This volume covers everything children want to know about their world, from the great empires of the past to the wonders of the natural world. It is full of tough questions, amazing answers and funny facts.
The Book of Knowledge and Wonder is a memoir about claiming a legacy of wonder from knowledge of a devastating event. In some ways it has the feel of a detective story in which Steven Harvey pieces together the life of his mother, Roberta Reinhardt Harvey, who committed suicide when he was eleven, out of the 406 letters she left behind. Before he read the letters his mother had become little more than her death to him, but while writing her story he discovered a woman who, despite her vulnerability to depression, had a large capacity for wonder and a love of familiar things, legacies that she passed on to him. The book tackles subjects of recent fascination in American culture: corporate life and sexism in the fifties, mental illness and its influence on families, and art and learning as a consolation for life's woes, but in the end it is the perennial theme of abiding love despite the odds that fuels the tale. As the memoir unfolds, his mother changes and grows, darkens and retreats as she gives up her chance at a career in nursing, struggles with her position as a housewife, harbors paranoid delusions of having contracted syphilis at childbirth, succumbs to a mysterious, psychic link with her melancholic father, and fights back against depression with counseling, medicine, art, and learning. Harvey charts the way, after his mother's death, that he blotted out her memory almost completely in his new family where his mother was rarely talked about, a protective process of letting go that he did not resist and in a way welcomed, but the book grows out of a nagging longing that never went away, a sense of being haunted that caused the writer to seek out places alone-dribbling a basketball on a lonely court, going on long solitary bicycle rides, walking away from his family to the edge of a mountain overlook, and working daily at his writing desk-where he might feel her presence. In the end, the loss cannot be repaired. Her death, like a camera flash in the dark, blotted out all but a few lingering memories of her in his mind, but the triumph of the book is in the creative collaboration between the dead mother, speaking to her son in letters, and the writer piecing together the story from photographs, snatches of memory, and her words so that he can, for the first time, know her and miss her, not some made up idea of her. The letters do not bring her back-he knows the loss is irrevocable-but as he shaped them into art, the pain, that had been nothing more than a dull throb, changed in character, becoming more diffuse and ardent, like heartache.
This book has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. We have represented this book in the same form as it was first published. Hence any marks seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature.
Doris Grumbach’s chilling look at the ways childhood experiences create transformative echoes that last throughout adulthood “I want to lead you all into the ocean to see if you will drown.” During the summer of 1929 four children come together and change the course of their lives forever. Caleb and Kate Flowers live an isolated existence with their mother until Lionel Schwartz and Roslyn Hellman come to Far Rockaway for the summer. Roslyn, quickly stepping in as ringleader, dominates the summer’s activities, and what appear to be innocent childhood games are actually very real confrontations with the group’s most closely held secrets. As the summer progresses, Caleb and Kate’s relationship grows from the affectionate love of siblings to something less innocent. The ensuing years will bring profound realizations and undeniable passions for all four as they move through adolescence and grow up. Doris Grumbach’s acutely intimate, deeply truthful, and often tragic tale of self-discovery never wavers.
We all have questions ... "Who actually built the pyramids?" "What happens after we die?" "Who created crop circles? And why?" "Nostradamus: the Healer-the Prophet-the Man" "Cleopatra: the women behind the legend" "Who actually controls humanity?" "If Nikola Tesla was so important, why is he so forgotten?" "What is the purpose of life?" But who has the answers? Without a doubt, author Roman Harambura believes, we hold the answers ... within our imagination, the greatest gift of all. The universe, he explains, is filled with life, and human beings are not alone. Earth, our home, is simply one planet in a sky filled with thousands of universes, each with the potential to harbor life beyond our human ability to understand. If we can simply come to accept and embrace the fact that we are just one small part of the inconceivably vast miracle of life across the stars, our own world would change. Imagination, in Harambura's experience, is our greatest gift. In his The Book of Knowledge: I Am Alien, he shares an eclectic and thought-provoking array of ideas to inspire, engage, and capture your imagination. As expressed by a being known as Kuntarkis, the hundreds of lessons, insights, and experiences within are intended to instigate your own questions and journey of discovery. Kuntarkis also answers questions submitted by people from all over the world. This book is highly recommended for those who are seeking a broader understanding, not just about their own lives, but life in all aspects.