Describes how the author, who vowed her children would never suffer the pain she endured during her parents' divorce, was confronted by the realities of her own failed marriage, which compelled her to reevaluate her views about family.
Find hope even in these dark times with this rediscovered masterpiece, a companion to his international bestseller Man’s Search for Meaning. Eleven months after he was liberated from the Nazi concentration camps, Viktor E. Frankl held a series of public lectures in Vienna. The psychiatrist, who would soon become world famous, explained his central thoughts on meaning, resilience, and the importance of embracing life even in the face of great adversity. Published here for the very first time in English, Frankl’s words resonate as strongly today—as the world faces a coronavirus pandemic, social isolation, and great economic uncertainty—as they did in 1946. He offers an insightful exploration of the maxim “Live as if you were living for the second time,” and he unfolds his basic conviction that every crisis contains opportunity. Despite the unspeakable horrors of the camps, Frankl learned from the strength of his fellow inmates that it is always possible to “say yes to life”—a profound and timeless lesson for us all.
Jacques Lacan continues to be subject to the most extravagant interpretations. Angelic to some, he is demonic to others. To recall Lacan’s career, now that the heroic age of psychoanalysis is over, is to remember an intellectual and literary adventure that occupies a founding place in our modernity. Lacan went against the current of many of the hopes aroused by 1968, but embraced their paradoxes, and his language games and wordplay resonate today as so many injunctions to replace rampant individualism with a heightened social consciousness. Widely recognized as the leading authority on Lacan, Élisabeth Roudinesco revisits his life and work: what it was – and what it remains.
It is an understatement to say that women are real people with true and great abilities just like men, yet it does seem like forever that we have been debating the rights of women and how they match up against the rights of men. By every reckoning, there is no blockage to the total equality of women to men, yet again, there it is. In spite of everything that has been accomplished, there still exists somewhat of a prejudice. In spite of this prejudice, young women need to know about those great, sometimes not-too-well-known, women who have pushed and prodded and fought like crazy to get todays women to a spot that would have been unheard of only a relatively short time agowomen who deserve the highest praise, and placed in the highest echelons of respect and honor. And even in politics, women have been able to bring more choices for the voters, with more women being elected as mayors, to county and state legislatures, executive offices, congress, and beyond. And despite the hectic pace and all the infighting, there have been far fewer who have been forced to resign because of incompetence or criminality. Many of the women discussed in these pages could have been even more useful and helpful had they not had faced that wordtradition. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were some team. Their organizational skills and tireless efforts could not have been met with failure. It goes back to Stanton calling a womens rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Someday we will truly be a land of equality, practicing what it preaches, and the women will get us there. Hopefully, this book will encourage young women of today to keep up the good fight.
In Spite of Everything Book 1 chronicles the struggle of my brothers and I to overcome the tragic death of our Mother, and the devastating bombing raids during the second world war, highlighting the efforts of our Grandparents to keep us together and guide us safely through that traumatic part of London history. Followed by the forced evacuation and safe return to Bermondsey,. School days prove to be very confrontational mainly due to religious bigotry, but then two years of work in the London docks turn the boy into a man. This part of my story ends with my entry into the British Army to start my compulsory two years National Service. Pat Coppard (Pat Cee)
“For most of my generation—Generation X—there is only one question: ‘When did your parents split?’ Our lives have been framed by the answer. Ask us. We remember everything.” In this powerful, poignant, and often laugh-out-loud-funny memoir, Susan Gregory Thomas reflects on that life-defining question and its answer through a lens imprinted by memory and sharpened by time. Raised in Berkeley, Thomas grew up in a seemingly stable household. But when the family moved east when she was twelve, her father, a charming alcoholic, ran off with his secretary, and her mother collapsed. Thomas and her younger brother joined the ubiquitous flocks of 1980s latchkey kids: collateral damage in their parents’ wars, sustaining private injuries they would try to self-treat throughout adolescence and adulthood. When Thomas became a wife and mother in her early thirties, she made a fierce promise: She would never let her own children know the scorched earth of divorce. It was a vow shared by many of her peers, who, in reaction to the divorces of the 1970s and ’80s, sought out marriages based on deeper friendships and more genuine partnerships than those of previous generations. So Thomas was stunned when, after sixteen years with the man she considered her best friend, she found her marriage coming to an end. Not only did the divorce reopen all the old wounds, but she would now have to contend with the aftershocks affecting her two young daughters. In Spite of Everything is an astounding, bright, and brilliantly told account of a mother’s fight to protect her children’s world and to make sense of her own troubled past—and the culture of divorce in which she and Generation X were raised. Interwoven with original, hilarious insights on divorce and parenthood, Thomas’s eye-opening, gut-wrenching, ultimately optimistic story holds a mirror up to a whole generation.
