The Fact of the Cage


Book Description

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest raised expectations of what a novel might do. As he understood fiction to aim at what it means to be human, so he hoped his work might relieve the loneliness of human suffering. In that light, The Fact of the Cage shows how Wallace’s masterpiece dramatizes the condition of encagement and how it comes to be met by "Abiding" and through inter-relational acts of speaking and hearing, touching, and facing. Revealing Wallace’s theology of a "boneless Christ," The Fact of the Cage wagers that reading such a novel as Infinite Jest makes available to readers the redemption glimpsed in its pages, that reading fiction has ethical and religious significance—in short, that reading Infinite Jest makes one better. As such, Plank’s work takes steps to defend the ethics of fiction, the vital relation between religion and literature, and why one just might read at all.




The Cage


Book Description

A teenage girl recounts the suffering and persecution of her family under the Nazis, in a Polish ghetto, during deportation, and in a concentration camp.




Escape from the American Cage


Book Description

Never doubted, We the People love our country, but are we ready to love its people too? Are we ready to write a New Declaration based on Truth, Dignity, and Love? Are we ready to escape from the American Cage and fly away to our new home - new America? This book is about how to escape from our American Cage and regain our lost independence by living in accordance with "The New Declaration." It is about how to regain not only our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but also find purpose, attain dignity, build meaningful relationships and find love. It is a dream about human-centered capitalism and democracy in a united, prosperous, and flourishing society. On the surface, indeed, the United States of America looks like a great nation and country, the biggest world power, the most prosperous economy ever created, the best democracy, the land of unlimited possibilities for everyone who wants to make their American dreams come true, and an oasis of freedom and respect for life and happiness. In Escape from the American Cage, author Konrad Milewski argues that this vision belies the fact that America is only a dreamland for a small percentage of its population. The majority of Americans feel tired, used, betrayed, abandoned, unsafe, and hopeless. They hide frustrations that can easily turn into anger and aggression. The U.S. is performing poorly and substantially below most comparably wealthy nations when it comes to happiness. America is a violent country. The rate of murder by firearm is the highest in the developed world. America experiences huge socioeconomic inequality and injustice. Millions of Americans live in poverty, without healthcare, and without education. America has the world's highest rates of substance abuse. About 35% of adult Americans are chronically lonely. Americans are divided. The system that has been created is clearly preventing people from flourishing. And paradoxically, the point is not that the economic system or the justice system are seriously broken. It works exactly the way it was designed to work. This book is an invitation to build a safe, prosperous, united and happy society, the United Societies of America - the best human-centered economy and superpower on earth. "An incredible book about an incredible nation. It seeks out the deepest truths, challenges the most difficult problems, offers long-awaited solutions as well as faith, hope and love. It is about the greatest escape in human history from the most precious, most guarded, and strongest golden cage ever made - The American Cage." The prize is great and monumental. Your independence and our independence. Your happiness and our happiness! Support the movement: The United Societies of America, U*S*A www.unitedsocietiesofamerica.org www.americancage.org




Rattling the Cage


Book Description

Most South Africans have strong views on our past and present, often based on how we have been personally affected by history, and an understanding of the challenges that face us as a country. But how well-examined and solid are these positions? Have your views been properly thought through? Are you correctly informed? Do you even have the facts straight? Rattling the Cage takes the reader on an informed tour of the South African reality: from the highs and lows, the successes and failures, FW de Klerk’s gaffes to Fees Must Fall, the Oscar Pistorius trial, the 2010 FIFA World Cup, triple BEE, global warming, the Covid-19 pandemic, gay rights in Africa, and veganism. Among the questions Meersman asks are: Do South Africans still believe in their Constitution and democracy? Why do so many young South Africans say Nelson Mandela was a sell-out and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a dismal failure? Is outlawing hate speech and criminalising racist behaviour really a good idea? Why do communities still burn down their schools? How did the Marikana massacre happen in the democratic era? Why are African immigrants increasingly unwelcome in South Africa? Can our media be trusted to tell us the truth? And how do we embrace climate change? History, big-picture philosophy, grassroots journalism and a novelist’s eye – animated by a genuine sense of moral indignation at the current state of the nation – come together in these essays to provide critical perspectives on and insights into South Africa’s recent past and current political, economic and social undercurrents. No matter what your views are, you are sure to find your understanding of the country deepened, challenged and sometimes changed.




