Island of the Setting Sun


Book Description

A history of the people who lived in Ireland around 6,000 years ago, focusing on their buildings, beliefs, and role in the development of the Island.




Just Left of the Setting Sun


Book Description

Just Left of the Setting Sun is a collection of non-fiction essays by a young Chamoru scholar-activist from the island of Guam. These essays reflect the present-day reality of the indigenous people of the island of Guam. This book is framed in the context of an island that exists amidst the many conflicts and contradictions of being "freed from colonialism" by another colonial power in 1898 and "liberated from wartime aggression" by a country that put in under a Naval Administration until the 1960s and who worked to eliminate the culture of the local people through forced assimilation and nominal citizenship. It is written to articulate the reality of the Chamoru people of Guam as an indigenous Pacific Island culture, an American minority group, and an island people threatened by the encroachment of globalization into their lives. These essays will cause the reader to think critically on the subjects of globalization, sustainable development, sustainable governance, cultural reclamation, and self-determination on Guam, amongst the indigenous and colonized peoples in the world, question the value of democracy if it is involuntarily imposed on a people. This book is especially relevant for the present state of the world. Just Left is included in an academic series that we publish, 'The 1898 Consciousness Studies Series'. This series is a varied collection of essays on consciousness today in areas affected by the Spanish-American War and consequent possession by the U.S. These include The Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Praise for Just Left of the Setting Sun "Fierce and compassionate, bold and resolute, Just Left of the Setting Sun is at once a coming into consciousness as it is a conch-shell blare for action by and for a new generation of Chamorros, the indigenous people of an island and archipelago long colonized by Spain, Japan and the United States of America. As critical towards fellow Chamorros who aid and abet the colonizer as he is of the colonizers themselves, Aguon also importantly situates the need for Native Struggles for Political and Cultural Self-Determination and Sovereignty within Feminist/Womanist critiques and global struggles for economic, social, and environmental justice, thereby providing a glimpse into the possibilities for local struggle informed and articulated to global movements beyond pan-indigenous movements per se, and for keeping global movements and political theory grounded in Indigenous traditions." Vicente M. Diaz Associate Professor of American Culture University of Michigan, Ann Arbor "Aguon re-introduces us to the principles of international law as a guiding framework to the resolution of the dilemma brought about by the present non self-governing arrangements which provide the trappings of democratic governance, but in reality are rather democratically deficient by any objective examination. Indeed, an important component of new millennium colonialism is the existence, but not the recognition, of this democratic deficit... ..."Just Left of the Setting Sun" should be required reading for the people in the remaining territories, young and old, who need to discover/re-discover the fire within, that they might further move the process forward, if only by a few steps further along the continuum. In a very real sense, as Aguon observes, "inside the heart of the Chamoru is still an ocean of latent potentialities waiting to surge." Dr. Carlyle Corbin Advisor on Governance and Political Development St. Croix, Virgin Islands




Blazing Star, Setting Sun


Book Description

From popular Pacific Theatre expert Jeffrey R. Cox comes this insightful new history of the critical Guadalcanal and Solomons campaign at the height of World War II. Cox's previous book, Morning Star, Rising Sun, had found the US Navy at its absolute nadir and the fate of the Enterprise, the last operational US aircraft carrier at this point in the war, unknown. This second volume completes the history of this crucial campaign, combining detailed research with a novelist's flair for the dramatic to reveal exactly how, despite missteps and misfortunes, the tide of war finally turned. By the end of February 1944, thanks to hard-fought and costly American victories in the first and second naval battles of Guadalcanal, the battle of Empress Augusta Bay, and the battle of Cape St George, the Japanese would no longer hold the materiel or skilled manpower advantage. From this point on, although the war was still a long way from being won, the American star was unquestionably on the ascendant, slowly, but surely, edging Japanese imperialism towards its sunset. Jeffrey Cox's analysis and attention to detail of even the smallest events are second to none. But what truly sets this book apart is how he combines this microscopic attention to detail, often unearthing new facts along the way, with an engaging style that transports the reader to the heart of the story, bringing the events on the deep blue of the Pacific vividly to life.




