Let Us Not Talk Falsely Now


Book Description

Johnny Desmond is a racist and a believer in white separatism. He tells us of past exploits and then, on instructions from his mentor, beats up a Jewish college professor. Johnny also tells the back story of how he was born in Mississippi but ended up in foster care in Iowa, where he is bounced from family to family and often abused. Finally he ends up at reform school. He finds comfort and family with Peter, the head of Iowa’s right-wing commandoes. He also is willing to do the dirty work of the movement. After he places a bomb, he realizes that someone is in the building. It’s also the story of a Des Moines detective who arrests Johnny. Johnny goes on trial for arson, attempted murder and several other charges, enough to have him spend the rest of his life in prison. There is a lot of evidence against him, but will that include the testimony of the man who was left in the building? Will Johnny go to prison? Will he choose the right woman to be with for the rest of his life? And, will he find his mother again? Find out in Let Us Not Talk Falsely Now.




The Invisible Chains That Enslave Us


Book Description

For thousands of years mankind has been enslaved. For the longest time real chains were used to enslave us. In modern times, the forces that be evolved from using real chains to invisible chains. After thousands of years of wars, famine, plagues, disease, and man’s inhumanity to both man and other life forms on the planet, is humanity finally ready for an evolutionary step? A step that will dissolve the invisible chains that enslave us. After a lifetime of research, Mr. Brown has gathered together the keys to our past that he believes will unlock the next evolutionary steps. His research covers the clues left throughout history in mythology, religions, and philosophy. He explains why we are where we are today. Then he examines some of the many ways we can recover our humanity and evolve as he believes we were intended. The next evolution will not be through wars to conquer other nations or people, but rather a dramatic shift in the way humanity thinks.




Habakkuk before Breakfast


Book Description

"These liturgies, written in the language of longing and lament, in the voices Brian Walsh's community, call us to engage with the words of Habakkuk, and with the prophets and poets of our time. These words, forged in shared experience, in joy and pain, call us to join in the radical resistance of sitting and eating in midst of a bewildering age." --Mark Wallace, Christian Reformed Church Campus Ministry Leader "Habakkuk Before Breakfast is like no other book on the prophet. That's because it is, itself, prophecy - and poetry, and preaching, and prayer, and liturgy, and lament, and a dozen other things melded together into a powerful, and powerfully disturbing, whole. A book to shake us up and make us realize that God's loving justice is the only firm on which anyone--or any society--can stand." --N.T. Wright, University of St. Andrews




The Bible's Authority in Today's Church


Book Description

How important is the Bible in today's church? This book provides the clear answer that the Bible is fundamental to the church's vitality and continuance. Ignoring the Bible or limiting its importance in the church is "the precursor to spiritual death and communal dissolution." Here, then, is a lively study, debate, and conversationparticularly within the Episcopal Church in the United Statesconcerning the authority and function of the Bible in today's church. A helpful leader's guide has been added to assist those who would use the book in adult study groups.




Play it Again: Cover Songs in Popular Music


Book Description

Covering—the musical practice of one artist recording or performing another composer's song—has always been an attribute of popular music. In 2009, the internet database Second Hand Songs estimated that there are 40,000 songs with at least one cover version. Some of the more common variations of this "appropriationist" method of musical quotation include traditional forms such as patriotic anthems, religious hymns such as Amazing Grace, Muzak's instrumental interpretations, Christmas classics, and children's songs. Novelty and comedy collections from parodists such as Weird Al Yankovic also align in the cover category, as does the "larcenous art" of sampling, and technological variations in dance remixes and mash-ups. Film and television soundtracks and advertisers increasingly rely on versions of familiar pop tunes to assist in marketing their narratives and products. The cover phenomenon in popular culture may be viewed as a postmodern manifestation in music as artists revisit, reinterpret and re-examine a significant cross section of musical styles, periods, genres, individual records, and other artists and their catalogues of works.The cover complex, with its multiple variations, issues, contexts, and re-contextualizations comprises an important and rich popular culture text. These re-recordings represent artifacts which embody artistic, social, cultural, historical, commercial, biographical, and novel meanings. Through homage, allusion, apprenticeship, and parody, among other modes, these diverse musical quotations express, preserve, and distribute popular culture, popular music and their intersecting historical narratives. Play it Again represents the first collection of critical perspectives on the many facets of cover songs in popular music.




