Faulkner. Fitzgerald. Hemingway. O'Neill. All great American writers; all alcoholics. And as Tom Dardis convincingly tells, the work of each suffered grievously from the disease. 8 photos.
A landmark text on the history of Christian spirituality embarks on the journey afresh. This accessible and engaging history provides an excellent primer on the two-millennium quest for union with God, a "thirst" at the center of Christian life and practice. Holt traces the practice of Christian devotion, prayer, and contemplation from the biblical and influential early periods through the diverse insights of the Reformation and modern eras. Globally framed, the book highlights the local contributions of people from a wide array of traditions and perspectives as unified yet diverse voices giving witness to the thirst for the experience of the divine that is at the heart of the Christian pilgrimage. This new edition not only updates all the chapters and features but also adds more material on the spirituality of Jesus, medieval women mystics, contemporary spirituality, spiritual faith and practice in the digital age, and spirituality in a globalized world. Excerpts and illustrations from primary sources, a glossary, a timeline, new bibliographies, sets of spiritual exercises and discussion questions, and an online resource guide heighten the book's usefulness for students and lay persons alike.
“There's Money in Thirst,” reads a headline in the New York Times. The CEO of Nestlé, purveyor of bottled water, heartily agrees. It is important to give water a market value, he says in a promotional video, so “we're all aware that it has a price.” But for those who have no access to clean water, a fifth of the world's population, the price is thirst. This is the frightening landscape that Karen Piper conducts us through in The Price of Thirst—one where thirst is political, drought is a business opportunity, and more and more of our most necessary natural resource is controlled by multinational corporations. In visits to the hot spots of water scarcity and the hotshots in water finance, Piper shows us what happens when global businesses with mafia-like powers buy up the water supply and turn off the taps of people who cannot pay: border disputes between Iraq and Turkey, a “revolution of the thirsty” in Egypt, street fights in Greece, an apartheid of water rights in South Africa. The Price of Thirst takes us to Chile, the first nation to privatize 100 percent of its water supplies, creating a crushing monopoly instead of a thriving free market in water; to New Delhi, where the sacred waters of the Ganges are being diverted to a private water treatment plant, fomenting unrest; and to Iraq, where the U.S.-mandated privatization of water resources destroyed by our military is further destabilizing the volatile region. And in our own backyard, where these same corporations are quietly buying up water supplies, Piper reveals how “water banking” is drying up California farms in favor of urban sprawl and private towns. The product of seven years of investigation across six continents and a dozen countries, and scores of interviews with CEOs, activists, environmentalists, and climate change specialists, The Price of Thirst paints a harrowing picture of a world out of balance, with the distance between the haves and have-nots of water inexorably widening and the coming crisis moving ever closer.
Qiang returns to his homeland of China from Silicon Valley to find Beijing undergoing a chaotic transformation in the lead up to hosting the 2008 Olympic Games. Wrecking balls are knocking down entire neighborhoods to make way for new structures more in line with the government's vision of a modern China. The tumult inspires Qiang to shoot a documentary about the loss of affordable housing, which draws the attention of public security officials. When Qiang is suddenly arrested by local police, it falls on his friend Jake, an American journalist who admires Qiang and his work, to try to figure out how to end the detention. With few options, Jake enlists the help of those he's not sure he can trust. Dawei, a Chinese itinerant Jake befriended years earlier, returns to Beijing in the midst of a cat-and-mouse game Jake is playing with the authorities to retrieve a memento that has suddenly become extremely valuable. Dawei becomes ensnared in a plan to force the authorities to release Qiang, and Jake must then decide who survives. Based on real events, Robert F. Delaney's The Wounded Muse takes readers to a city and country undergoing a transformation on a scale previously unseen, where in the shadowed wreckage of forgotten communities people are pushed to psychological extremes to secure their position.
Skinny's Book of the Year, 2018 In 1990, Myles chose Rosie from a litter on the street, and their connection instantly made an indelible impact on the writer's way of being. Over the course of sixteen years together, Myles was devoted to the pit bull and their linked quality of life. And starting from the emptiness following Rosie's death, Afterglow launches a playful and incisive investigation into the mostly mutually beneficial, sometimes reprehensible power dynamics between pet and pet-owner. At the same time, it reimagines Myles's experiences with alcoholism and recovery, intimacy and mourning, celebrity and politics, spirituality and family history, while joyously transcending the parameters of memoir. Moving from an imaginary talk show where Rosie is interviewed by Myles's childhood puppet, to a critical reenactment of the night Rosie mated with another pit bull; from shimmering poetic transcriptions of video footage taken during their walks, to Rosie's final enlightened narration from the afterlife, this totally singular text combines elements of science fiction, screenplay, monologue, and lucid memory to get to the heart of how and why we dedicate our existence to our dogs.
