The Lioness in Bloom


Book Description

Kepner's selection shows the many ways fiction has mirrored the lives of Thai women over the twentieth century. The spectrum is broad, encompassing the young and the old, the rural and the cosmopolitan, the privileged and the poor. Some writers address previously unacceptable themes: female sexuality, spousal abuse, gender oppression. Others display a scintillating sense of humor. They touch on many themes—injustice, the heartlessness of society, loneliness, the difficult choices that life presents. Susan Kepner's lyrical, faithful translations preserve the tenor and resonances of these voices, many of which will be heard for the first time by English-speaking readers.




Preserving Rural Australia


Book Description

Scientific knowledge alone will not help countries achieve sustainable management of land, water and biota. Everyone now realises that a partnership is needed between land and water users, scientists, managers and the community if countries are to achieve the goal of preserving rural resources. This book deals with broad issues relating to resource decline and how different groups such as farmers, rural town dwellers, resource managers and government deal with these issues from social, economic and ecological points of view.




Bloom


Book Description

Insightful and engaging, Bloom explains how to use the Bach Flower Remedies for personal and spiritual growth. Written by a key team member at the Dr Edward Bach Centre, Bloom reveals how the Bach flower essences offer a complete system that can help us to change our lives for the better. Chapters 1-7 explore the ways in which the remedies relate to different life experiences, as well as intriguing schools of religious and philosophical belief. Interspersed with chapters 1-7, chapters i-vii look closely at the individual remedies in the system, explaining when to take each one and what they will do for you. Containing a wealth of personal stories, individual testimonies and fascinating anecdotes, Bloom has something to offer to anyone interested in the Bach Flower Remedies or drawn to personal development in general. Discover how to use the remedies to improve your own life and to grow into your full potential.




Diaspora in the Countryside


Book Description

From the 1930s to the 1980s, the North American countryside faced a profound cultural transformation in which a once-unified rural society became fragmented and dispersed. Families wishing to remain on the farm were required to accept new levels of automation, while others, unwilling or unable to make the change, migrated to nearby towns or regional cities. The cultural reformulation that resulted saw the emergence of a genuine rural diaspora. The growing cultural and physical separation was especially true for close-knit, ethno-religious communities, Mennonites, in particular. Forced into regional cities, the kaleidoscopic urban culture further fragmented the Mennonites into disparate social entities. In Diaspora in the Countryside, the phenomena of rural fragmentation is examined by comparing and contrasting two closely-related but distinctive Dutch-Russian Mennonite communities located in different parts of the continent: Kansas and Manitoba, respectively. By systematically comparing these communities, two distinctive responses to the mid-twentieth century 'Great Disjuncture' are made apparent. Royden Loewen also contrasts the cultural changes of these farm families to the cultures their kin adopted in nearby towns and cities. Loewen charts not only the dispersion of two rural communities, but follows their former residents as they reformulate their lives in new settings.







Human Development Report 1996


Book Description

The Human Development Report, now in its seventh edition, updates the unique Human Development Indicators comparing human development in most countries of the world, and the data tables on all aspects of human development. The special focus of this edition is on the important link between economic growth and human development. The Report maintains that the link is not automatic but can be established through proper policy management, arguing the case for initiating and accelerating economic growth and at the same time accelerating and sustaining human development in different parts of the world. The Report also maintains that the quality of growth is as important as its quantity; otherwise, growth can be jobless, voiceless, ruthless, rootless, and futureless. It identifies employment as an important instrument in translating the benefits of economic growth into people's lives.An indispensable resource for courses in international development, the Report ranks 174 countries according to the Human Development Index (HDI). It also gives the global ranking of more than 100 countries in terms of Gender-Related Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). The first index represents HDI, taking into account gender inequality in capabilities, and the second represents female opportunities in selected economic and political areas. New to this edition is the Capability Poverty Measure (CPM), which is used as an alternative to the traditional income poverty measure. The Report concludes that the future challenge is how to forge and sustain the desired kind of linkage between economic growth and human development in a globalized world which represents both opportunities and threats for the nations of the world.




