Waves Passing in the Night
Waves Passing in the Night

Author: Lawrence Weschler

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2017-01-31

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 1632867206

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From Pulitzer Prize nominee Lawrence Weschler, a fascinating profile of Walter Murch, a film legend and amateur astrophysicist whose investigations could reshape our understanding of the universe. For film aficionados, Walter Murch is legendary--a three-time Academy Award winner, arguably the most admired sound and film editor in the world for his work on Apocalypse Now, The Godfather trilogy, The English Patient, and many others. Outside of the studio, his mind is wide-ranging; his passion, pursued for several decades, has been astrophysics, in particular the rehabilitation of Titius-Bode, a long-discredited 18th century theory regarding the patterns by which planets and moons array themselves in gravitational systems across the universe. Though as a consummate outsider he's had a hard time attracting any sort of comprehensive hearing from professional astrophysicists, Murch has made advances that even some of them find intriguing, including a connection between Titius Bode and earlier notions--going back past Kepler and Pythagorus--of musical harmony in the heavens. Unfazed by rejection, ever probing, Murch perseveres in the highest traditions of outsider science. Lawrence Weschler brings Murch's quest alive in all its seemingly quixotic, yet still plausible, splendor, probing the basis for how we know what we know, and who gets to say. "The wholesale rejection of alternative theories has repeatedly held back the progress of vital science," Weschler observes, citing early twentieth-century German amateur Alfred Wegener, whose speculations about continental drift were ridiculed at first, only to be accepted as fact decades later. Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin says "It is controversy that brings science alive"--and Murch's quest does that in spades. His fascination with the way the planets and their moons are arranged opens up the field of celestial mechanics for general readers, sparking an awareness of the vast and (to us) invisible forces constantly at play in the universe.

How the Word Is Passed
How the Word Is Passed

Author: Clint Smith

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2021-06-01

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 0316492914

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This “important and timely” (Drew Faust, Harvard Magazine) #1 New York Times bestseller examines the legacy of slavery in America—and how both history and memory continue to shape our everyday lives. Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves. It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned-maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers. A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted. Informed by scholarship and brought to life by the story of people living today, Smith's debut work of nonfiction is a landmark of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country and how it has come to be. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Winner of the Stowe Prize Winner of 2022 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021

A Chosen Exile
A Chosen Exile

Author: Allyson Hobbs

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2014-10-13

Total Pages: 395

ISBN-13: 067436810X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. This revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions. It also tells a tale of loss. As racial relations in America have evolved so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one’s birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one’s own. Although black Americans who adopted white identities reaped benefits of expanded opportunity and mobility, Hobbs helps us to recognize and understand the grief, loneliness, and isolation that accompanied—and often outweighed—these rewards. By the dawning of the civil rights era, more and more racially mixed Americans felt the loss of kin and community was too much to bear, that it was time to “pass out” and embrace a black identity. Although recent decades have witnessed an increasingly multiracial society and a growing acceptance of hybridity, the problem of race and identity remains at the center of public debate and emotionally fraught personal decisions.

Passing
Passing

Author: Nella Larsen

Publisher: Alien Ebooks

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 166762265X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen (1891 –1964) published just two novels and three short stories in her lifetime, but achieved lasting literary acclaim. Her classic novel Passing first appeared in 1926.

The Bluebird Years
The Bluebird Years

Author: Arthur Knowles

Publisher: Sigma Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9781850587668

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Illustrated throughout, The Bluebird Years details what really happened in the final, fateful crash in which Donald Campbell attempted to break the world water-speed record to 300 mph. New analysis is featured by Ken Norris, Bluebird's Designer.

The Word We Celebrate
The Word We Celebrate

Author: Patricia Datchuck Sanchez

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 9781556123023

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Accessible background and insights on each scripture text in the three-year Sunday lectionary cycle. An invaluable resource for preachers, lectors, liturgical musicians, catechists and more.

The Narrative of the Good Death
The Narrative of the Good Death

Author: Ms Mary Riso

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2015-09-28

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1472446968

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A good death was as central to Methodism as conversion and holiness. Based on an analysis of 1,200 obituaries, this book contributes to an understanding not only of death but of the history of Methodist and evangelical Nonconformist piety, theology, social background and literary expression in mid-nineteenth-century England, and focuses on the tension in Nonconformist allegiance to both worldly and spiritual matters.

The Passing of the Night
The Passing of the Night

Author: Robinson Risner

Publisher: Konecky & Konecky

Published: 2004-02

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781568524665

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The real story of what went on in the prison camps in North Vietnam will be shocking to many Americans, for it was a nightmare that required incredible endurance to survive ...

History and the Contemporary Novel
History and the Contemporary Novel

Author: David Cowart

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 9780809314799

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Cowart presents a study of international historical fiction since World War II, with reflections on the affinities between historical and fictional narrative, analysis of the basic modes of historical fiction, and readings of a number of historical novels, including John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel, William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. He proposes recognizing four modes of the historical novel: the past as a "distant mirror" of the present, fictions whose authors seek to pinpoint the precise historical moment when the modern age or some prominent feature of it came into existence, fictions whose authors aspire purely or largely to historical verisimilitude, and fictions whose authors reverse history to contemplate utopia and dystopia in the future. Thus, historical fiction can be organized under the rubrics: The Distant Mirror; The Turning Point; The Way It Was; and The Way It Will Be. This fourfold schema and his focus on postwar novels set Cowart’s work apart from previous studies, which have not devoted adequate space to the contemporary historical novel. Cowart argues that postwar historical fiction merits more extensive treatment because it is the product of an age unique in the annals of history—an age in which history itself may end.

An Outline History of the Japanese Drama
An Outline History of the Japanese Drama

Author: Frank Alanson Lombard

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-07-24

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1317418549

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Students of international drama are turning more and more to the study of Japanese drama, desirous to know to what extent its development duplicates or differs from the evolution of drama in other countries. Stimulated by the colour, originality, power, and poetry, they are interested to know more. This title, first published in 1928, traces the general development of the drama of the Japanese. This book will be of interest to students of drama, theatre studies and Asian Studies.