Walter’s freshman year at a top Engineering School wasn’t what he had hoped for. Academic success was a given but wasn’t college supposed to be about freedom, drugs and wild sex? This was 1969 after all. But as Walter laments “freshman year was just OK, I somehow missed out on that sex thing.” Walter was hoping sophomore year will be his MVP season. Regrettably it wasn’t, it was a nothing, in fact it was The Year that Didn’t Exist. The story opens with Walter’s big mistake: securing off-campus housing with two roommates he finds intolerable. One chapter details his accidental meeting, and getting stoned with Jane and Tom H. They, activist-celebrities, on their way to a Vietnam protest rally at the Tute, Tom being the keynote speaker. Several chapters are devoted to his introduction and obsession with recreational drugs, pot, hashish, LSD and Ludes. How he meets his first girlfriend, the result of a bet, as to who would score better on a biology test, is thoroughly, but not graphically detailed. And finally, the only real highlight of his meaningless year, teaming up with drug buddy Strappa and winning a collegiate bowling championship, provides a humorous ending to the saga. The Year that Didn’t Exist should strike chords that ring true in almost everyone and hopefully transport the reader back to their college days, days perhaps simpler and likely filled with unbound optimism.
The All-American Football Conference was the only challenger to the NFL (except for the American Football League of the 1960s) to survive more than two seasons in competition with the established league. It ultimately failed to achieve its goal of a peaceful coexistence with the NFL and folded in 1949. Its Cleveland Browns and San Francisco 49ers, which were absorbed by the NFL in 1950, are still in business. This book takes a brief look at all of the NFL's challengers (and would-be challengers) from 1926 to 1945. It looks particularly at the All-American Conference, which overcame obstacles that proved too difficult for others and opened the 1946 season with teams on the East Coast, in the Midwest, on the West Coast, and in the deep South, making it a truly "All-American" enterprise. Each season and off-season is examined in detail.
When twelve-year-old Rixon's great-uncle leaves him an island in his will, Rixon can't quite believe it. Things get even more confusing when the mysterious island can only be located on a very ancient map, and only then by using a big magnifying glass. Does the island actually exist? And if so, does it really belong to him? There's only one thing for it. Rixon is going to have to go there and find it for himself. And what he finds when he gets there might just hold the key to the future of the planet: four children hidden away from society with an altogether different set of values. But soon Rixon is fighting for his own life, left in a cave with a rising tide, floating out to sea on a leaky inflatable and fending off the attacks of a multimillionaire tech giant and his super yacht. Can Rixon keep the island's secrets? And will he even want to. . .?
A classic in the philosophy of education, considering the fundamental purpose and function of schools, translated into English for the first time. This classic 1971 work on the fundamental purpose and function of schools belongs on the same shelf as other landmark works of the era, including Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society, Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and John Holt's How Children Fail. Nils Christie's If School Didn't Exist, translated into English for the first time, departs from these works by not considering schooling (and deschooling) as much as schools and their specific community and social contexts. Christie argues that schools should be proving grounds for how to live together in society rather than assembly lines producing future citizens and employees.
Gisèle d'Estoc was the pseudonym of a nineteenth-century French woman writer and, it turns out, artist who, among other things, was accused of being a bomb-planting anarchist, the cross-dressing lover of writer Guy de Maupassant, and the fighter of at least one duel with another woman, inspiring Bayard's famous painting on the subject. The true identity of this enigmatic woman remained unknown and was even considered fictional until recently, when Melanie C. Hawthorne resurrected d'Estoc's discarded story from the annals of forgotten history. Finding the Woman Who Didn't Exist begins with the claim by expert literary historians of France on the eve of World War II that the woman then known only as Gisèle d'Estoc was merely a hoax. More than fifty years later, Hawthorne not only proves that she did exist but also uncovers details about her fascinating life and career, along the way adding to our understanding of nineteenth-century France, literary culture, and gender identity. Hawthorne explores the intriguing life of the real d'Estoc, explaining why others came to doubt the "experts" and following the threads of evidence that the latter overlooked. In focusing on how narratives are shaped for particular audiences at particular times, Hawthorne also tells "the story of the story," which reveals how the habits of thought fostered by the humanities continue to matter beyond the halls of academe.
