Download or read book The Romance of Reality written by Bobby Azarian and published by BenBella Books. This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do we exist? For centuries, this question was the sole province of religion and philosophy. But now science is ready to take a seat at the table. According to the prevailing scientific paradigm, the universe tends toward randomness; it functions according to laws without purpose, and the emergence of life is an accident devoid of meaning. But this bleak interpretation of nature is currently being challenged by cutting-edge findings at the intersection of physics, biology, neuroscience, and information theory—generally referred to as “complexity science.” Thanks to a new understanding of evolution, as well as recent advances in our understanding of the phenomenon known as emergence, a new cosmic narrative is taking shape: Nature’s simplest “parts” come together to form ever-greater “wholes” in a process that has no end in sight. In The Romance of Reality, cognitive neuroscientist Bobby Azarian explains the science behind this new view of reality and explores what it means for all of us. In engaging, accessible prose, Azarian outlines the fundamental misunderstanding of thermodynamics at the heart of the old assumptions about the universe’s evolution, and shows us the evidence that suggests that the universe is a “self-organizing” system, one that is moving toward increasing complexity and awareness. Cosmologist and science communicator Carl Sagan once said of humanity that “we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” The Romance of Reality shows that this poetic statement in fact rests on a scientific foundation and gives us a new way to know the cosmos, along with a riveting vision of life that imbues existence with meaning—nothing supernatural required.

Download or read book T R written by H. W. Brands and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author, an acclaimed biography of President Teddy Roosevelt Lauded as "a rip-roaring life" (Wall Street Journal), TR is a magisterial biography of Theodore Roosevelt by bestselling author H.W. Brands. In his time, there was no more popular national figure than Roosevelt. It was not just the energy he brought to every political office he held or his unshakable moral convictions that made him so popular, or even his status as a bonafide war hero. Most important, Theodore Roosevelt was loved by the people because this scion of a privileged New York family loved America and Americans. And yet, according to Brands, if we look at the private Roosevelt without blinders, we see a man whose great public strengths hid enormous personal deficiencies; he was uncompromising, self-involved, and a highly imperfect brother, husband, and father. Beautifully written, and powerfully moved by its subject, TR is the classic biography of one of America's greatest and most complex leaders.

Download or read book The Romance of Real Life written by Steven Watts and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1994. The Romance of Real Life aims to reconstruct historically the life and writings of Charles Brockden Brown in terms of their cultural connection. Watts examines in detail Brown's early and later writings. By looking at these often-neglected works more closely, he offers a new perspective on the well-known novels from the late 1790s. Watts's synthetic look at genre as well as chronology reveals broader connections between Brown's literature and American society and culture in the decades of the early republic. Furthermore, Watts situates Brown's writings in terms of the interplay of text, context, and the self, with each factor recognized as mutually shaping the others. The Romance of Real Life incorporates sensitivity to the "social history of ideas," in which both the form and content of language remain rooted in the material experience of real life.

Download or read book Falling in Love with Jesus written by Dee Brestin and published by Thomas Nelson. This book was released on 2002-01-19 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Authors Dee Brestin and Kathy Troccoli introduce readers to the ultimate love relationship of all time: a relationship with Jesus Christ. Using humor, contemporary love songs, real-life stories, and solid Biblical teaching, Dee and Kathy help women discover a life-changing intimacy with Jesus. No matter your age or marital status, you are His bride, the object of His affection. The secret to an abundant life lies not in ten steps, but in developing a deep love relationship with Jesus, abandoning yourself to the greatest romance of your life!

