The Body in the Clouds

The Body in the Clouds

Author: Ashley Hay

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2017-07-18

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1501165119

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Originally published: Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2010.


Feet in the Clouds

Feet in the Clouds

Author: Richard Askwith

Publisher: Aurum

Published: 2013-05-09

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1845136497

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Nearly 10 years after its first publication, Aurum are re-issuing this classic running book which has defined a genre. It includes an introduction from bestselling author Robert Macfarlane and an epilogue from Richard Askwith. The concept of fell-running is simple: it’s a sport that involves running over mountains – sometimes one, sometimes many. It’s also immensely demanding. While running uphill is a stamina-sapping slog, running pell-mell down the other side requires the agility – and even recklessness – of a mountain goat. And there’s the weather to contend with. It may make the sports pages only rarely, but in areas like the Lake District and Snowdonia fell-running is the basis of a whole culture – indeed, race organisers sometimes have to turn competitors away so that fragile mountain uplands are not irrevocably damaged by too many thundering feet. Fixtures like the annual Ben Nevis and Snowdon races attract runners from all over Britain, and beyond. Others, such as the Wasdale and Ennerdale fell runs in the Lakeland valleys – gruelling marathons of more than 20 miles – remain truly local events for which the whole community turns out, with many of the runners back on the same fells the next day tending sheep. Now, Richard Askwith explores the world of fell-running in the only legitimate way: by donning his Ron Hill vest and studded shoes to spend a season running as many of the great fell races as he can, from Borrowdale to Ben Nevis: an arduous schedule that tests the very limits of one’s stamina and courage. Over the months he also meets the greats of fell-running – like the remarkable Joss Naylor, who to celebrate his fiftieth birthday ran all 214 major Lakeland fells in a single week; Billy Bland, the combative Borrowdale man whose astounding records still stand for many of the top races; and Bill Teasdale, a hero of the sport’s earlier, professional days, whom he tracks down to his tiny cottage in the northern Lakes. And ultimately Askwith’s obsession drives him to attempt the ultimate challenge: the Bob Graham Round – a non-stop circuit of 42 of the Lake District’s highest peaks to be completed within 24 hours. This is a portrait of one of the few sports to have remained utterly true to its roots – in which the point is not fame or fortune but to run the ancient, wild landscape, and to be a hero, if at all, within one’s own valley. Feet in the Clouds is a chronicle of a masochistic but admirable sporting obsession, an insight into one of the oldest extreme sports, and a lyrical tribute to Britain’s mountains and the men and women who live among them.


The Man in the Clouds

The Man in the Clouds

Author: Koos Meinderts

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781935954132

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When the Man in the Clouds creates a beautiful painting, people begin to make a pilgrimage up his mountain to see it for themselves--the misfits find it especially comforting. An art expert tells the artist that it is very valuable and he begins to think about differently, determined to protect it rather than share it. Finally, he sees that his greed and possessiveness has changed the way he sees the picture so he tosses it into the fire and looks out the window with fresh eyes, seeing again the beauty that enthralled him in the first place.


The Marvelous Clouds

The Marvelous Clouds

Author: John Durham Peters

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-06-19

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 022625397X

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“An ambitious re-writing—a re-synthesis, even—of concepts of media and culture . . . It is nothing less than an attempt at a history of Being.” —Los Angeles Review of Books When we speak of clouds these days, it is as likely that we mean data clouds or network clouds as cumulus or stratus. In their sharing of the term, both kinds of clouds reveal an essential truth: that the natural world and the technological world are not so distinct. In The Marvelous Clouds, John Durham Peters argues that though we often think of media as environments, the reverse is just as true—environments are media. Peters defines media expansively as elements that compose the human world. Drawing from ideas implicit in media philosophy, Peters argues that media are more than carriers of messages: they are the very infrastructures combining nature and culture that allow human life to thrive. Through an encyclopedic array of examples from the oceans to the skies, The Marvelous Clouds reveals the long prehistory of so-called new media. Digital media, Peters argues, are an extension of early practices tied to the establishment of civilization such as mastering fire, building calendars, reading the stars, creating language, and establishing religions. New media do not take us into uncharted waters, but rather confront us with the deepest and oldest questions of society and ecology: how to manage the relations people have with themselves, others, and the natural world. A wide-ranging meditation on the many means we have employed to cope with the struggles of existence—from navigation to farming, meteorology to Google—The Marvelous Clouds shows how media lie at the very heart of our interactions with the world around us.


Wellness Above the Clouds

Wellness Above the Clouds

Author: Irene Lauretti- von Olnhausen

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783000205798

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A self-help wellness guide, which shows how to get fit, well, radiant and happy by using the fingers. By employing the simple finger positions of the 22 programs, this work reveals the keys to the ancient Japanese healing art Jin Shin Jyutsu registered].