Setting Sun, The


Book Description

This powerful novel of a nation in social and moral crisis in the early postwar years probes the transition from a feudal Japan to an industrial society. The influence of this book, often considered Dazai's masterpiece, made the term 'people of the setting sun' -- the declining aristocracy -- a permanent part of the Japanese language. Dazai's heroine, Kazuko, the strong-willed young aristocrat who deliberately abandons her class, stands as a symbol of the anomie that pervades so much of the modern world. The distinguished translator Donald Keene has said of the author's work: 'His world...suggest Chekhov or possibly postwar France...but there is a Japanese sensibility in the choice and presentation of the material. A Dazai novel is at once immediately intelligible in Western terms and quite unlike any Western book.'




Mythical Ireland


Book Description

Mythical Ireland embodies the search for a soul among Ireland's ancient ruins, and is an attempt to retrieve something of deeper import from 5,000-year-old megalithic monuments and their associated myths. The book represents a fascinating and engaging journey through time, landscape and the human spirit. Dealing with archaeology, interpretive mythography, cosmology and cosmogony, the book attempts to grapple with a core meaning, something beyond the functional interpretations of academia. In this revised and expanded edition, Anthony Murphy delves further into the many enthralling aspects of this journey. Just how much knowledge did locals have of the secrets of Newgrange before it was excavated? Who is the Cailleach, the ancient hag goddess whose image is ubiquitous in the ancient landscape? What happened to make Ireland's Stonehenge disappear from the landscape? Who were the first kings of Tara? What were the indigenous Irish myths about the Milky Way? Did someone try to steal the Tara Brooch? Why are there myths in Ireland about flooded towns and cities? Lavishly illustrated with exquisite photographs of the Irish landscape and ancient monuments, Mythical Ireland represents a personal and yet universal journey, a quest to reimagine the shrines as empowering and transformative sacred places. Murphy invokes the druids and poets of the Boyne and thus the sídhe of the ancient texts are reawakened for a modern and turbulent world.




Setting Sun


Book Description

Epic in scope, intimate in detail, heartbreaking in its human drama, Former People is the first book to recount the history of the nobility caught up the maelstrom of the Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of Stalin’s Russia. It is a book filled with chilling tales of looted palaces, burning estates, of desperate flights in the night from marauding bands of thugs and Red Army soldiers, of imprisonment, exile, and execution. It is the story of how a centuries’-old elite famous for its glittering wealth, its service to the empire, its promotion of the arts and culture, was dispossessed and destroyed along with the rest of old Russia. Drawing on the private archives of two great families – the Sheremetovs and the Golitsyns – it is also a story of survival and accommodation, of how many of the tsarist ruling class, so-called 'former people', managed to find a place for themselves and their families in the hostile world of the Soviet Union. It reveals, too, how even at the darkest depths of the terror, daily life went on - men and women fell in love, children were born, friends gathered. Ultimately, Former People is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.




Earthly Utopias


Book Description

Earthly Utopias is a visual tour of the best religious and spiritual gardens around the world.