Begin Again


Book Description

A man of extraordinary and seemingly limitless talents—musician, inventor, composer, poet, and even amateur mycologist—John Cage became a central figure of the avant-garde early in his life and remained at that pinnacle until his death in 1992 at the age of eighty. Award-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman gives us the first comprehensive life of this remarkable artist. Silverman begins with Cage’s childhood in interwar Los Angeles and his stay in Paris from 1930 to 1931, where immersion in the burgeoning new musical and artistic movements triggered an explosion of his creativity. Cage continued his studies in the United States with the seminal modern composer Arnold Schoenberg, and he soon began the experiments with sound and percussion instruments that would develop into his signature work with prepared piano, radio static, random noise, and silence. Cage’s unorthodox methods still influence artists in a wide range of genres and media. Silverman concurrently follows Cage’s rich personal life, from his early marriage to his lifelong personal and professional partnership with choreographer Merce Cunningham, as well as his friendships over the years with other composers, artists, philosophers, and writers. Drawing on interviews with Cage’s contemporaries and friends and on the enormous archive of his letters and writings, and including photographs, facsimiles of musical scores, and Web links to illustrative sections of his compositions, Silverman gives us a biography of major significance: a revelatory portrait of one of the most important cultural figures of the twentieth century. !--?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /--




Freedom and the Cage


Book Description

Spurred by ideals of individual liberty that took hold in the Western world in the late nineteenth century, psychiatrists and public officials sought to reinvent asylums as large-scale, totally designed institutions that offered a level of freedom and normality impossible in the outside world. This volume explores the “caged freedom” that this new psychiatric ethos represented by analyzing seven such buildings established in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy between the late 1890s and World War I. In the last two decades of the Habsburg Empire, architects of asylums began to abandon traditional corridor-based plans in favor of looser formations of connected villas, echoing through design the urban- and freedom-oriented impulse of the progressive architecture of the time. Leslie Topp considers the paradoxical position of designs that promoted an illusion of freedom even as they exercised careful social and spatial control over patients. In addition to discussing the physical and social aspects of these institutions, Topp shows how the commissioned buildings were symptomatic of larger cultural changes and of the modern asylum’s straining against its ideological anchorage in a premodern past of “unenlightened” restraint on human liberty. Working at the intersection of the history of architecture and the history of psychiatry, Freedom and the Cage broadens our understanding of the complexity and fluidity of modern architecture’s engagement with the state, with social and medical projects, and with mental health, psychiatry, and psychology.




Inside The Cage


Book Description

Under suspicion for a virtual break-in at Fort Knox, 17-year-old Carl Hobbes finds himself on a rendition flight for questioning by the US military. Taken to an isolated camp in the Arctic wilderness, dedicated to holding terrorists-for-hire, the boy finds all assurances about his safety blow away when one notorious detainee stages an uprising. Cut off from civilisation, and with overnight temperatures plummeting, Hobbes must decide whether his chances of survival are greater inside the cage - or out…




The Lizard Cage


Book Description

Set during Burma's military dictatorship of the mid—1990s, Karen Connelly’s exquisitely written and harshly realistic debut novel is a hymn to human resilience and love. In the sealed-off world of a vast Burmese prison known as the cage, Teza languishes in solitary confinement seven years into a twenty-year sentence. Arrested in 1988 for his involvement in mass protests, he is the nation’s most celebrated songwriter whose resonant words and powerful voice pose an ongoing threat to the state. Forced to catch lizards to supplement his meager rations, Teza finds emotional and spiritual sustenance through memories and Buddhist meditation. The tiniest creatures and things–a burrowing ant, a copper-coloured spider, a fragment of newspaper within a cheroot filter–help to connect him to life beyond the prison walls. Even in isolation, Teza has a profound influence on the people around him. His integrity and humour inspire Chit Naing, the senior jailer, to find the courage to follow his conscience despite the serious risks involved, while Teza’s very existence challenges the brutal authority of the junior jailer, perversely nicknamed Handsome. Sein Yun, a gem smuggler and prison fixer, is his most steady human contact, who finds delight in taking advantage of Teza by cleverly tempting him into Handsome's web with the most dangerous contraband of all: pen and paper. Lastly, there's Little Brother, an orphan raised in the jail, imprisoned by his own deprivation. Making his home in a tiny, corrugated-metal shack, Little Brother stays alive by killing rats and selling them to the inmates. As the political prisoner and the young boy forge a cautious friendship, we learn that both are prisoners of different orders; only one of them dreams of escape and only one of them achieves it. Barely able to speak, losing the battle of the flesh but winning the battle of the spirit, Teza knows he has the power to transfigure one small life, and to send a message of hope and resistance out of the cage. Shortlisted for both the Kiriyama Prize for Fiction and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, The Lizard Cage has received rave reviews nationally and internationally.




The Cage


Book Description

First published in 1975, The Cage was a graphic novel before there was a name for the genre. Considered an early masterpiece of the genre, the Canadian cult comic has been out of print for decades. The new edition includes an introduction by Canadian comics master and Lemony Snicket collaborator Seth (Palookaville; It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken). Cryptic and disturbing, like Dave Gibbons (Watchmen) illustrating a film by Ozu, The Cage spurns narrative for atmosphere, guiding us through a series of disarrayed rooms and desolate landscapes, tracking a stuttering and circling time and a sequence of objects: headphones, inky stains, bedsheets. It's not about where we're going but how – if – we get there.




The Northeastern Reporter


Book Description

Includes the decisions of the Supreme Courts of Massachusetts, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and Court of Appeals of New York; May/July 1891-Mar./Apr. 1936, Appellate Court of Indiana; Dec. 1926/Feb. 1927-Mar./Apr. 1936, Courts of Appeals of Ohio.