep even the most astute thriller reader uncertain, unnerved, and unable to resist the tantalizing twists and turns of this fiendishly suspenseful shadow show.
Download or read book The Madman and the Assassin written by Scott Martelle and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As thoroughly examined as the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth have been, virtually no attention has been paid to the life of the Union cavalryman who killed Booth, an odd character named Boston Corbett. The killing of Booth made Corbett an instant celebrity who became the object of fascination and of derision. Corbett was an English immigrant, a hatter by trade, who was likely poisoned by mercury. A devout Christian, he castrated himself so that his sexual urges would not distract him from serving God, which he did as a street evangelist and preacher. He was one of the first volunteers to join the US Army in the first days of the Civil War, a path that would in time land him in the notorious Andersonville prison camp. Eventually released in a prisoner exchange, he would end up in the squadron that cornered Booth in Virginia. The Madman and the Assassin is the first full-length biography of Boston Corbett, a man who was something of a prototypical modern American, thrust into the spotlight during a national news event. His story also encompasses tragedy—his wife died when he was young, and he struggled with poverty and his own mental health—as it weaves through some of the biggest events in nineteenth century America. Scott Martelle is a professional journalist and the author of The Admiral and the Ambassador, and Detroit: A Biography, and is an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times.
Download or read book The Poor Christ of Bomba written by Mongo Beti and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-02-01 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning author Mongo Beti presents The Poor Christ of Bomba, a cutting satirical critique on the role of Catholic missionaries and French colonialism in 1930s Cameroon. A revolutionary novel in its time. In the small village of Bomba, a French missionary priest is instructed to build a parish for its residents. Father Drumont has one important task; to save the village from heresy by preparing its girls for Christian marriage. A servant in Father Drumont's house, a young boy named Denis is reliant on the priest's generosity after the death of his mother. In the eyes of the Catholic church, Denis is the perfect example of the African heathen saved by Christianity – but the reality of what happens behind closed doors in much more sinister. 'One of the foremost African writers of the independence generation.' Guardian
Download or read book The Madman s Middle Way written by Donald S. Lopez Jr. and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-05-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gendun Chopel is considered the most important Tibetan intellectual of the twentieth century. His life spanned the two defining moments in modern Tibetan history: the entry into Lhasa by British troops in 1904 and by Chinese troops in 1951. Recognized as an incarnate lama while he was a child, Gendun Chopel excelled in the traditional monastic curriculum and went on to become expert in fields as diverse as philosophy, history, linguistics, geography, and tantric Buddhism. Near the end of his life, before he was persecuted and imprisoned by the government of the young Dalai Lama, he would dictate the Adornment for Nagarjuna’s Thought, a work on Madhyamaka, or “Middle Way,” philosophy. It sparked controversy immediately upon its publication and continues to do so today. The Madman’s Middle Way presents the first English translation of this major Tibetan Buddhist work, accompanied by an essay on Gendun Chopel’s life liberally interspersed with passages from his writings. Donald S. Lopez Jr. also provides a commentary that sheds light on the doctrinal context of the Adornment and summarizes its key arguments. Ultimately, Lopez examines the long-standing debate over whether Gendun Chopel in fact is the author of the Adornment; the heated critical response to the work by Tibetan monks of the Dalai Lama’s sect; and what the Adornment tells us about Tibetan Buddhism’s encounter with modernity. The result is an insightful glimpse into a provocative and enigmatic workthatwill be of great interest to anyone seriously interested in Buddhism or Asian religions.
Download or read book Diary of a Madman written by Brad "Scarface" Jordan and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2015-04-21 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Rolling Stone’s Best Music Books of 2015. “As complete a self-portrait of the intensely private MC that we’re ever likely to get.” —Houston Press From Geto Boys legend and renowned storyteller Scarface, comes a passionate memoir about how hip-hop changed the life of a kid from the south side of Houston, and how he rose to the top—and ushered in a new generation of rap dominance. Scarface is the celebrated rapper whose hits include “On My Block,” “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” and “Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta” (made famous in the cult film Office Space). The former president of Def Jam South, he’s collaborated with everyone from Kanye West, Ice Cube and Nas, and had many solo hits such as “Guess Who’s Back” feat. Jay-Z and “Smile” feat. Tupac. But before that, he was a kid from Houston in love with rock-and-roll, listening to AC/DC and KISS. In Diary of a Madman, Scarface shares how his world changed when he heard Run DMC for the first time; how he dropped out of school in the ninth grade and started selling crack; and how he began rapping as the new form of music made its way out of New York and across the country. It is the account of his rise to the heights of the rap world, as well as his battles with his own demons and depression. Passionately exploring and explaining the roots and influences of rap culture, Diary of a Madman is the story of hip-hop—the music, the business, the streets, and life on the south side Houston, Texas. “A remarkable personal memoir.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
Download or read book Memoirs of a Madman written by Gustave Flaubert and published by Hesperus Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A captivating and evocative work, Memoirs of a Madman is one of Flaubert's earliest writings, and forms the basis for his highly renowned L'Education Sentimentale. As a young man looks back on the years that have brought him to "madness," he recalls the innocence of his boyhood and his fond belief that he was blessed with a mind of genius. Yet, painfully, wretchedly, he also recounts his all-too-sudden entry into the adult world. For the day he caught sight of a beautiful woman by the sea marked the end of his flamboyant philosophizing, and the beginning of a tragic coming of age.
