Memoirs of a Shape-Shifter
Author: Thomas Kaplan-Maxfield
Publisher: Kepler Press
Published: 2010-06-12
Total Pages:
ISBN-13: 0971377014
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPosts
Shapeshifters
Author: Gavin Francis
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2018-06-05
Total Pages: 280
ISBN-13: 1541697510
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom birth to death, a lyrical exploration of the role of transformation in human life To be alive is to be in perpetual metamorphosis: growing, healing, learning, aging. In Shapeshifters, physician and writer Gavin Francis considers the inevitable changes all of our bodies undergo -- such as birth, puberty, and death, but also laughter, sleeping, and healing-and those that only some of our bodies will: like getting a tattoo, experiencing psychosis, suffering anorexia, being pregnant, or undergoing a gender transition. In Francis's hands, each event becomes an opportunity to explore the meaning of identity and the natures-biological, psychological, and philosophical-of our selves. True to its own subject, Shapeshifters combines Francis's lyrical imagination and deep knowledge of medicine and the humanities for a life-altering read.
London Made Us
Author: Robert Elms
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2019-03-07
Total Pages: 336
ISBN-13: 178689212X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK'London is a giant kaleidoscope, which is forever turning. Take your eye off it for more than a moment and you're lost.' Robert Elms has seen his beloved city change beyond all imagining. London in his lifetime has morphed from a piratical, bomb-scarred playground, to a swish cosmopolitan metropolis. Motorways driven through lost communities, accents changing, skyscrapers appearing. Yet still it remains to him the greatest place on earth. Elms takes us back through time and place to myriad Londons. He is our guide through a place that has seen scientific experiments conducted in subterranean lairs and a small community declare itself an independent nation; a place his great-great-grandfather made the Elms' home over a century ago and a city that has borne witness to world-changing events.
Shifting Worlds, Shaping Fieldwork
Author: Susan Ossman
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-04-19
Total Pages: 201
ISBN-13: 1000182606
DOWNLOAD EBOOKReflecting on fieldwork for the twenty-first century, anthropologist and artist Susan Ossman invites readers on a journey across North Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. She reveals that fieldwork today is not only about being immersed in a place or culture; instead, it is an active way of focusing attention and engendering encounters and experiences. She conceives a new kind of autoethnography, making art and ethnography equal partners to follow three "waves" of her research on media, globalization, and migration. Ossman guides the reader through diverse settings, including a colonial villa in Casablanca, a Cairo beauty salon, a California mall-turned-gallery, the Berlin Wall, and Amsterdam’s Hermitage museum. She delves into the entanglements of solitary research and collective action. This book is a primer for current anthropology and an invitation to artists and scholars to work across boundaries. It vividly shows how fieldwork can shape scenes for experiments with multiple outcomes, from conceptual advances to artworks, performances to dialogue and community making.
Running with Scissors
Author: Augusten Burroughs
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2010-04-01
Total Pages: 347
ISBN-13: 1429902523
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe #1 New York Times bestselling memoir from Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors, now a Major Motion Picture! Running with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her psychiatrist, a dead-ringer for Santa and a lunatic in the bargain. Suddenly, at age twelve, Augusten Burroughs found himself living in a dilapidated Victorian in perfect squalor. The doctor's bizarre family, a few patients, and a pedophile living in the backyard shed completed the tableau. Here, there were no rules, there was no school. The Christmas tree stayed up until summer, and Valium was eaten like Pez. And when things got dull, there was always the vintage electroshock therapy machine under the stairs.... Running with Scissors is at turns foul and harrowing, compelling and maniacally funny. But above all, it chronicles an ordinary boy's survival under the most extraordinary circumstances.
