The century old mystery of the disappearance of Thomas Stanwell begins to unfold when a World War 1 mass grave is found at Fromelles. Thomas great grandson is determined to find out what happened and travels from Australia to Europe in the quest to find answers. The rich tapestry of this family saga is woven with descendants from Australia, England, Scotland and Germany and covers the entire 20th Century. The mystery begins to unravel with an unexpected meeting in Glasgow.
This thought-provoking, semi-autobiographical book tells the story of Aisha, a young Moroccan woman, and her struggle to find an identity in the Morocco of the second half of the twentieth century. Charting Aisha's path through adolescence and young adulthood up to the present, her story is told through a series of flashbacks, anecdotes, and glimpses of the past, all bound up with a strong, often strident, always compelling worldview that takes in Morocco, its politics, people, and traditions, Islam, and marriage. Male-female relationships feature strongly in the narrative, and by exposing us to Aisha's troubled romantic encounters, Abouzeid uncovers the shifting male/female roles within the Morocco of her lifetime. Many aspects of Moroccan society are also explored through the other clashes of the modern and the traditional in Aisha's life. The workplace and corruption, the struggle for women's rights, the clash between Islamic and Western values as well as with the older practices of sorcery and witchcraft, and the conflict between colonial and native language use are all intertwined in a narrative that is both forceful and often poetic. Through a series of tales of emotional disasters, the reader becomes aware not only of Aisha's frustrations but also of her deep commitment to her country and her struggle to defeat suffering, uphold justice, and retain a fierce independence as a woman and a clarity of conviction in her life. Leila Abouzeid is a pioneer among her Moroccan contemporaries in that she writes in Arabic rather than in French and is the first Moroccan woman writer of literature to be translated into English. This stimulating and revealing book adds a new perspective to Maghrebi women's writing, and is an important addition to the growing body of Arab women's writing in translation.
The Final Chapter is an end of life organizational planning tool. The reader is prompted to safely record valuable information their loved ones will need upon his or her passing. Having everything documented in one place relieves emotional stress, heartache, and chaos for those who are grieving. Now, more than ever, our digital world necessitates a structured depository for passwords, accounts, insurance details and other crucial information, as much of it is saved online and cannot be accessed by anyone after death.This book provides peace of mind, financial security, guidance, direction, and knowledge for the survivors' coming days and will be a major part of your legacy. As loved ones begin their journey down an untraveled path, and they begin to realize the time, work, effort, and preparation you, the reader, put forth for their survival without you, they will begin to grasp just how deep your love and protection will always be for them.What sets this book apart from others on the market is our invaluable CHECK LIST of items and a TIME LINE of what to do when your loved one passes away. These are both incredibly helpful since some items are time sensitive.
“Deftly shows how a seemingly frivolous film genre can guide us in shaping tomorrow’s world.” —Seth Shostak, senior astronomer, SETI Institute Artificial intelligence, gene manipulation, cloning, and interplanetary travel are all ideas that seemed like fairy tales but a few years ago. And now their possibilities are very much here. But are we ready to handle these advances? This book, by a physicist and expert on responsible technology development, reveals how science fiction movies can help us think about and prepare for the social consequences of technologies we don’t yet have, but that are coming faster than we imagine. Films from the Future looks at twelve movies that take us on a journey through the worlds of biological and genetic manipulation, human enhancement, cyber technologies, and nanotechnology. Readers will gain a broader understanding of the complex relationship between science and society. The movies mix old and new, and the familiar and unfamiliar, to provide a unique, entertaining, and ultimately transformative take on the power of emerging technologies, and the responsibilities they come with.