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and The Boston Globe An authoritative, illuminating, and deeply humane history of addiction—a phenomenon that remains baffling and deeply misunderstood despite having touched countless lives—by an addiction psychiatrist striving to understand his own family and himself “Carl Erik Fisher’s The Urge is the best-written and most incisive book I’ve read on the history of addiction. In the midst of an overdose crisis that grows worse by the hour and has vexed America for centuries, Fisher has given us the best prescription of all: understanding. He seamlessly blends a gripping historical narrative with memoir that doesn’t self-aggrandize; the result is a full-throated argument against blaming people with substance use disorder. The Urge is a propulsive tour de force that is as healing as it is enjoyable to read.” —Beth Macy, author of Dopesick Even after a decades-long opioid overdose crisis, intense controversy still rages over the fundamental nature of addiction and the best way to treat it. With uncommon empathy and erudition, Carl Erik Fisher draws on his own experience as a clinician, researcher, and alcoholic in recovery as he traces the history of a phenomenon that, centuries on, we hardly appear closer to understanding—let alone addressing effectively. As a psychiatrist-in-training fresh from medical school, Fisher was soon face-to-face with his own addiction crisis, one that nearly cost him everything. Desperate to make sense of the condition that had plagued his family for generations, he turned to the history of addiction, learning that the current quagmire is only the latest iteration of a centuries-old story: humans have struggled to define, treat, and control addictive behavior for most of recorded history, including well before the advent of modern science and medicine. A rich, sweeping account that probes not only medicine and science but also literature, religion, philosophy, and public policy, The Urge illuminates the extent to which the story of addiction has persistently reflected broader questions of what it means to be human and care for one another. Fisher introduces us to the people who have endeavored to address this complex condition through the ages: physicians and politicians, activists and artists, researchers and writers, and of course the legions of people who have struggled with their own addictions. He also examines the treatments and strategies that have produced hope and relief for many people with addiction, himself included. Only by reckoning with our history of addiction, he argues—our successes and our failures—can we light the way forward for those whose lives remain threatened by its hold. The Urge is at once an eye-opening history of ideas, a riveting personal story of addiction and recovery, and a clinician’s urgent call for a more expansive, nuanced, and compassionate view of one of society’s most intractable challenges.
From Babe Walker, author of the New York Times bestselling White Girl Problems series, comes a new novella in which the fearless, witty, and spirited Babe decides to try on her most ambitious hat yet: Wine Mogul—what, like it’s hard? On what should be a romantic trip to California wine country, Babe realizes there's something off with her new lust-at-first-sight-lover, Jack—something she can't get past, even with all his inherited wealth. So she decides to take matters into her own hands and toss him to the curb to enjoy the rest of her vacation. What she doesn't expect is to run into her old high school nemesis Tina, whose life is at rock bottom. Babe’s frozen heart is warmed by Tina's plight as a struggling winemaker. Armed with a pair of Louis Vuittons that would look fabulous crushing grapes if she felt like it (she doesn't), Babe decides to bring her no-apologies approach and street-smarts to Tina’s vineyard to help her revitalize her business in her most selfless act yet. The always hilarious, upfront, and basic yet delusional Babe Walker is everything you hate to love and love to hate. Just don't call her Thirsty.
It is 1883, and all of Klara Bozic’s girlish dreams have come crashing down as she arrives in Thirsty, a gritty steel town carved into the slopes above the Monongahela River just outside of Pittsburgh. She has made a heartbreaking discovery. Her new husband Drago is as abusive as the father she left behind in Croatia. In Kristin Bair O’Keeffe’s debut novel, Klara’s life unfolds over forty years as she struggles to find her place in a new country where her survival depends on the friends who nurture her: gutsy, funny Katherine Zupanovic, who isn’t afraid of Drago’s fist; BenJo, the only black man in Thirsty to have his own shop; and strangely enough, Old Man Rupert, the town drunk. Thirsty follows a chain of unlikely events that keep Klara’s spirit aloft: a flock of angelic butterflies descends on Thirsty; Klara gives birth to her first child in Old Man Rupert’s pumpkin patch; and BenJo gives her a talking bird. When Klara’s daughter marries a man even more brutal than Drago, Klara is forced to act. If she doesn’t finally break the cycle of violence in her family, her granddaughters will one day walk the same road, broken and bruised. As the threads that hold her family together fray and come undone, Klara has to decide if she has the courage to carve out a peaceful spot in the world for herself and her girls.
This fictional memoir, the first of an autobiographical trilogy, traces a self professed failure's nightmarish decent into the underside of American life and his resurrection to the wisdom that emerges from despair.
“Be prepared to stay up late with this one.”—NPR.org “[A] must-have story.”—School Library Journal (starred review) “Evocative and refreshingly unique.”—Tor A young woman with a dangerous power she barely understands. A smuggler with secrets of his own. A country torn between a merciless colonial army, a terrifying tyrant, and a feared rebel leader. The first book in acclaimed author Heidi Heilig’s Shadow Players trilogy blends traditional storytelling with ephemera for a lush, page-turning tale of escape and rebellion. For a Muse of Fire will captivate fans of Sabaa Tahir, Leigh Bardugo, and Renée Ahdieh. Jetta’s family is famed as the most talented troupe of shadow players in the land. With Jetta behind the scrim, their puppets seem to move without string or stick—a trade secret, they say. In truth, Jetta can see the souls of the recently departed and bind them to the puppets with her blood. But ever since the colonizing army conquered their country, the old ways are forbidden. Jetta must never show, never tell. Her skill and fame are her family’s way to earn a spot aboard the royal ship to Aquitan, where shadow plays are the latest rage, and where rumor has it the Mad King has a spring that cures his ills. Because seeing spirits is not the only thing that plagues Jetta. But as rebellion seethes and as Jetta meets a young smuggler, she will face truths and decisions that she never imagined—and safety will never seem so far away. Heidi Heilig creates a vivid, rich world inspired by Southeast Asian cultures and French colonialism. Told from Jetta’s first-person point-of-view, as well as chapters written as play scripts and ephemera such as telegrams and letters, For a Muse of Fire is an engrossing journey that weaves magic, simmering romance, and the deep bonds of family with the high stakes of epic adventure.