Faces in the Clouds

Faces in the Clouds

Author: Stewart Elliott Guthrie

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1995-04-06

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 0195356802

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Religion is universal human culture. No phenomenon is more widely shared or more intensely studied, yet there is no agreement on what religion is. Now, in Faces in the Clouds, anthropologist Stewart Guthrie provides a provocative definition of religion in a bold and persuasive new theory. Guthrie says religion can best be understood as systematic anthropomorphism--that is, the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman things and events. Many writers see anthropomorphism as common or even universal in religion, but few think it is central. To Guthrie, however, it is fundamental. Religion, he writes, consists of seeing the world as humanlike. As Guthrie shows, people find a wide range of humanlike beings plausible: Gods, spirits, abominable snowmen, HAL the computer, Chiquita Banana. We find messages in random events such as earthquakes, weather, and traffic accidents. We say a fire "rages," a storm "wreaks vengeance," and waters "lie still." Guthrie says that our tendency to find human characteristics in the nonhuman world stems from a deep-seated perceptual strategy: in the face of pervasive (if mostly unconscious) uncertainty about what we see, we bet on the most meaningful interpretation we can. If we are in the woods and see a dark shape that might be a bear or a boulder, for example, it is good policy to think it is a bear. If we are mistaken, we lose little, and if we are right, we gain much. So, Guthrie writes, in scanning the world we always look for what most concerns us--livings things, and especially, human ones. Even animals watch for human attributes, as when birds avoid scarecrows. In short, we all follow the principle--better safe than sorry. Marshalling a wealth of evidence from anthropology, cognitive science, philosophy, theology, advertising, literature, art, and animal behavior, Guthrie offers a fascinating array of examples to show how this perceptual strategy pervades secular life and how it characterizes religious experience. Challenging the very foundations of religion, Faces in the Clouds forces us to take a new look at this fundamental element of human life.


Just Beyond the Clouds

Just Beyond the Clouds

Author: Karen Kingsbury

Publisher: Center Street

Published: 2007-09-14

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1599950529

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#1 bestselling author Karen Kingsbury tells the heartwrenching story of Cody Gunner, a widower fighting for stability, and the woman who wants to help him trust again -- even when trust is the most terrifying thing of all. Still aching over his wife's death, Cody Gunner can't bear the thought of also letting go of his Down's Syndrome brother, Carl Joseph. Cody wants his brother home, where he will be safe and cared for, not out on his own in a world that Cody knows all too well can be heartless and insecure. So when Carl Joseph's teacher, Elle, begins championing his independence, she finds herself at odds with Cody. But even as these two battle it out, they can't deny the instinctive connection they share, and Cody faces a crisis of the heart. What if Elle is the one woman who can teach Cody that love is still possible? If Cody can let go of his lingering anger, he might just see that sometimes the brightest hope of all lies just beyond the clouds.


Out of the Clouds

Out of the Clouds

Author: Linda Carroll

Publisher: Hachette Books

Published: 2018-05-29

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0316432210

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In the bestselling tradition ofthe The Eighty-Dollar Champion, the propulsive, inspiring Cinderella story of Stymie, an unwanted Thoroughbred, and Hirsch Jacobs, the once dirt-poor trainer who bought the colt on the cheap and molded him into the most popular horse of his time and the richest racehorse the world had ever seen. In the wake of World War II, as turmoil and chaos were giving way to a spirit of optimism, Americans were looking for inspiration and role models showing that it was possible to start from the bottom and work your way up to the top-and they found it in Stymie, the failed racehorse plucked from the discard heap by trainer Hirsch Jacobs. Like Stymie, Jacobs was a commoner in "The Sport of Kings," a dirt-poor Brooklyn city slicker who forged an unlikely career as racing's winningest trainer by buying cheap, unsound nags and magically transforming them into winners. The $1,500 pittance Jacobs paid to claim Stymie became history's biggest bargain as the ultimate iron horse went on to run a whopping 131 races and win 25 stakes, becoming the first Thoroughbred ever to earn more than $900,000. The Cinderella champion nicknamed "The People's Horse" captivated the masses with his rousing charge-from-behind stretch runs, his gritty blue-collar work ethic, and his rags-to-riches success story. In a golden age when horse racing rivaled baseball and boxing as America's most popular pastime, he was every bit as inspiring a sports hero as Joe DiMaggio and Joe Louis. Taking readers on a crowd-pleasing ride with Stymie and Jacobs, Out of the Clouds -- the winner of the Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award -- unwinds a real-life Horatio Alger tale of a dauntless team and its working-class fans who lived vicariously through the stouthearted little colt they embraced as their own.


Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas

Author: David Mitchell

Publisher: Vintage Canada

Published: 2010-07-16

Total Pages: 596

ISBN-13: 0307373576

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#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A timeless, structure-bending classic that explores how actions of individual lives impact the past, present and future—from a postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in fiction One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. The novel careens, with dazzling virtuosity, to Belgium in 1931, to the West Coast in the 1970s, to an inglorious present-day England, to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok, and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history. But the story doesn’t end even there. The novel boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, David Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky. As wild as a video game, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.


Empire of the Clouds

Empire of the Clouds

Author: James Hamilton-Paterson

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2010-10-07

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0571271731

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In 1945 Britain was the world's leading designer and builder of aircraft - a world-class achievement that was not mere rhetoric. And what aircraft they were. The sleek Comet, the first jet airliner. The awesome delta-winged Vulcan, an intercontinental bomber that could be thrown about the sky like a fighter. The Hawker Hunter, the most beautiful fighter-jet ever built and the Lightning, which could zoom ten miles above the clouds in a couple of minutes and whose pilots rated flying it as better than sex. How did Britain so lose the plot that today there is not a single aircraft manufacturer of any significance in the country? What became of the great industry of de Havilland or Handley Page? And what was it like to be alive in that marvellous post-war moment when innovative new British aircraft made their debut, and pilots were the rock stars of the age? James Hamilton-Paterson captures that season of glory in a compelling book that fuses his own memories of being a schoolboy plane spotter with a ruefully realistic history of British decline - its loss of self confidence and power. It is the story of great and charismatic machines and the men who flew them: heroes such as Bill Waterton, Neville Duke, John Derry and Bill Beaumont who took inconceivable risks, so that we could fly without a second thought.