Life Isn't Always a Bed of Roses is a collecting of poems that deal with life and its many facets. From soft palatable verse to raw chunks of pseudo reality the poems take you on a journey across the barriers of realms seldom visited by most. Although it falls in the genre of poetry it is actually humanistic verse for the common folk. Hopefully youll laugh a little, maybe even cry a little but most of all it should make you think about life from a number of different viewpoints.
Rose Chan, “Queen of Striptease” at just 27 years old, enthralled men young and old in the heyday of cabaret in 1950s Malaya. Her accidental shot to fame, thanks to a wardrobe malfunction in which her bra snapped, catapulted her into the limelight. In No Bed of Roses, Cecil Rajendra pens an account of her life — her childhood in Soochow, China, and then in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, her five marriages and personal struggles, how she circumvented the colonial decency laws that forbade nudity, and finally her fight with cancer that took her life in 1987 at the age of 62.
'I have all the money in the world with which I can buy whatever I prophesised but not what I need and that is peace' Young Lord Jack Harold of the Westminster, a noble and handsome lad. A well-mannered gentleman in the eyes of all the well known but seemingly struggles with himself and people around him. Unusual events of his life haunts him to the point where his sins start reflecting through his own shadow. The only solution to this unbearable anxiety is...Death.
What happens when a former Zen Buddhist monk and his feminist wife experience an apparition of the Virgin Mary? “This book could not have come at a more auspicious time, and the message is mystical perfection, not to mention a courageous one. I adore this book.”—Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit Before a vision of a mysterious “Lady” invited Clark Strand and Perdita Finn to pray the rosary, they were not only uninterested in becoming Catholic but finished with institutional religion altogether. Their main spiritual concerns were the fate of the planet and the future of their children and grandchildren in an age of ecological collapse. But this Lady barely even referred to the Church and its proscriptions. Instead, she spoke of the miraculous power of the rosary to transform lives and heal the planet, and revealed the secrets she had hidden within the rosary’s prayers and mysteries—secrets of a past age when forests were the only cathedrals and people wove rose garlands for a Mother whose loving presence was as close as the ground beneath their feet. She told Strand and Finn: The rosary is My body, and My body is the body of the world. Your body is one with that body. What cause could there be for fear? Weaving together their own remarkable story of how they came to the rosary, their discoveries about the eco-feminist wisdom at the heart of this ancient devotion, and the life-changing revelations of the Lady herself, the authors reveal an ancestral path—available to everyone, religious or not—that returns us to the powerful healing rhythms of the natural world.
In Salvation and Sovereignty, Kenneth Keathley asks, “What shall a Christian do who is convinced of certain central tenets of Calvinism but not its corollaries?” He then writes, “I see salvation as a sovereign work of grace but suspect that the usual Calvinist understanding of sovereignty (that God is the cause of all things) is not sustained by the biblical witness as a whole.” Aiming to resolve this matter, the author argues that just three of Calvinism’s five TULIP points can be defended scripturally and instead builds on the ROSES acronym first presented by Timothy George (Radical depravity, Overcoming grace, Sovereign election, Eternal life, Singular redemption). In relation, Keathley looks at salvation and sovereignty through the lens of Molinism, a doctrine named after Luis Molina (1535-1600) that is based on a strong notion of God’s control and an equally firm affirmation of human freedom.
Written with compassion, intelligence and insight, A Bed of Red Flowers is a profoundly moving portrait of life under occupation and the unforgettable story of a family, a people and a country. "The picnic of the red flower" is a traditional time of celebration for Afghans. One of Nelofer Pazira's earliest memories is of people gathering in the countryside to admire the tulips and poppies carpeting the landscape. It is the mid-1970s, and her parents are building a future for themselves and their young children in the city of Kabul. But when Nelofer is just five the Communists take power and her father, a respected doctor, is imprisoned along with thousands of other Afghans. The following year, the Russians invade Afghanistan, which becomes a police state and the center of a bloody conflict between the Soviet army and American-backed mujahidin fighters. A climate of violence and fear reigns. For Nelofer, there is no choice but to grow up fast. At eleven, she and her friends throw stones at the Russian tanks that stir up dust and animosity in the streets of Kabul. As a teenager she joins a resistance group, hiding her gun from her parents. Her emotional refuge is her friendship with her classmate Dyana, with whom she shares a passion for poetry, dreams and a better life. After a decade of war, Nelofer's family escapes across the mountains to Pakistan and later to Canada, where she continues to write to Dyana. When her friend suddenly stops writing, Nelofer fears for Dyana's life. With lyrical, narrative prose, A Bed of Red Flowers movingly tells Pazira's haunting story, as well as Afghanistan's story as a nation.
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time From the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by Truman Capote—also available are Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Other Voices, Other Rooms (in one volume), Portraits and Observations, and The Complete Stories Truman Capote’s masterpiece, In Cold Blood, created a sensation when it was first published, serially, in The New Yorker in 1965. The intensively researched, atmospheric narrative of the lives of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, and of the two men, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, who brutally killed them on the night of November 15, 1959, is the seminal work of the “new journalism.” Perry Smith is one of the great dark characters of American literature, full of contradictory emotions. “I thought he was a very nice gentleman,” he says of Herb Clutter. “Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.” Told in chapters that alternate between the Clutter household and the approach of Smith and Hickock in their black Chevrolet, then between the investigation of the case and the killers’ flight, Capote’s account is so detailed that the reader comes to feel almost like a participant in the events.
Careful writers and speakers agree that clichés are generally to be avoided. However, nearly all of us continue to use them. Why do they persist in our language? In It's Been Said Before, lexicographer Orin Hargraves examines the peculiar idea and power of the cliché. He helps readers understand why certain phrases became clichés and why they should be avoided -- or why they still have life left in them. Indeed, clichés can be useful -- even powerful. And few people even agree on which expressions are clichés and which are not. Many regard any frequent idiom as a cliché, and a phrase regarded as a cliché in one context may be seen simply as an effective expression in another. Examples drawn from data about actual usage support Hargraves' identification of true clichés. They also illuminate his commentary on usage problems and helpful suggestions for eliminating clichés where they serve no useful purpose. Concise and lively, It's Been Said Before serves as a guide to the most overused phrases in the English language -- and to phrases that are used exactly as often as they should be.
Dear Readers, you have authority over the powers of darkness that you have not yet unfolded and apprehended for yourself and therefore are not using. Well, not too long ago I discovered this truth for myself, so don't feel bad. As I searched the scriptures, I became cognizant of the power that I possess in Christ Jesus, our Lord and Savior. I had been defeated countless times, using the wrong means to try to overcome my defeats. I was being tossed to and fro by the enemy of my soul. It took me a long time to learn and acknowledge who I am and my purpose for being here on earth, but thanks be to God, He has given me the victory through Christ Jesus. In this book you will discover that no matter what you used to be, God can bring you back to where you should be in Christ Jesus, the Messiah, and use you for HIs glory in a mighty way. Like the Apostle Paul, no matter what your past life story has to tell or what sins you committed, your slate becomes completely clean when you come to know Jesus. Yes! You are made entirely brand new. God sees you just as if you had never sinned at all. Before he was named Paul, Saul was a persecutor of those who believed in Jesus as Messiah. One day, he experienced a miraculous conversion while on a road trip to Damascus to persecute some believers, as recorded in Acts 9:3, which transformed him into a man and his life into a ministry on fire for the Lord, because of God's grace and mercy towards him. You, too, can be transformed and begin walking in The Newness of Life and serving Him in the newness of the Holy Spirit. 1 Samuel 14:6 assures us that "... nothing restrains the LORD from saving by many or by few."