Archaeo–Astronometria


Book Description

There have been many books on the origin of astronomy some good and some very poorly address the issues of ancient mans interests in the stars. The ancient Sumer and Egyptian notions of music mostly confirms how ancient this notion is in their chorded progressions of tone. This notion is more an Upper Paleolithic celestial idea. In a sense man during this time man was beginning to have a concept of north, south, east and west in spatial terms. It involves the curvature of the ribs of Nut the Egyptian Sky Goddess as a ribbed vaulted sky, and sometimes in a horizon sense of a bowing arch of a stars path, or the curve of a bone in the stars moving path. The half way point of this fall for say our Nut, Adam and Eve would thus be about 27,000 BC which falls in a significant period Ice Age re-emergence and a deserts expanding in equator regions. These are only a small part of what had to addressed in origins of night sky studies. The point being this piece as fake or not is that the components of the animals, man, plants and mans artifacts were very early on displayed. We might ask in such a condition what was their night sky? If we look at all of these constellations they fall below the Celestial Equator in the South Pole region mostly. It would seem that all these birds to them being placed in the night sky like the stars and as they watched what directions the birds along with stars as to where they went in order to ascertain their relations to dusk or dawn night sky. What caused the South Africa plight of 80,000 BC? The Antarctica had been growing ice forms from 170,000 BC to 80,000 BC towards the north, and then around 70,000 BC there seemed to be a melting trend back south. In an astronomy sense we can thank him for larger game entering in the pantheon of the constellations, or the leaf, otter, and some constellations lost to time like the mammoths. What does this have to do with constellations, taboos, or the advent of Cro-Magnon man well in the depictions of constellation images? Slowly from east to west the stars move, but then it did not take man not long after 70,000 BC to note that some planets or stars seemed to move retrograde in the night sky? This book address what ideas did they show or have before or after these earth changes. As ideas such as: "Maybe, it was a lasso constellation for some animals capture as a God of Capture." And, "Somewhere around the time of 50,000 BC in the region of northern England to the region above the Black Sea there occurred a melting phase between the ice ages and cultures began to spread". The evidence of this is found by different locations in Europe and Central Europe of the use of rock shadows, stars noted by hands in movement, and certain hand symbols by star images or dots as stars not just stab marks. Ironic again that Man beside Woman on the pole treetop does not have strong reminders of the Adam-Eve Tree and the Serpent as maybe Draco? The symbol anciently always shows the snake at the foot of the tree or ascended the tree at the apex of the trunk which if astronomy wise would mean an ascended constellation to the Zenith or the Pole! Draco thus deposed Adam and Eve from their own constellation garden and domain by it ascending as an ancient Pole Axis Mundi? Thus the smoke screen really is a tied between this local area of France and Late Paleolithic Mans ideas of that region in the night sky of a certain year or month period of hunting. Although we have jumped forward in the time of ancient astronomy beginnings in a way really in this sense we have not. To the real beginnings of little known ancient astronomy.




Hy Brasil: The Metamorphosis of an Island


Book Description

Brasil Island, better known as Hy Brasil, is a phantom island. In the fourteenth century Mediterranean mapmakers marked it on nautical charts to the west of Ireland, and its continued presence on maps over the next six hundred years inspired enterprising seafarers to sail across the Atlantic in search of it. Writers, too, fell for its lure. While English writers envisioned the island as a place of commercial and colonial interest, artists and poets in Ireland fashioned it into a fairyland of Celtic lore. This pioneering study first traces the cartographic history of Brasil Island and examines its impact on English maritime exploration and literature. It investigates the Gaelicization process that the island underwent in nineteenth century and how it became associated with St Brendan. Finally, it pursues the Brasil Island trope in modern literature, the arts and popular culture.




An Ecology of Scriptures


Book Description

In this volume, Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski examines the experiences of domestic and quotidian space that contributed to the extant form of many foundational early Jewish and Christian scriptures. His analytical approaches are derived from diverse sources including modern psychological science, Gaston Bachelard's critical theories of domestic space, and Henri Lefebvre's observations regarding “spatial practice.” The result of this attention to textual “ecology” or “home-logic” is an innovative exploration of classic texts yielding exciting new interpretive possibilities for the Gospel of John, the undisputed Pauline letters, the Parables of Enoch, the Book of Revelation, the History of the Rechabites, and Augustine's De Trinitate. Experiences of loss, homelessness, imprisonment, and marginal dwelling lie behind these texts and contributed to their authors' re-imagination and re-establishment of home. Pruszinski proves inescapably that while the most familiar of experiences are often overlooked, they are also among the most important of formative influences on the early Jewish and Christian literary imagination.