In Spite of Everything invites us into the lives of twenty-two ordinary, but also extraordinary women. Part Ellen DeGeneres, part Studs Terkel, Leila Peters allows the women to tell their own storiesabout their lives, their challenges, their relationships. The women trust herand usenough to share their difficulties and failures as well as their joys and successes and we are richer for their honesty. Although these women share being in long-term lesbian relationships, their lives are incredibly varied. We have much to learn from them about loving and living well. Dr. Nancy Marie Robertson, Director of Womens Studies Indiana University/ Purdue University. Indianapolis Leila Peters has chronicled the inspiring and captivating stories of lesbian couples from all walks of life who maintained long lasting and flourishing relationships in the face of a disapproving and sometimes hostile family and community. This book is important not only as an historical record of determined women who prevailed against the odds, but as powerful evidence of the urgent need to legitimize same-sex relationships through the legal recognition of gay marriage. Barbara Baird, Esquire, With Chuck Loring, Barbara organized the first Lambda Legal Indiana Benefit Dinner, a premiere fund raising event which benefits the legal needs of the LGBT community. Stories, storiesI just love to read stories! Warm, thought-provoking, hilarious, gut-wrenching, sexy, wonderful stories. Leila spins the tales of these womens lives sensitively, honestly, and with just the right amount of background. Mary Byrne, Executive Director of Indiana Youth Group In Spite of Everything balances painful stories of sickness, poverty, prejudice and repression with tales of romance, joy and passion. This book is a walk down the not-always-happy memory lanes of lesbian relationships in the latter half of the 20th century into the twenty-first century, rich with detail, and narrated in a matter-of-fact way that sugarcoats nothing but leaves the reader feeling that with love, anything is possible. Id love to see a five years later sequel, bringing us up to date on these fascinating women. Becky Thacker, Amazon Girls Handbook, Wicker Park Press, 2002 Faithful Unto Death, University of Michigan Press, Fall 2010 I was much impressed by the diversity of Relationships described in Leila Peters book. The themes of Honesty, Struggle, and Success are compelling. Its power lies in the telling of real life stories of Women fighting for love. Joseffa Crowe Storyteller, author of Growing Up Under the Swastika.
Julian didn’t expect to have a second chance at life. Then his son dragged him out of the forest, and he met Kaspar. Kaspar thought he’d eventually go home now that the carriers in the forest are free, but Julian walked into his life and made him rethink everything. Julian and Kaspar want to be together, but even with the new laws and the majority of the council on their side, it doesn’t mean that people will look kindly at two carriers who want to be together, even if one of them thinks he can’t have any more children. That’s only one of their problems. Kaspar is much younger than Julian, who already has an adult son. Julian doesn’t know how to live with people after spending the past twenty-five years in the forest. And the humans are coming, something that could cause more problems than anything they are prepared for.
Canada’s most celebrated and acclaimed actor lets loose in a magnificent memoir that will delight and enchant readers across the country. A rollicking, rich self-portrait written by one of today’s greatest living actors. The story of a “young wastrel, incurably romantic, spoiled rotten” – his privileged Montreal background, rich in Victorian gentility, included steam yachts, rare orchid farms, music lessons in Paris and Berlin – “who tore himself away from the ski slopes to break into the big, bad world of theater not from the streets up but from an Edwardian living room down.” Plummer writes of his early acting days – on radio and stage with William Shatner and other fellow Canadians; of the early days of the Stratford Festival in southern Ontario; of his Broadway debut at twenty-four in The Starcross Story, starring Eva Le Gallienne (“It opened and closed in one night, but what a night!”); of joining Peter Hall’s Royal Shakespeare Company (its other members included Judi Dench, Vanessa Redgrave and Peter O’Toole); of his first picture, Stage Struck, directed by Sidney Lumet; and of The Sound of Music, which he affectionately dubbed “S&M.” He writes about his legendary colleagues: Dame Judith Anderson (“the Tasmanian devil from Down Under”); Sir Tyrone Guthrie; Sir Laurence Olivier; Elia Kazan (“this chameleon of chameleons might change into you, wear your skin, steal your soul”); and “that reprobate” Jason Robards, among many others. A revelation of the wild and exuberant ride that is the actor’s – at least this actor’s – life.
Francis Spufford's Unapologetic is a wonderfully pugnacious defense of Christianity. Refuting critics such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the "new atheist" crowd, Spufford, a former atheist and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, argues that Christianity is recognizable, drawing on the deep and deeply ordinary vocabulary of human feeling, satisfying those who believe in it by offering a ruthlessly realistic account of the grown-up dignity of Christian experience. Fans of C. S. Lewis, N. T. Wright, Marilynne Robinson, Mary Karr, Diana Butler Bass, Rob Bell, and James Martin will appreciate Spufford's crisp, lively, and abashedly defiant thesis. Unapologetic is a book for believers who are fed up with being patronized, for non-believers curious about how faith can possibly work in the twenty-first century, and for anyone who feels there is something indefinably wrong, literalistic, anti-imaginative and intolerant about the way the atheist case is now being made.