Letters to Ambrose Merton
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Publisher:
Published: 2002
Total Pages: 82
ISBN-13:
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Author:
Publisher:
Published: 2002
Total Pages: 82
ISBN-13:
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Published: 2000
Total Pages: 228
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DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Jan Harold Brunvand
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1984
Total Pages: 257
ISBN-13: 0393303217
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDiscusses over forty stories of improbable events told as true and embelished with local details which the author calls urban legends.
Author: Iona Archibald Opie
Publisher:
Published: 1955
Total Pages: 223
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: William John Thoms
Publisher:
Published: 1945
Total Pages: 8
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Jan Harold Brunvand
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1994-10-17
Total Pages: 370
ISBN-13: 0393346722
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAmerica's premier folk detective is back on the case, sniffing out those zany but dubious stories that "really happened" to a friend of your sister's boyfriend's accountant's mechanic. Jan Harold Brunvand—''Mr. Urban Legend" [Smithsonian]—tracks the most fabulous tales making today's cocktail-party circuit and shows why those stories that sound too good to be true probably are too good to be true. The eponymous episode—"The Baby Train"—sheds light on certain predawn activities that have linked unusually high birth rates to the whim of train schedule makers. Other stories offer a revealing peek behind the story of "The Exploding Bra," expose the embarrassing source of "The Hairdresser's Error," resurrect a "Failed Suicide" Buster Keaton would have died for, and show why adults are better off not bringing their comic book fantasies out of the closet. From "Superhero Hijinx" to "The Shocking Videotape" to "The Accidental Cannibal," The Baby Train uncovers the mysteries behind some of the bawdiest, goriest, funniest, most pyrotechnic urban legends yet.
Author: Thomas Merton
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
Published: 2007-02-13
Total Pages: 235
ISBN-13: 1590303482
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhen Thomas Merton entered a Trappist monastery in December 1941, he turned his back on secular life—including a very promising literary career. He sent his journals, a novel-in-progess, and copies of all his poems to his mentor, Columbia professor Mark Van Doren, for safe keeping, fully expecting to write little, if anything, ever again. It was a relatively short-lived resolution, for Merton almost immediately found himself being assigned writing tasks by his Abbot—one of which was the autobiographical essay that blossomed into his international best-seller The Seven Storey Mountain. That book made him famous overnight, and for a time he struggled with the notion that the vocation of the monk and the vocation of the writer were incompatible. Monasticism called for complete surrender to the absolute, whereas writing demanded a tactical withdrawal from experience in order to record it. He eventually came to accept his dual vocation as two sides of the same spiritual coin and used it as a source of creative tension the rest of his life. Merton’s thoughts on writing have never been compiled into a single volume until now. Robert Inchausti has mined the vast Merton literature to discover what he had to say on a whole spectrum of literary topics, including writing as a spiritual calling, the role of the Christian writer in a secular society, the joys and mysteries of poetry, and evaluations of his own literary work. Also included are fascinating glimpses of his take on a range of other writers, including Henry David Thoreau, Flannery O’Connor, Dylan Thomas, Albert Camus, James Joyce, and even Henry Miller, along with many others.
Author: Robert K. Merton
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2011-11-28
Total Pages: 342
ISBN-13: 1400841526
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom the names of cruise lines and bookstores to an Australian ranch and a nudist camp outside of Atlanta, the word serendipity--that happy blend of wisdom and luck by which something is discovered not quite by accident--is today ubiquitous. This book traces the word's eventful history from its 1754 coinage into the twentieth century--chronicling along the way much of what we now call the natural and social sciences. The book charts where the term went, with whom it resided, and how it fared. We cross oceans and academic specialties and meet those people, both famous and now obscure, who have used and abused serendipity. We encounter a linguistic sage, walk down the illustrious halls of the Harvard Medical School, attend the (serendipitous) birth of penicillin, and meet someone who "manages serendipity" for the U.S. Navy. The story of serendipity is fascinating; that of The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity, equally so. Written in the 1950s by already-eminent sociologist Robert Merton and Elinor Barber, the book--though occasionally and most tantalizingly cited--was intentionally never published. This is all the more curious because it so remarkably anticipated subsequent battles over research and funding--many of which centered on the role of serendipity in science. Finally, shortly after his ninety-first birthday, following Barber's death and preceding his own by but a little, Merton agreed to expand and publish this major work. Beautifully written, the book is permeated by the prodigious intellectual curiosity and generosity that characterized Merton's influential On the Shoulders of Giants. Absolutely entertaining as the history of a word, the book is also tremendously important to all who value the miracle of intellectual discovery. It represents Merton's lifelong protest against that rhetoric of science that defines discovery as anything other than a messy blend of inspiration, perspiration, error, and happy chance--anything other than serendipity.
Author: Gillian Bennett
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Published: 2009-09-18
Total Pages: 330
ISBN-13: 160473065X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBecause they are so often told as news, contemporary legends force us to reevaluate life as we know it. They confront us with macabre, fantastic, horrific, or hilarious characters and events that seem to come straight out of myths and folktales, but are presented as present day events. The difficulty is that it is not at all easy to decide whether these often disturbing stories should be treated as reliable or dismissed as fantasy. The legends explored in this book are some of the most bizarre, gruesome, and politically sensitive stories in the contemporary legend canon. At any moment a body may be invaded by noxious creatures, deliberately infected with deadly disease, or raided to provide donor organs for sick foreigners. These are "winter's tales," the stuff of nightmares. In this book Gillian Bennett traces the cultural history of six legends, well-known in Europe and America from medieval times to the present day. Appearing in broadsides, ballads, myths, ancient and modern legends, novels, plays, films, television shows, and stories told in the oral tradition, these legends are not just silly tales which can be dismissed as trivial and untrue. They reveal much about the concerns and fears of everyday life and demonstrate the limits of knowledge and power in the modern world.