Cosmic Weather Report


Book Description

On a planet facing environmental and geopolitical catastrophes on every continent, the idea that human beings need to “evolve or die” is gaining currency on an almost daily basis. Cosmic Weather Report tackles the personal and collective obstacles to world transformation head-on, inspiring readers to rethink the whole purpose of humankind, and change their lives—and the course of the planet’s future—from within. In this book, eminent astrologers Mark Borax and Ellias Lonsdale pool their talents to explore what we are emerging from—“the age we need to leave behind”—and what we are approaching—“the age we’re on the verge of creating.” Readers are encouraged to see how the greatest difficulties can be seized for optimal growth. While Cosmic Weather Report is not an astrology book per se, it uses astrological concepts, which can also be read as metaphors to convey the universal scale of the transformations taking place. Preserving the lecture format and question-and-answer dialogue of Lonsdale and Borax’s famed mystery school, the authors usher readers into an exciting classroom of evolution in which students get to quiz the teachers.




Breaking the Heart Open


Book Description

Bestselling author and psychologist Tony Bates has spent his whole career examining and seeking to understand the lives of others. Here, he turns his therapeutic eye on himself and describes the events and people in his own life that have made him the insightful thinker and teacher that he is today. Tony recalls traumatic events in his childhood that reverberated throughout his life for many years and describes how, with therapy and time, he was eventually able to heal those internal wounds. He recounts the stories of people in pain that affected him most deeply and informed both the direction of his work and his philosophy as a psychologist. By interweaving his own life story with reflections on how psychology and society treat people with mental health vulnerabilities, Tony invites us to reflect with compassion on the meaning of emotional struggles in all our lives. 'A searingly honest, lucid and inspiring account of a life, moving from deep childhood trauma to the hard-earned wisdom of a wounded healer. A compelling read and remarkable achievement.' Richard Kearney 'I was moved by Tony's honesty; humbled by his courage; fascinated by the way he used psychology to make sense of his personal suffering; and inspired by the place he has arrived at this point in his life. Beautifully written, poetic in parts, Tony's book is a treasure trove of wisdom. Everyone should read it.' Alan Carr, PHD 'What a generous gift, so typical of Tony, to those who need to know that in their loneliness or depression they are not alone' Dr Mary McAleese 'This is an emotional read in which the psychologist bears their own soul and highlights why they are so skilled at their work' Niall Breslin




No Man's War


Book Description

A “blunt, bold debut memoir” of women’s lives on an army base and the intimate hardships of war and deployment on this community (Kirkus) Raised as an army brat, Angie Ricketts though she knew what she was in for when she eloped with Darrin – then an Infantry Lieutenant – on the eve of his deployment to Somalia. Since then, Darrin, now a Colonel, has been deployed eight times, serving four of those tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Ricketts has lived every one of those deployments intimately – distant enough to survive the years apart from her husband, but close enough to share a common purpose and a lifestyle they both love. With humor, candor, and a brazen attitude, Ricketts pulls back the curtain on a subculture many readers know, but few will ever experience. Counter to the dramatized snapshot seen on Lifetime's Army Wives, Ricketts digs into the personalities and posturing that officers' wives must survive daily – whether navigating a social event at the base, suffering through a husband's prolonged deployment, or reacting to a close friend's death in combat. At its core, No Man's War is a story of sisterhood and survival. As Ricketts states: "We tread those treacherous waters together. Do we sometimes shove each other's heads underwater for a few seconds? Maybe even on purpose? Of course. Are we sometimes dragged underwater ourselves by the undertow created by all of us struggling together too closely? Without a doubt. But we never let each other drown. Our buoyancy is our survival."




Secrets of The Fourth Way


Book Description




Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus


Book Description

Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan's life in music is revisited by his foremost interpreter -- weaving individual moods and moments into a brilliant history of their changing times. The book begins in Berkeley in 1968, and ends with a piece on Dylan's show at the University of Minnesota -- his very first appearance at his alma mater -- on election night 2008. In between are moments of euphoric discovery: From Marcus's liner notes for the 1967 Basement Tapes (pop music's most famous bootlegged archives) to his exploration of Dylan's reimagining of the American experience in the 1997 Time Out of Mind. And rejection; Marcus's Rolling Stone piece on Dylan's album Self Portrait -- often called the most famous record review ever written -- began with "What is this shit?" and led to his departure from the magazine for five years. Marcus follows not only recordings but performances, books, movies, and all manner of highways and byways in which Bob Dylan has made himself felt in our culture. Together the dozens of pieces collected here comprise a portrait of how, throughout his career, Bob Dylan has drawn upon and reinvented the landscape of traditional American song, its myths and choruses, heroes and villains. They are the result of a more than forty-year engagement between an unparalleled singer and a uniquely acute listener.