Story Alchemy


Book Description

The title Story Alchemy isn't a metaphor. It's the real deal. Ideas for stories, the prima materia of the story alchemist, are gifts. They are provocations from the unconscious, lures. The unconscious lies in wait, stalking you with a story aimed directly at your heart. Even when you get an idea from the outside world, it has resonated with something locked away inside your Unconscious. A story has its own ego. It wants to be told. Once the idea has come to you, and it comes of its own volition, you must consciously establish contact with the psychic energy that contains the story. It takes a collaboration between Consciousness and the Unconscious to bring the words across. We know certain things about stories that will aid us in the telling. Story is a particular form of psychic energy to which details cling, a unity of psychic energy. That energy has the same shape, the same form, but the details are different, so different that we hardly recognize the form from one story to another. Cinderella is such a story that has been told many times under different guises throughout the centuries. You must find your stories, those meant for you alone. To tell them, your awareness must cross the psychic threshold, the Iris of Time, and enter the Imaginarium. Story Alchemy unveils the alchemical processes involved in that divine art, the Philosopher's Stone of storytelling.




Strange Alchemy


Book Description

When 114 people go missing on Roanoke Island in what seems like an eerie repeat of what happened hundreds of years before, seventeen-year-olds Miranda and Grant may be the key to the mysteries past and present.







The Alchemy of Loss


Book Description

Like A Year of Magical Thinking, this powerful and touching book is both an inspirational read and a comfort to those who are looking for help in overcoming loss. The phone rang. It was my husband Arron telling me that he was at Windows of the World in the World Trade Center. “There’s been a bomb!” he said. I had been preparing my six-year-old daughter for her second day of first grade, balancing my two-year-old son on my hip, and I was distracted. “OK . . .” I managed to say back. It was 8:49 a.m. on September 11, 2001. He never came home. Abigail Carter is smart, funny, perceptive, and bereft. In the eyes of most, herself included, she had it all — a full life with a loving successful husband and two beautiful children. But in a horrifying instant watched by the world, it was gone, and her life and her children’s were changed irreparably. How does one learn to live again after tragedy? The Alchemy of Loss is Abby’s moving story of answering that unimaginable question. Veering away from the trite and pat grief books, which offer one-size-fits-all solutions to this most deeply personal and unique experience, she realizes that each person must forge her own path through grief, and that there are no right answers. Abby’s journey took her six years, in which she turned everything she knew about herself upside down in order to learn to live again. She charts this journey in the year’s most remarkable memoir. The Alchemy of Loss is her gift to us all — reminding us that life throws up roadblocks we can’t anticipate, and that we cannot live well if we live with regrets.




From Alchemy to Chemistry in Picture and Story


Book Description

Praise for From Alchemy to Chemistry in Picture and Story "The timeline from alchemy to chemistry contains some of the most mystifying ideas and images that humans have ever devised. Arthur Greenberg shows us this wonderful world in a unique and highly readable book." —Dr. John Emsley, author of The Elements of Murder: A History of Poison "Art Greenberg takes us, through text and lovingly selected images, on a 'magical mystery tour' of the chemical universe. No matter what page you open, there is a chemical story worth telling." —Dr. Roald Hoffmann, Nobel Laureate and coauthor of Chemistry Imagined "Chemistry has perhaps the most intricate, most fascinating, and certainly most romantic history of all the sciences. Arthur Greenberg's essays-delightful, learned, quirky, highly personal, and richly illustrated with contemporary drawings (many of great rarity and beauty)-provide a kaleidoscope of intellectual landscapes, bringing the experiments, the ideas, and the human figures of chemistry's past intensely alive." —Dr. Oliver Sacks, author of Awakenings From Alchemy to Chemistry in Picture and Story takes you on an illustrated tour of chemistry's fascinating history, from its early focus on the spiritual relationship between man and nature to some of today's most cutting-edge applications. Drawing from rare publications and artwork that span over five centuries, the book contains nearly 200 essays and over 350 illustrations-including 24 in full color-that tell the engaging story of the development of this fundamental science and its connection with human history. Join Arthur Greenberg as he combines the "best of the best" from his previous works (as well as several new essays) to paint a colorful picture of chemistry's remarkable origins!