Download or read book Roosevelt s Ranches written by Rolf Sletten and published by . This book was released on 2015-06-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Romance By The Book written by Sarah Ready and published by W. W. Crown. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Book-loving, librarian Jessie has loved Gavin Williams for practically her whole life. So when a psychic predicts that Gavin is Jessie's one fated soul mate, she's ecstatic. There's just one itty bitty little problem. Gavin's engaged to marry another woman. What's a book lover to do? Easy. Check out dozens of romance books, study the (totally realistic) way characters fall in love, and make a foolproof plan on how to win her soul mate (in one week). Meet cute? Check. Dance under the stars? Check. Kiss in the rain? Check. Romance books don't lie - it'll all go perfectly. Except, there's another problem. Gavin's twin brother: William Williams IV. Jessie has hated William for as long as she's loved his brother. William is grump to Jessie's sunshine, stand-offish to her extrovert, cold to her warm. And when William learns of Jessie's plan to derail his brother's engagement he swears that he'll do anything to stop her. But after William and Jessie (unwillingly) share a dance...a romantic dinner...a kiss...Jessie starts to wonder, is William actually her soul mate? Or is this just another one of his games? She's can't tell, because this romance definitely isn't going by the book. Romance by the Book is Book 3 in Sarah Ready's Soul Mates in Romeo Romance Series.

Download or read book Marley Me written by John Grogan and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The heartwarming and unforgettable story of a family and the wondrously neurotic dog who taught them what really matters in life. Now with photos and new material. Is it possible for humans to discover the key to happiness through a bigger-than-life, bad-boy dog? Just ask the Grogans. John and Jenny were just beginning their life together. They were young and in love, with not a care in the world. Then they brought home Marley, a wiggly yellow furball of a puppy. Life would never be the same. Marley grew into a barreling, ninety-seven-pound streamroller of a Labrador retriever. He crashed through screen doors, gouged through drywall, and stole women's undergarments. Obedience school did no good -- Marley was expelled. But just as Marley joyfully refused any limits on his behavior, his love and loyalty were boundless, too. Marley remained a model of devotion, even when his family was at its wit's end. Unconditional love, they would learn, comes in many forms. Marley & Me is John Grogan's funny, unforgettable tribute to this wonderful, wildly neurotic Lab and the meaning he brought to their lives.

Download or read book In Love written by Amy Bloom and published by Random House. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A powerful memoir of a love that leads two people to find a courageous way to part—and a woman’s struggle to go forward in the face of loss—that “enriches the reader’s life with urgency and gratitude” (The Washington Post) “A pleasure to read . . . Rarely has a memoir about death been so full of life. . . . Bloom has a talent for mixing the prosaic and profound, the slapstick and the serious.”—USA Today ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR Amy Bloom began to notice changes in her husband, Brian: He retired early from a new job he loved; he withdrew from close friendships; he talked mostly about the past. Suddenly, it seemed there was a glass wall between them, and their long walks and talks stopped. Their world was altered forever when an MRI confirmed what they could no longer ignore: Brian had Alzheimer’s disease. Forced to confront the truth of the diagnosis and its impact on the future he had envisioned, Brian was determined to die on his feet, not live on his knees. Supporting each other in their last journey together, Brian and Amy made the unimaginably difficult and painful decision to go to Dignitas, an organization based in Switzerland that empowers a person to end their own life with dignity and peace. In this heartbreaking and surprising memoir, Bloom sheds light on a part of life we so often shy away from discussing—its ending. Written in Bloom’s captivating, insightful voice and with her trademark wit and candor, In Love is an unforgettable portrait of a beautiful marriage, and a boundary-defying love.