Shapeshifting
Author: John Perkins
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 1997-09-01
Total Pages: 170
ISBN-13: 1594778698
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAfter 'Hit Man' The New York Times bestseller Confessions of an Economic Hit Man documents John Perkins’ extraordinary career as a globe-trotting economic hit man. Perkins’ insider’s view leads him to crisis of conscience--to the realization that he must devote himself to work which will foster a world-wide awareness of the sanctity of indigenous peoples, their cultures, and their environments. Perkins’ books demonstrate how the age-old shamanic techniques of some of the world’s most primitive peoples have sparked a revolution in modern concepts about healing, the subconscious, and the powers each of us has to alter individual and communal reality. Many indigenous cultures practice shapeshifting. Native American hunters take on the spirit of their prey to ensure a successful hunt; Asian medicine men “ingest” a sickness to heal the one afflicted; Amazon warriors become jaguars to soundlessly travel the jungle. Those who shapeshift understand that all of life is energy and that by focusing your intent you can change energetic patterns, rendering a new form. Shapeshifting can occur on three levels: cellular--transforming from human to plant or animal; personal--becoming a new self or leaving an addiction behind; and institutional--creating a new business or cultural identity. Since 1968, master shamans in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas have been training John Perkins to teach the industrial world about the powerful techniques involved in shapeshifting. His groundbreaking book takes you to deserts and jungles, mountains and oceans, medical research centers and corporate board rooms to learn the step-by-step methods of this practice that integrates ancient and modern techniques to bring about profound healing.
Grail Mysterium: An Adventure on The Heights
Author: Thomas Kaplan-Maxfield
Publisher: Kepler Press
Published: 2012-03-06
Total Pages: 356
ISBN-13: 0986001104
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIt’s the fall of 2010 at Jesuit-run Boston College, where senior Jack Knecht has just seen a ghostly figure in long antique robes slipping into Gasson Hall, the Gothic bell tower looming over the stately campus. Students and faculty alike, comfortably at home on The Heights, know the building is locked for major renovations this semester. Why would a spirit in 18th-century dress be haunting contemporary college life? Jack wonders. Thus begins this driving mystery-adventure in which Jack and his girlfriend, Fran Romero, run from menacing ghosts, are attacked out of the blue by a fiery dragon overhead and a raging bull underground, and have to face suspicious Jesuits threatening expulsion, all while keeping up with classes in this most sociable of schools. These are reasons enough to quickly decipher a tantalizing ancient map that convincingly points to the BC campus as the secret site of the Holy Grail, lost for centuries now. Proceeding by their wits with crucial help from eccentric art history professor Melinda Galen, the fey ghost of the last Templar grand master Jacques de Molay, and an imaginative, close-knit circle of college friends, Fran and Jack embark on a journey of discovery. The trail, however, is a twisted one, winding from the religious cult of Mithraism rooted in the ancient Syrian city of Dura-Europos through the medieval Templars down to modern-day Jesuits bearing a colorful history from Old World to New. Amid campus Quidditch games and undergraduate parties, dance rehearsals, middle-of-the-night discussions about hooking up, and communal meals, the young students pool their various esoteric disciplines to pursue the mystery of the Grail’s location. In the course of investigating the recondite riddles of the Mithraic cult, Fran and Jack come to pursue a Grail for a new millennium and thereby seek to become initiates into the mysteries of love. But in our age of crisis, with the planet suffering while economies spin out of control, can Fran and Jack find a way through the phantasmagoric maze confronting them, to find at last the Grail and arrive at a newly awakened consciousness? Grail Mysterium is a novel about love and its possibilities, about dating and relationships among the younger Linked Generation, and about the fundamental shift in human interconnectedness now underway in the 21st century. This cross between "The Da Vinci Code" and "Harry Potter for adults" is the first in the Adventure on The Heights series by Thomas Kaplan-Maxfield.
The Future That Brought Her Here
Author: Deborah DeNicola
Publisher: Nicolas-Hays, Inc.
