Amateur detective and singing sensation Dinah Galloway has enough on her plate without having to worry about being pursued by a vengeful stalker. The red-headed twelve-year-old is in the running to sing in commercials promoting beautiful British Columbia. To clinch the job, Dinah has to get fit at a wellness retreat on Salt Spring Island. Veggies? Exercise? Yech! Grudgingly, though, Dinah admits that her lifestyle could be a little healthier. Off to Salt Spring she goes, along with the two other finalists: one friendly, the other the last word in sulky. Her friends Talbot and Pantelli make their usual disruptive appearances, along with Dinah's ever-anxious mother and cool, elegant sister Madge. Hoping to shed not only pounds but her crazed pursuer, Dinah learns the true meaning of personal best—it truly is how you play the game, not whether you win or lose.
StepWisdom: Knowledge from the Ages for Successful StepFamilies asks us to shift the way we look at stepfamilies. These vibrant, flexible, and creative families are a boon to our society. Stepfamilies can indeed be challenging and sometimes difficult, but StepWisdom provides the reader with a solid understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of blended families, offering useful guidelines, anecdotes, and expectations to help your family be a success. Eleanor Alden's work encourages stepfamilies to recognize their worth and to function at their best. Combining history, archetypal psychology, and modern family systems theory in a practical and often humorous way, StepWisdom brings hope. Eleanor Spackman Alden, LCSW, BCD, has been working with stepfamilies for over forty years. She has taught Jungian psychology and family therapy at Naropa University's graduate school, and has been in private practice since 1985. She lectures and does workshops on stepfamilies, and presently lives with her husband and two doodles in Colorado. www.StepWisdom.com "This rich and careful work on the holy and unholy aspects of stepfamilies, written by therapist and professor Eleanor Alden, not only draws on observations and understandings from her private practice and education, but also from growing up in a stepfamily herself. This evocative work offers understandings about patterns of both sweet and sour drives and impulses within stepfamilies as found in reality and mythos. This work can help others sow the seeds for a beautiful flowering within those special families called 'step'--as in 'step' to a more fulfilling consciousness." -- Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Diplomate Jungian Psychoanalyst, Author of Women Who Run with the Wolves "Insightful, historically illuminating in a very interesting way, and a must-read for every psychiatrist and mental health professional who works with stepfamilies. And now we know that we all do!" -- Laura J. Klein, MD, Assistant Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center "StepWisdom: Knowledge from the Ages for Successful StepFamilies is truly wonderful. There is nothing out there like it. Eleanor Alden speaks to the reader with clarity and moments of humor. She makes the case so well that stepfamilies are the norm and that there is no reason that they can't be gifts. Everyone should be required to read this before they enter a marriage with children. The work is truly captivating." -- Claudia Black, MSW, PhD, Author and Addictions Specialist
The Philosopher's Stone is a collection of case studies in compositional process; not so much about how the music was arrived at through its sketch stages, but more are construction of issues of form as the defining features of a genre, and structure as the individual realization in a particular work. Great musical movements and works are seen as highly creative solutions to problem-solving. The contexts of the works differ considerably. Some were written against the background of a specific precedent or model, as with Mozart's Haydn quartets via Haydn's Op. 33 set. In other cases, as with Beethoven's middle period style, the composer reconsiders a comprehensive range of implications about style and construction, of how, after earlier successes now outworn, to make a new and significant contribution to the genre without duplicating earlier solutions. The essays are grouped into three sections: on Beethoven studies, Mozart in retrospect, and nineteenth-century music. All the movements and works in these chapters pose in their different ways these issues of structural reinterpretation and re-formation, where the reworking of the form leads to a distinctive and higher level transformation
This work offers a comparative cross-cultural history of dreams. The authors examine a range of texts concerning dreams, from a variety of religious contexts (including China, the Americas and Greek and Roman antiquity) to explore the ways in which different cultures experience the world of dreams.
Giacomo Meyerbeer, one of the most important and influential opera composers of the nineteenth century, enjoyed a fame during his lifetime hardly rivalled by any of his contemporaries. This ten volume set provides in one collection all the operatic texts set by Meyerbeer in his career. The texts offer the most complete versions available. Each libretto is translated into modern English by Richard Arsenty; and each work is introduced by Robert Letellier. In this comprehensive edition of Meyerbeer's libretti, the original text and its translation are placed on facing pages for ease of use. The eleventh volume presents the fourth of Meyerbeer’s grands opéras, and his final work. By 1860 long-imposed labor had started to tell upon the composer’s health: he knew that he must concentrate on the “navigator project” which he had started twenty years earlier if he intended to finish it. Meyerbeer died on 2 May 1864, the day after the completion of the copying of the full score of this his last opera, Vasco da Gama. Minna Meyerbeer and César-Victor Perrin, the director of the Opéra, entrusted the editing of a performing edition to the famous Belgian musicologist François-Joseph Fétis, while the libretto was revised by Mélesville. The original title of L’Africaine was restored out of deference to public expectation. Much of the music and action was suppressed, in spite of the strain this inflicted on the internal logic of the story. While L'Africaine is not lacking in the grandeur of statement and stirring climaxes for which the composer was so famous, there is a new intimacy, a new intensity of melancholic lyricism. Like its famous predecessors, it is basically an historical work, derived from the period of sixteenth-century Renaissance. The account of Vasco da Gama's voyage of discovery around the Cape of Good Hope and conquest of Calicut (1497-98) is subjected to a fictional treatment that raises many interesting issues. The framework is historical, but most of the characters and course of action are not; in fact the end of the opera, in the suicide of the heroine, suddenly leaves the terra firma of reality, and transports us into the mystical realms of the spirit. It is this mixture of modes that is central to the dramaturgy of L'Africaine, a confusion of history and fairytale, ancient certainties and challenging discoveries, in the creation of a new mythology. There is also originality in formal developments, with the great tenor scene in act 4 providing a new malleability in handling the constraints of shape and genre: recitative, arioso and cabaletta have a fluent integration in trying to explore the text more pointedly. L’Africaine was produced on 28 April 1865, a great posthumous tribute to its famous creators. The Ship Scene, the exotic Indian act, and the Scene of the Manchineel Tree exerted a fascination on audiences, and elicited new praise. The work full of melodic beauty and rapturous lyricism, began a triumphal progress through the world, beginning with the big stages of London and Berlin.
Once Upon a Time There Was a Little Girl shares the moving stories of seven women who as young girls experienced the early loss of their mothers through death or physical or emotional abandonment. The women explore their personal traumas through their responses to seven fairy tales in which there was no nurturing maternal presence. Dr. Marcella Shields is a psychologist with over thirty years of experience who reveals the inspiring journeys of these women who eventually triumph over suffering and learn to rely on the bond they have formed with each other to help reclaim their passion for life. By exploring seven timeless fairy tales in which the heroine finds her way through the grief of abandonment, the women offer a deeper understanding of the significance of the mother-daughter bond and the devastating consequences for the daughter if this bond is ruptured early. The poignant life stories and dreams courageously offered by these women show how fairy tales allowed them to understand and refashion themselves, and provide a source of encouragement and hope for other women who have experienced early maternal loss. Fathers raising daughters without a consistent maternal presence will also find the reflections valuable.
Thelemic Alchemy begins with dozens of pages of Alchemic History, including Isis and Osiris in Alchemy, Tarot and Alchemy, The Enochian Aeyres in Alchemy, and Jung. The Second Section makes this a system of ritual and meditation, including Initiations and Banishing Rituals. The 418 Ritual is also included. Together they create a new vision of non-Christian Alchemy, and a more Internal and Psychological form of Thelema!