Download or read book Reading the Romance written by Janice A. Radway and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-11-18 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1984, Reading the Romance challenges popular (and often demeaning) myths about why romantic fiction, one of publishing's most lucrative categories, captivates millions of women readers. Among those who have disparaged romance reading are feminists, literary critics, and theorists of mass culture. They claim that romances enforce the woman reader's dependence on men and acceptance of the repressive ideology purveyed by popular culture. Radway questions such claims, arguing that critical attention "must shift from the text itself, taken in isolation, to the complex social event of reading." She examines that event, from the complicated business of publishing and distribution to the individual reader's engagement with the text. Radway's provocative approach combines reader-response criticism with anthropology and feminist psychology. Asking readers themselves to explore their reading motives, habits, and rewards, she conducted interviews in a midwestern town with forty-two romance readers whom she met through Dorothy Evans, a chain bookstore employee who has earned a reputation as an expert on romantic fiction. Evans defends her customers' choice of entertainment; reading romances, she tells Radway, is no more harmful than watching sports on television. "We read books so we won't cry" is the poignant explanation one woman offers for her reading habit. Indeed, Radway found that while the women she studied devote themselves to nurturing their families, these wives and mothers receive insufficient devotion or nurturance in return. In romances the women find not only escape from the demanding and often tiresome routines of their lives but also a hero who supplies the tenderness and admiring attention that they have learned not to expect. The heroines admired by Radway's group defy the expected stereotypes; they are strong, independent, and intelligent. That such characters often find themselves to be victims of male aggression and almost always resign themselves to accepting conventional roles in life has less to do, Radway argues, with the women readers' fantasies and choices than with their need to deal with a fear of masculine dominance. These romance readers resent not only the limited choices in their own lives but the patronizing atitude that men especially express toward their reading tastes. In fact, women read romances both to protest and to escape temporarily the narrowly defined role prescribed for them by a patriarchal culture. Paradoxically, the books that they read make conventional roles for women seem desirable. It is this complex relationship between culture, text, and woman reader that Radway urges feminists to address. Romance readers, she argues, should be encouraged to deliver their protests in the arena of actual social relations rather than to act them out in the solitude of the imagination. In a new introduction, Janice Radway places the book within the context of current scholarship and offers both an explanation and critique of the study's limitations.

Download or read book The Romantic Conception of Life written by Robert J. Richards and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-04-06 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one." Friedrich Schlegel's words perfectly capture the project of the German Romantics, who believed that the aesthetic approaches of art and literature could reveal patterns and meaning in nature that couldn't be uncovered through rationalistic philosophy and science alone. In this wide-ranging work, Robert J. Richards shows how the Romantic conception of the world influenced (and was influenced by) both the lives of the people who held it and the development of nineteenth-century science. Integrating Romantic literature, science, and philosophy with an intimate knowledge of the individuals involved—from Goethe and the brothers Schlegel to Humboldt and Friedrich and Caroline Schelling—Richards demonstrates how their tempestuous lives shaped their ideas as profoundly as their intellectual and cultural heritage. He focuses especially on how Romantic concepts of the self, as well as aesthetic and moral considerations—all tempered by personal relationships—altered scientific representations of nature. Although historians have long considered Romanticism at best a minor tributary to scientific thought, Richards moves it to the center of the main currents of nineteenth-century biology, culminating in the conception of nature that underlies Darwin's evolutionary theory. Uniting the personal and poetic aspects of philosophy and science in a way that the German Romantics themselves would have honored, The Romantic Conception of Life alters how we look at Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology.

Download or read book A Little Life written by Hanya Yanagihara and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-01-26 with total page 833 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. Look for Hanya Yanagihara’s latest bestselling novel, To Paradise.

Download or read book The Night of Your Life written by Lydia Sharp and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He's having the worst prom ever... over and over again. Does a perfect prom night exist? JJ's about to find out. All year, JJ's been looking forward to going to prom with his best friend, Lucy. It will be their last hurrah before graduation -- a perfect night where all their friends will relax, have fun together, and celebrate making it through high school. But nothing goes according to plan. When a near car crash derails JJ before he even gets to prom, a potential new romance surfaces, and Lucy can't figure out what happened to him, things spiral out of control. The best night of their lives quickly turns into the worst. That is... until JJ wakes up the next day only to find that it's prom night all over again. At first, JJ thinks he's lucky to have the chance to get innumerable chances at perfecting the night of his life. But each day ends badly for him and Lucy, no matter what he does. Can he find a way to escape the time loop and move into the future with the girl he loves? In the end, JJ might not get the prom he wanted, but he may well get the prom he needed...

