How Everything Turns Away


Book Description

Ezra James used to be a big deal: Harvard graduate, FBI agent, beautiful wife. After being accused of fabricating evidence in a serial killer trial, he finds himself suspended, on the verge of a divorce, and working security at a posh Catholic school in Chicago. Then something out-of-the-ordinary happens: a young student-teacher is attacked during a Christmas pageant and left for dead in the snow with a noose around her neck and an electrical burn. Plus, she's pregnant. Ezra, along with up-and-coming police detective, Lucia Vargas, and school chaplain, Fr. Remy Mbombo, must work fast before the culprit returns to finish the job.




Everything Turns Away


Book Description

On September 11, 2001, the world changed. For Sophie and Paul, it started with a disastrous dinner party. For the babysitter, it started with waking in a dark kitchen and recognizing the smell of blood. For everyone else it started with a plane flying into the World Trade Center. In this tautly written domestic thriller set in Toronto, Michelle Berry weaves together the story of two couples whose lives are about to be unravelled by the murder of a neighbour, a babysitter that has gone missing and the aftermath of the collapse of the World Trade Center. It is a haunting exploration of marriages and what tears them apart, of what happens to people during shocking events and of how everything can change in an instant. Filled with richly drawn characters, a web of thwarted desires and multiple motives, Everything Turns Away is riveting until the very end.




The Unsignificant


Book Description

The Unsignificant: Three Talks on Poetry and Pictures is a selection of lectures that poet and Griffin Award–finalist Srikanth Reddy presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2015. True to its title, The Unsignificant is concerned with what it’s not about—not the logical proofs of philosophy but the affective flux of poetry. The lectures approach poetry from Homer to Gertrude Stein to Ronald Johnson obliquely, refracted through images such as Brueghel’s “Landscape with Fall of Icarus,” Hermann Rorschach’s inkblots, or Galileo’s drawings of the moon. Ranging from pictorial backgrounds in visual art to portraiture and similes to the poetics of wonder, The Unsignificant embarks on an unsystematic, errant, and eccentric tour of Western poetry and poetics from the ancient world to our continuous present.




The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing


Book Description

For several years after 1968, Herbert Marcuse was one of the most famous philosophers in the world. He became the face of Frankfurt School Critical Theory for a generation in turmoil. His fame rested on two remarkable books, Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man. These two books represent the utopian hopes and dystopian fears of the time. In the 1960s and 70s, young people seeking a theoretical basis for their revolution found it in his work. Marcuse not only supported their struggles against imperialism and race and gender discrimination, he foresaw the far-reaching implications of the destruction of the natural environment. Marcuse's Marxism was influenced by Husserl and Heidegger, Hegel and Freud. These eclectic sources grounded an original critique of advanced capitalism focused on the social construction of subjectivity and technology. Marcuse contrasted the "one-dimensionality" of conformist experience with the "new sensibility" of the New Left. The movement challenged a society that "delivered the goods" but devastated the planet with its destructive science and technology. A socialist revolution would fail if it did not transform these instruments into means of liberation, both of nature and human beings. This aspiration is alive today in the radical struggle over climate change. Marcuse offers theoretical resources for understanding that struggle.




Humans and the Environment


Book Description

The environment has always been a central concept for archaeologists and, although it has been conceived in many ways, its role in archaeological explanation has fluctuated from a mere backdrop to human action, to a primary factor in the understanding of society and social change. Archaeology also has a unique position as its base of interest places it temporally between geological and ethnographic timescales, spatially between global and local dimensions, and epistemologically between empirical studies of environmental change and more heuristic studies of cultural practice. Drawing on data from across the globe at a variety of temporal and spatial scales, this volume resituates the way in which archaeologists use and apply the concept of the environment. Each chapter critically explores the potential for archaeological data and practice to contribute to modern environmental issues, including problems of climate change and environmental degradation. Overall the volume covers four basic themes: archaeological approaches to the way in which both scientists and locals conceive of the relationship between humans and their environment, applied environmental archaeology, the archaeology of disaster, and new interdisciplinary directions.The volume will be of interest to students and established archaeologists, as well as practitioners from a range of applied disciplines.