Crucibles


Book Description

Brief biographies of great chemists, from Trevisan and Paracelsus to Bohr and Lawrence, provide a survey of the discoveries and advances that shaped modern chemistry




Seventh Street Alchemy


Book Description

The 2004 winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, Brian Chikwava's "Seventh Street Alchemy" is featured alongside shortlisted stories from 2004, compositions from the Caine Prize's March 2005 Workshop for African Writers, and Charles Mungoshi's previously unpublished "Letter from a Friend" in this inspired collection of work from some of Africa's most promising young and new writers.




Alchemy and Rose


Book Description

A beautiful and sweeping historical novel that takes the reader from the west coast of New Zealand, to Scotland and Melbourne in the 1870s 'Its portrayal of life in a gold-rush town is vivid, and Rose's story is absorbing' The Times 'Worth reading for its occasional streaks of brilliance and insight' Telegraph India 'A epic read . . . a beautifully written, evocative novel that I anticipate you reading and re-reading for years to come' Woman's Way 'A gripping page-turner' Woman 1866. Will Stewart is one of many who have left their old lives behind to seek their fortunes in New Zealand's last great gold rush. The conditions are hostile and the outlook bleak, but he must push on in his uncertain search for the elusive buried treasure. Rose is about to arrive on the shores of South Island when a storm hits and her ship is wrecked. Just when all seems lost she is snatched from the jaws of death by Will, who risks his life to save her. Drawn together by circumstance, they stay together by choice and for a while it seems that their stars have finally aligned. But after a terrible misunderstanding they are cruelly separated, and their new-found happiness is shattered. As Will chases Rose across oceans and continents, he must come to terms with the possibility that he might never see her again. And if he does, he will have to face the man who took her . . . Readers love Alchemy and Rose: 'A real rollercoaster of emotions' 5* reader review 'One of her best yet' 5* reader review 'Both gripping and romantic (quite a combination!) and keeps you hooked right up to the end' 5* reader review 'One of those books that you need to find out what happened, but at the same time you don't want it to finish' 5* reader review 'Couldn't put it down, a real page turner' 5* reader review




The Story of N


Book Description

In The Story of N, Hugh S. Gorman analyzes the notion of sustainability from a fresh perspective—the integration of human activities with the biogeochemical cycling of nitrogen—and provides a supportive alternative to studying sustainability through the lens of climate change and the cycling of carbon. It is the first book to examine the social processes by which industrial societies learned to bypass a fundamental ecological limit and, later, began addressing the resulting concerns by establishing limits of their own The book is organized into three parts. Part I, “The Knowledge of Nature,” explores the emergence of the nitrogen cycle before humans arrived on the scene and the changes that occurred as stationary agricultural societies took root. Part II, “Learning to Bypass an Ecological Limit,” examines the role of science and market capitalism in accelerating the pace of innovation, eventually allowing humans to bypass the activity of nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Part III, “Learning to Establish Human-Defined Limits,” covers the twentieth-century response to the nitrogen-related concerns that emerged as more nitrogenous compounds flowed into the environment. A concluding chapter, “The Challenge of Sustainability,” places the entire story in the context of constructing an ecological economy in which innovations that contribute to sustainable practices are rewarded.




A Story Of Artists


Book Description

Whereas much has been written on the subject of art, the literature on the figure of the artist has been relatively scant. There are certainly countless biographies as well as essays dedicated to particular aspects of art - for example, the relationship between artists and their patrons - but there is no comprehensive text that puts together the pieces of the puzzle showing how the figure of the artist changed over the millennia. An Artist’s Story of Artists is an attempt to make good this lacuna by retracing the long and often fragmented path of the artist, from the Palaeolithic until this morning, more or less. During this journey, artists assumed and shed many guises. They were magicians, priests, legends, slaves, salaried workers, entrepreneurs, inventors, lunatics, revolutionaries, scientists, patrons and much else besides. They experimented with techniques and ideas, always aiming to find new ways to make art, and overcoming the boundaries determined by society, as well as those established by themselves. Highlights of this story are the complex relationships artists have always had with writing and literature, philosophy, technology, politics, religion and criticism, and the weighty stigma on manual work that for 5,000 years subdued them as they were regarded as halfwits who were good with their hands. This substantial work is divided into five phases, five great periods that witnessed the radical ways in which artists changed as they fought and lost battles among themselves and with society, and the ups and downs they experienced from being revered shamans reduced to reviled labourers, later raised to geniuses and then turned into doomed and damned artists. This book examines the role played by optical instruments, the reasons behind the origins of exhibitions, the paradoxes of art education, the clichés affecting artists, and the influences and interferences that have made them what they are today. The book finally examine