Download or read book Get a Life Chloe Brown written by Talia Hibbert and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Absolutely charming... a flawless balance of humor, heat, sweetness, and depth, and I loved every page.” – Helen Hoang, USA Today bestselling author of The Bride Test USA TODAY BESTSELLER A witty, hilarious romantic comedy about a woman who’s tired of being “boring” and recruits her mysterious, sexy neighbor to help her experience new things—perfect for fans of Sally Thorne, Jasmine Guillory, and Helen Hoang! Chloe Brown is a chronically ill computer geek with a goal, a plan, and a list. After almost—but not quite—dying, she’s come up with seven directives to help her “Get a Life”, and she’s already completed the first: finally moving out of her glamorous family’s mansion. The next items? Enjoy a drunken night out. Ride a motorcycle. Go camping. Have meaningless but thoroughly enjoyable sex. Travel the world with nothing but hand luggage. And... do something bad. But it’s not easy being bad, even when you’ve written step-by-step guidelines on how to do it correctly. What Chloe needs is a teacher, and she knows just the man for the job. Redford ‘Red’ Morgan is a handyman with tattoos, a motorcycle, and more sex appeal than ten-thousand Hollywood heartthrobs. He’s also an artist who paints at night and hides his work in the light of day, which Chloe knows because she spies on him occasionally. Just the teeniest, tiniest bit. But when she enlists Red in her mission to rebel, she learns things about him that no spy session could teach her. Like why he clearly resents Chloe’s wealthy background. And why he never shows his art to anyone. And what really lies beneath his rough exterior… "This is an extraordinary book, full of love, generosity, kindness and sharp humor." — The New York Times Book Review *Featured on the TODAY Show! Named a Best Romance of 2019 by Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Apple, and Amazon, and Best of November from Essence, Woman's Day, Marie Claire, Buzzfeed, Popsugar, Bustle, Bookish, Bookpage, Entertainment Weekly, and Washington Post*

Download or read book Life Among the Pirates written by David Cordingly and published by Little Brown. This book was released on 2000 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What were pirates really like? How much, if any, of the piratical stereotype - of a dashingly handsome man with an eye-patch, peg-leg and a parrot on his shoulder - is based on the documented fact. In this revealing and highly original study David Cordingly sets out to discover the truth behind the piracy myth, exploring its enduring and extraordinary appeal, and answering such questions as: why did men become pirates? Were there any women pirates? How much money did they make from plundering and looting? And were pirates really dashing highwaymen of the Seven Seas or just vicious cut-throats and robbers? From Long John Silver to Henry Morgan, Robert Louis Stevenson to J.M. Barrie, LIFE AMONG THE PIRATES examines all the heavyweights of history and literature and presents the essential survey of this fascinating phenomenon.

Download or read book Under the Black Flag written by David Cordingly and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-02-06 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This is the most authoritative and highly literate account of these pernicious people that I have ever read.”—Patrick O'Brian “[A] wonderfully entertaining history of pirates and piracy . . . a rip-roaring read . . . fascinating and unexpected.”—Men's Journal This rollicking account of the golden age of piracy is packed with vivid history and high seas adventure. David Cordingly, an acclaimed expert on pirates, reveals the spellbinding truth behind the legends of Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, Sir Francis Drake, the fierce female brigands Mary Read and Anne Bonny, and others who rode and robbed upon the world's most dangerous waters. Here, in thrilling detail, are the weapons they used, the ships they sailed, and the ways they fought—and were defeated. Under the Black Flag also charts the paths of fictional pirates such as Captain Hook and Long John Silver. The definitive resource on the subject, this book is as captivating as it is supremely entertaining. Praise for Under the Black Flag “[A] lively history . . . If you've ever been seduced by the myth of the cutlass-wielding pirate, consider David Cordingly's Under the Black Flag.”—USA Today, “Best Bets” “Engagingly told . . . a tale of the power of imaginative literature to re-create the past.”—Los Angeles Times “Entirely engaging and informative . . . a witty and spirited book.”—The Washington Post Book World “Plenty of thrills and adventure to satisfy any reader.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

Download or read book If He Had Been with Me written by Laura Nowlin and published by Sourcebooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2013-04-02 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If he had been with me everything would have been different... I wasn't with Finn on that August night. But I should've been. It was raining, of course. And he and Sylvie were arguing as he drove down the slick road. No one ever says what they were arguing about. Other people think it's not important. They do not know there is another story. The story that lurks between the facts. What they do not know—the cause of the argument—is crucial. So let me tell you...

Download or read book The Romance of My Life written by Theodore Roosevelt and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: