Leaving Eden brilliantly brings to life that watershed moment in our history when man -- and woman -- turned their backs on the most ancient of laws in order to strike out in independence. Told from the point of view young Na'amah, Adam's daughter by his first wife, Lilith, it tells of the passing of the ancient Goddess and the birth of the new God. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
They are Jen and Zoe, the beautiful and charismatic identical twins, living in the seemingly idyllic village of Eden during the 1970's. Suddenly, one night Zoe is forced to flee under mysterious circumstances, leaving security, family and everything she has ever known behind. Jen remains in Eden with a crippling disease, a young daughter, and an unwelcome and very persistent ghost. The unlucky twin is caught in the midst of not only her own problems, but of family members like poor, hysterical Aunt Connie, who keeps misplacing things, and Aunt Caroline whose family is in a state of total disrepair. Once Zoe leaves Eden, her life is on the upswing. She has a successful career as a music reporter for a young, hip television network and more money than anyone knows. When she meets Clive, the rock 'n' roll superstar, her life is taken to another level of success and excess that sweeps her from her home and opens doors for new opportunities she's never dreamed of. Sean, the gentle and supportive husband, is caught in the middle of the fast lane lifestyle and is always looking for the exit ramp and a normal family life. Zoe's best friend, Abbey, the successful and beautiful singer/songwriter, tries to keep her feet on the ground, while understanding the world she has been thrown into and the temptations found there. Jen's world becomes increasingly complicated as her spiritual companion refuses to leave. Her expectations to live the way she chooses seem beyond her grasp, but she is determined to make it happen. Both women possess something the other wants but cannot seem to find. They struggle to balance trying to have it all while being consumed by wanting more.
“The promise of beauty—the kind of real, personal beauty that can transform a person’s life—arrived in Eden, Virginia, on the fourth Thursday in June.” That’s the day Tallie Brock sees the sign at the Klip-N-Kurl, the beauty parlor where she works part-time, sweeping the floor and refilling shampoo bottles, among other chores. (What she really enjoys is listening to the women chat, gossip, and buzz like a beehive.) The sign in the front window announces GLAMOUR DAY. For twenty dollars, a woman can receive a complete professional makeover—and a glossy nine-by-twelve-inch picture of the result. For Tallie, the glam shot just may be her ticket out of Lovettsville. She dreams of someday going to Hollywood and becoming a Star. Her mother, who was the spitting image of Natalie Wood, used to say “the sky’s the limit.” In fact, her mother once left home to make a movie in Los Angeles. But she returned six months later without whispering a word about it—and tried to pick up her life right where she left off. Tallie noticed something different, though. And her mother’s best friend, Martha Lee, the plainest woman within miles, knew the secret that soon the whole town would discover. At the time, Tallie was just afraid her mother would get antsy and disappear again. She was only half right. But that was four years ago, and now Glamour Day is fast approaching. While jotting down observations in her Rulebook for Living (such as “Women with fat faces shouldn’t wear bangs” and “Beetles signify change”), Tallie finds herself changing in unexpected ways—as she tests the limits of trust, explores her growing attraction to a boy from a family as rich as her imagination, and reaches for the sky like she has never done before. By turns funny and tender, joyous and poignant, bestselling author Anne LeClaire has written a winning, stylish novel of small-town Southern life— and what it means to be a mother, daughter, best friend, wife, and lover.
In this stunning work of narrative nonfiction, the author tours the front lines of ecological invasion--in Hawaii, Tasmania, Guam, San Francisco, in lush rain forests, through underground lava tubes, on the deck of an Alaska-bound oil tanker.
Offering a philosophical meditation on the problem of evil, this book uses the Genesis story of the Fall as the starting point for an articulation of the human condition, and shows us that evil expresses the rage of a subject who knows both that he is an image of an infinite God and that he must die.
Out of Eden presents the rigorous investigations and musings of a poet-essayist on the ways in which modern artists have confronted and transfigured the realist tradition of representation. Di Piero pursues his theme with an autobiographical force and immediacy. He fixes his attention on painters and photographers as disparate as Cezanne, Boccioni, Pollock, Warhol, Edward Weston, and Robert Frank. There is indeed a satisfying sweep to this collection: Matisse, Giacometti, Morandi, Bacon, the Tuscan Macchiaioli of the late nineteenth century, the Futurists of the early modern period, and the American pop painters. Di Piero's analysis of modern images also probes the relation between new kinds of image making and transcendence. The author argues that Matisse and Giacometti, for example, continued to exercise the religious imagination even in a desacralized age. And because Di Piero believes that the visual arts and poetry live intimate, coordinate lives, his essays speak of the relation of poetry to forms in art. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.
In a brilliant synthesis of genetic, archaeological, linguistic and climatic data, Oppenheimer challenges current thinking with his claim that there was only one successful migration out of Africa. In 1988 Newsweek headlined the startling discovery that everyone alive on the earth today can trace their maternal DNA back to one woman who lived in Africa 150,000 years ago. It was thought that modern humans populated the world through a series of migratory waves from their African homeland. Now an even more radical view has emerged, that the members of just one group are the ancestors of all non-Africans now alive, and that this group crossed the mouth of the Red Sea a mere 85,000 years ago. It means that not only is every person on the planet descended from one African 'Eve' but every non-African is related to a more recent Eve, from that original migratory group. This is a revolutionary new theory about our origins that is both scholarly and entertaining, a remarkable account of the kinship of all humans. Further details of the findings in this book are presented at www.bradshawfoundation.com/stephenoppenheimer/
How did the replication bomb we call ”life” begin and where in the world, or rather, in the universe, is it heading? Writing with characteristic wit and an ability to clarify complex phenomena (the New York Times described his style as ”the sort of science writing that makes the reader feel like a genius”), Richard Dawkins confronts this ancient mystery.
A masterpiece of Biblical scope, and the magnum opus of one of America’s most enduring authors, in a commemorative hardcover edition In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden "the first book," and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set in the rich farmland of California's Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. The masterpiece of Steinbeck’s later years, East of Eden is a work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. Adapted for the 1955 film directed by Elia Kazan introducing James Dean, and read by thousands as the book that brought Oprah’s Book Club back, East of Eden has remained vitally present in American culture for over half a century.
On a night of torrential rain, a warrior appears near the Colombia River, where the Chinook people thrived before the hydroelectric dams came and changed their entire way of life. He has come to reclaim the river, to return it to its original majesty. Soon after, government employees are found murdered with elaborate harpoons. As the body count grows, Francine Smohalla, a government marine biologist of Chinook and white descent, embarks on her own investigation of the bizarre murders. As she desperately tries to find the killer and prevent any other murders, she finds herself spinning in the convergence of ethnic hatreds between Indians and whites, an unlikely relationship with a kindred spirit whose troubled life has led him to contemplate terrorism and apocalypse, an ancient prophecy about the return of her beloved salmon, and the giant dams on the Columbia that loom large and as seemingly immovable as the mountains themselves. A River Out of Eden is a gripping literary thriller straight from today’s headlines set against the uniquely American contradictions of the Pacific Northwest.