Published: 2009-04-01
Total Pages: 369
ISBN-13: 0892545593
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA dynamic blend of history, science, psychology, dreams, and visions, Deborah DeNicola's memoir is a compelling account of self-discovery that is provocative and humble. A poet, dream analyst, and college professor DeNicola writes about her struggle to live in the ordinary world of academia while honoring the competing call of the creative and the spiritual. DeNicola's memoir shows her range of intellectual pursuits and spiritual experiences as she battles an inner war between depressive cynicism and faith and shares her lifelong search to heal the trauma of her father's tragic death when she was a teenager. Struggles between cynicism and faith, depression and hope, independence and attachment, creativity and financial security in the midst of spiritual searching, motherhood, teaching and writing are inextricably woven into the fabric of her story. Sharing the process of her awakening and how dreams and visions guide her, DeNicola stirs readers to listen courageously to their own inner voices. Her visionary quest takes her to the American West, Israel, and Southern France. Along the way she weaves together references from the Bible and the Gnostic Gospels, the story of Mary Magdalene, medieval history, the Templar Knights, the Black Madonnas, String Theory and quantum physics to find the repeated linkage between divinity and humanity.
The Shapeless Unease
Author: Samantha Harvey
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 2020-05-12
Total Pages: 124
ISBN-13: 0802148840
DOWNLOAD EBOOK“Sleeplessness gets the Susan Sontag illness-as-metaphor treatment in this pensive, compact, lyrical inquiry into the author’s nighttime demons.” —Kirkus Reviews In 2016, Samantha Harvey began to lose sleep. She tried everything to appease her wakefulness: from medication to therapy, changes in her diet to changes in her living arrangements. Nothing seemed to help. The Shapeless Unease is Harvey’s darkly funny and deeply intelligent anatomy of her insomnia, an immersive interior monologue of a year without one of the most basic human needs. Original and profound, and narrated with a lucid breathlessness, this is a startlingly insightful exploration of memory, writing and influence, death and the will to survive, from “this generation’s Virginia Woolf” (Telegraph). “Captures the essence of fractious emotions—anxiety, fear, grief, rage—in prose so elegant, so luminous, it practically shines from the page. Harvey is a hugely talented writer, and this is a book to relish.” —Sarah Waters, New York Times–bestselling author “Harvey writes with hypnotic power and poetic precision about—well, about everything: grief, pain, memory, family, the night sky, a lake at sunset, what it means to dream and what it means to suffer and survive . . . The big surprise is that this book about ‘shapeless unease’ is, in the end, a glittering, playful and, yes, joyful celebration of that glorious gift of glorious life.” —Daily Mail “What a spectacularly good book. It is so controlled and yet so wild . . . easily one of the truest and best books I’ve read about what it’s like to be alive now, in this country.” —Max Porter, award-winning author of Lanny
Ordinary Girls
Author: Jaquira Díaz
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2019-10-29
Total Pages: 284
ISBN-13: 164375016X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOne of the Must-Read Books of 2019 According to O: The Oprah Magazine * Time * Bustle * Electric Literature * Publishers Weekly * The Millions * The Week * Good Housekeeping “There is more life packed on each page of Ordinary Girls than some lives hold in a lifetime.” —Julia Alvarez In this searing memoir, Jaquira Díaz writes fiercely and eloquently of her challenging girlhood and triumphant coming of age. While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Díaz found herself caught between extremes. As her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was supported by the love of her friends. As she longed for a family and home, her life was upended by violence. As she celebrated her Puerto Rican culture, she couldn’t find support for her burgeoning sexual identity. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico’s history of colonialism, every page of Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism. Díaz writes with raw and refreshing honesty, triumphantly mapping a way out of despair toward love and hope to become her version of the girl she always wanted to be. Reminiscent of Tara Westover’s Educated, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, and Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, Jaquira Díaz’s memoir provides a vivid portrait of a life lived in (and beyond) the borders of Puerto Rico and its complicated history—and reads as electrically as a novel.