Dahlia in Bloom


Book Description

Can a person just decide to give up feeling scared? It's 1933, and Dahlia Harrell lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains in a hand-me-down cabin built by her Grandpap's Uncle Zeke. At eight-and-three-quarters, Dahlia knows all about being scared. She's scared of snakes, high-up places, dark nights, and a mean ol' sister named Celia. What she doesn't understand is the new president's nonsense: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Dahlia decides that enough money can buy away any reason she has for feeling afraid, and she sets her hope on the rumor of a treasure buried beneath Zeke's cabin. However, when her family is uprooted to become tenant farmers in a distant community, Dahlia's quest for fearlessness ultimately sets her on a path of recklessness. What she fails to realize is that the secret to living a fearless life has been hers all along. And that treasure? Well, it just might hold the answer after all.




Recent Research on the Late Antique Countryside


Book Description

A complex picture of differing regional trajectories emerges, whilst cultural change is everywhere apparent, in phenomena such as Christianisation, settlement nucleation and fortification."--BOOK JACKET.




Euripides and the Politics of Form


Book Description

How can we make sense of the innovative structure of Euripidean drama? And what political role did tragedy play in the democracy of classical Athens? These questions are usually considered to be mutually exclusive, but this book shows that they can only be properly answered together. Providing a new approach to the aesthetics and politics of Greek tragedy, Victoria Wohl argues that the poetic form of Euripides' drama constitutes a mode of political thought. Through readings of select plays, she explores the politics of Euripides' radical aesthetics, showing how formal innovation generates political passions with real-world consequences. Euripides' plays have long perplexed readers. With their disjointed plots, comic touches, and frequent happy endings, they seem to stretch the boundaries of tragedy. But the plays' formal traits—from their exorbitantly beautiful lyrics to their arousal and resolution of suspense—shape the audience's political sensibilities and ideological attachments. Engendering civic passions, the plays enact as well as express political ideas. Wohl draws out the political implications of Euripidean aesthetics by exploring such topics as narrative and ideological desire, the politics of pathos, realism and its utopian possibilities, the logic of political allegory, and tragedy's relation to its historical moment. Breaking through the impasse between formalist and historicist interpretations of Greek tragedy, Euripides and the Politics of Form demonstrates that aesthetic structure and political meaning are mutually implicated—and that to read the plays poetically is necessarily to read them politically.




Daffodil Hill


Book Description

A candid and heartwarming memoir of reinvention about a city girl who trades her career and her heels for five acres and a herd of goats “Jake Keiser is my favorite kind of woman—gutsy, tenacious, and not afraid to be vulnerable. And the animals are pretty f*cking adorable, too.”—Tara Schuster, author of Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies Jake Keiser was living the life in Tampa, Florida, running a high-powered PR firm and juggling drink dates, shopping sprees, and charity galas. But at age thirty-eight, following a failed marriage, a series of miscarriages, and a still-blistering breakup, she began to suffer from extreme anxiety. Hit with the realization that no amount of Botox could fill the hole in her heart, she decided to make the impulse purchase of a lifetime and bought a farm in the middle of nowhere, Mississippi. Suddenly responsible for more than seventy-five animals and five acres of land, and with only one bar of cell service, Jake begins her search for inner peace. She learns to fix a well, haul wood, shoot a gun, and care for baby chicks, goats, turkeys, geese, dogs, and a cat, playing spa music for them when they’re sick and naming them after her favorite fashion designers. The only problem is that she still can’t figure out how to truly care for herself. Unable to escape the accumulated pain of her past, Jake hits rock bottom. With nowhere left to run, she’s finally forced to confront a bracing reality: The farm won’t save her. Only she can save herself. Poignant, hilarious, and utterly charming, Daffodil Hill is for anyone who feels stuck—for those of us strapped to our desks and dreaming of an unconventional life, for those of us searching for something more. Most of all, it is for people who believe that the greatest love story of all is the one we write with ourselves.