New York Times bestselling sportswriter John Feinstein exposes the real “March Madness”—behind the scenes at the Final Four basketball tournament. When Stevie wins a writing contest for aspiring sports journalists, his prize is a press pass to the Final Four in New Orleans. While exploring the Superdome, he overhears a plot to throw the championship game. With the help of fellow contest winner Susan Carol, Stevie has just 48 hours to figure out who is blackmailing one of the star players . . . and why. John Feinstein has been praised as “the best writer of sports books in America today” (The Boston Globe), and he proves it again in this fast-paced novel. “A page-turning thriller and a basketball junkie’s bonanza.” —USA Today
Your life is a story, and it’s yours to write, all the way through to the end. There are numerous decisions to be made regarding aging, illness, and end-of-life issues, but many people put off those decisions until it’s too late. We may be purposeful in planning for our lives, but we often leave the last piece, the final chapter, undefined. How to Live Forever seeks to lay a foundation for people to live well in the time they have, to leave their stories behind as their legacies, and to write their own best ending so that their final wishes can be honored. Author Kimberly Best encourages you to consider what you want the final chapter of your life to look and feel like, providing you with tools and prompts that can help you have difficult conversations regarding legal decisions, health care plans, relationships, and death and dying. If we recognize the finite nature of our days, we can live purposefully, plan ahead for the end of our life story, and die without regret, living fully to the end and finishing well. Visit bestconflictsolutions.com for additional tools and worksheets to help you write your last chapter.
David Markson was a writer like no other. In his novels, which have been called "hypnotic," "stunning," and "exhilarating" and earned him praise from the likes of Kurt Vonnegut and David Foster Wallace, Ann Beattie and Zadie Smith. Markson created his own personal genre. With crackling wit distilled into incantatory streams of thought on art, life, and death, Markson's work has delighted and astonished readers for decades. Now for the first time, three of Markson's masterpieces are compiled into one page–turning volume: This Is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel. In This Is Not a Novel, readers meet an author, called only "Writer," who is weary unto death of making up stories, and yet is determined to seduce the reader into turning pages and getting somewhere. Vanishing Point introduces us to "Author," who sets out to transform shoeboxes crammed with note cards into a novel. In The Last Novel, we find an elderly author (referred to only as "Novelist") who announces that, since this will be his final effort, he possesses "carte blanche to do anything he damn well pleases." United by their focus on the trials, calamities, absurdities and even tragedies of the creative life, these novels demonstrate David Markson's extraordinary intellectual richness—leaving readers, time after time, with the most indisputably original of reading experiences.
With millions of Americans entering their so-called "retirement years" many with few material needs but a hunger in their souls to make this "second to last chapter" count Wilkes offers the practical counsel of one who has already been there. "The last thing we want to do in our remaining productive years is count the daisies and days," he says. "We want to matter, to accomplish something that matters. Something is stirring within us and demands a response." Your Second to Last Chapter is a time when you are at the peak of your powers wise in years, brimming with experience, ready to take on fresh new challenges. Wilkes shows how to match your passion and abilities with human needs in new ways that will use your talents to fullest and provide you the deepest personal satisfaction possible.
Beginning in childbirth and entered like a multiple dwelling in motion, Women and Men embraces and anatomizes the 1970s in New York - from experiments in the chaotic relations between the sexes to the flux of the city itself. Yet through an intricate overlay of scenes, voices, fact, and myth, this expanding fiction finds its way also across continents and into earlier and future times and indeed the Earth, to reveal connections between the most disparate lives and systems of feeling and power. At its breathing heart, it plots the fuguelike and fieldlike densities of late-twentieth-century life. McElroy rests a global vision on two people, apartment-house neighbors who never quite meet. Except, that is, in the population of others whose histories cross theirs believers and skeptics; lovers, friends, and hermits; children, parents, grandparents, avatars, and, apparently, angels. For Women and Men shows how the families through which we pass let one person's experience belong to that of many, so that we throw light on each other as if these kinships were refracted lives so real as to be reincarnate. A mirror of manners, the book is also a meditation on the languages, rich, ludicrous, exact, and also American, in which we try to grasp the world we're in. Along the kindred axes of separation and intimacy Women and Men extends the great line of twentieth-century innovative fiction.