In the World of Signs


Book Description

The book covers almost the whole range of semiotics: the conceptions of meaning, the appearance of meaning units in semiosis, the dichotomy analyticity/syntheticity, the formal condition of good translation, the metaphorical change in fine arts, the figurativeness in modern literary theories, the metaphor in computer translation, the conditionals with egocentric predicates, the evolution of the notion of cause, the temporal relation in conditionals, the structure of passive voice, the semantics of to think, the reasoning and rationality, the non-formalized reasoning, the operation of acceptance, the principle of non-contradiction, the relation semiotics/logic/philosophy, the interdisciplinarity and exactness, the notion of imprecision, the interpretation of some semiotic notions (i.a. semantic field of terms) in terms of mathematics, the description of categorial grammars in terms of model theory, the human knowledge as moral problem, the conceptualization of the development of knowledge by means of the notion of meme, the cultural relations between some European countries, the typology of scientists, the semiotic studies of some Spanish, Irish, Czech, Polish and Norwegian works of literature, the semiotic aspects of music, television and the whole sphere of artifacts, the history of semiotics (Plato, Gonsung Long, Descartes, Fu Yen, Peirce, Brwal, Lotman, Langer).




A Swing for Life: Revised and Updated


Book Description

An instructional guide to the perfect swing from one of golf’s most successful players and well-known television commentators. “A Swing for Life represents the ultimate collection of lessons, swing thoughts, observations, and discoveries that I relied upon in a career dedicated to the game of golf.” —Sir Nick Faldo Nick Faldo is one of the world’s most accomplished and well-respected golfers. His name is synonymous with the dedication that is necessary to reach the highest levels of the professional game, and the patience with which he analyzed and fine-tuned his swing rewarded him with six major championships. In this extensive book—revised and updated from the 1995 classic—Faldo draws on the wealth of that experience to demonstrate the skills that lie at the heart of the game, tee to green. Revealing a collection of absolute musts that underpin golf’s fundamentals, Faldo explains how to set in motion a chain reaction that inspires a flowing, repeating swing, a technique that can be applied to every club in the bag. There’s a whole chapter dedicated to timing and tempo, featuring the drills and exercises Faldo used to maintain his own trademark rhythm, plus comprehensive lessons on modern driving strategy, short-game technique, bunker play, and the art of putting. Supporting his teaching throughout are superb photographs, as well as twenty-six original videos available for you to download from the book, adding a valuable dimension to the learning experience in every department of the game. For veteran golfers, Faldo’s strategy on “working the ball” reveals the true talent of shot-making and control, while his practical advice on taking your game from the range to the course—the art of visualizing shots and reproducing your skills under pressure—is universally applicable. “At the highest level, golf is all about the respect a player has for the fundamentals—the lessons that have stood the test of time . . . and that’s precisely the message that I am going to make sure comes across in this book.” So says Faldo in his introduction to what is essentially a master class from one of the game’s most exacting students and prolific winners. A Swing for Life promises inspiration for anyone who has ever picked up a golf club.




The Arts in Medical Education


Book Description

Accompanying CD-ROM contains chapter 5. Sound Sense.




Suffering and the Remedy of Art


Book Description

This book suggests that a listening to suffering may profit from a literary hearing, and vice-versa. It is not only that literature tells of suffering but that suffering may tell us something about the nature of literature. The author examines works and texts that range from medicine to literature, philosophy to photography, prose to poetry, and from Antigone to W.H. Auden. The book presents individual instances, real and literary, of physical and mental wounds and diseases, of pain and death, endured by a little girl in a burn ward, a boy wounded in the war in Bosnia, a nameless Vietnamese woman, Job, Antigone, as well as a number of mostly lyrical elegists: a survivor of the holocaust, a wife bereft of her husband, a daughter bereft of her father. The autonomy of each chapter suggests that experiences of suffering are always incomparable. One must in every instance begin again and enter the scene of suffering on its own terms: the radically individual nature of suffering is prior or past to any theory or set of generalizations.




The End of Meaning


Book Description

The specter of the apocalypse has always been a semiotic fantasy: only at the end of all things will their true meaning be revealed. Our long romance with catastrophe is inseparable from the Western hermeneutical tradition: our search for an elusive truth, one that can only be uncovered through the interminable work of interpretation. Catastrophe terrifies and tantalizes to the extent it promises an end to this task. 9/11 is this book’s beginning, but not its end. Here, it seemed, was the apocalypse America had long been waiting for; until it became just another event. And, indeed, the real lesson of 9/11 may be that catastrophe is the purest form of the event. From the poetry of classical Greece to the popular culture of contemporary America, The End of Meaning seeks to demonstrate that catastrophe, precisely as the notion of the sui generis, has always been generic. This is not a book on the great catastrophes of the West; it offers no canon of catastrophe, no history of the catastrophic. The End of Meaning asks, instead, what if meaning itself is a catastrophe?