A classic in the philosophy of education, considering the fundamental purpose and function of schools, translated into English for the first time. This classic 1971 work on the fundamental purpose and function of schools belongs on the same shelf as other landmark works of the era, including Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society, Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and John Holt's How Children Fail. Nils Christie's If School Didn't Exist, translated into English for the first time, departs from these works by not considering schooling (and deschooling) as much as schools and their specific community and social contexts. Christie argues that schools should be proving grounds for how to live together in society rather than assembly lines producing future citizens and employees. Christie presents three examples of schools in different settings—a French village school that became the bedrock of its community; federal government–run schools for Native Americans that facilitated the experience of inferiority; and a British secondary school that reinforced class stratification. He considers the school's function as a storage space (for an unproductive segment of society), as a means for differentiation (based on merit), and as distributor of knowledge. He introduces the idea of the school-society, a self-governing body of students, teachers, parents, and community; and he offers a vision of a society based on normalizing the needs and values of local communities.
“I want the world to have these self-healing tools at hand through angels, archangels, Reiki, the Divinity, and unity. We are here to shake off our own sins and karmic payments to break an entire nation of suffering. Thus, we give the wings back to our children to dream of a living world full of color, joy, kindness, health, and wealth. The more light we spread, the faster we move toward 2032, when the golden age begins, when the human species will evolve from Homo sapiens to Homo luminous. We came out of a karmic cycle of ego and materialism that lasted two hundred years. This was the age of man based on materialism and the gathering of as much wealth as possible, which ended on March 21, 2021, when we entered the age of Aquarius, an era in which the emphasis will be, from an energetic point of view, on the elevation of the spirit and on the inner aspects. The new species will be called Homo luminous. The human collective, throughout history, has suffered, and it has been dramatic. Being allowed to deal with our own feelings, through our own powers as human beings disconnected from the divine and the Divinity in each of us, we have come to believe that it is right to kill in the name of religion and the ideologies based on it. We have come to believe and interpret through our own selfish minds that God wants us divided; that God is the one who punishes; and that he separates people according to color, financial status, or ethnicity. However, all these dirty and selfish ideologies are going to fall apart. Each of us will experience this through our own prism. Each of us will make this leap. Each of us will reconnect with the Divinity in us and realize that any thought, action, or deed on others has an effect on us as well. You will realize that you are a cocreator of your own life, and you will be able to make your own contribution in this regard. The divine will flow through each of us, for we will earn this right. We have earned this right over time. We earned it when people began to search within themselves for the answers. The Father waited for us with infinite patience and light to return home, to find ourselves, and to become one with him again. In one of my meditations, I was shown something that made me realize how interconnected everything on the planet is, and how they all lead to the same Source. The images came quickly, so I was not able to connect with everything I saw in a conscious way. I saw images of a grain of sand, stones, grass, cars, streets, animals, the sky, clouds, water, wind, and more, and then the images shrank as I ascended above Earth. Consciousness continued to show me Earth, the stars, black holes, and constellations, until I felt that no earthling or other being but the Father would be able to comprehend the vast universe shown to me, including beings in heaven”. ----------- "When you bring into the light certain traumas of yours, you free not only yourself from them but also your children. These processes have also an opposite effect, going down the ancestral line until the beginning of the first life. Do you realize now how important it is to overcome you fears? Do you realize now what can happen if you manage to overcome a fear, whether you do it by being present or calling on the help of angels, Reiki, therapy, or other methods? The final destination is important. A part of you is brighter, a part that shines. When you work every day, every week, or whenever you need or feel it is time to release something more, the body and the soul are reunited as a whole in the light piece by piece, until you become just the light"
"A breath, a gust, a positive whoosh of fresh air. Made me laugh, made me think, made me cry. " Adrian Plass In the last decade, atheism has leapt from obscurity to the front pages: producing best-selling books, making movies, and plastering adverts on the side of buses. There's an energy and a confidence to contemporary atheism: many people now assume that a godless scepticism is the default position, indeed the only position for anybody wishing to appear educated, contemporary, and urbane. Atheism is hip, religion is boring. Yet when one pokes at popular atheism, many of the arguments used to prop it up quickly unravel. The Atheist Who Didn't Exist is designed to expose some of the loose threads on the cardigan of atheism, tug a little, and see what happens. Blending humour with serious thought, Andy Bannister helps the reader question everything, assume nothing and, above all, recognise lazy scepticism and bad arguments. Be an atheist by all means: but do be a thought-through one.
People That Don't Exist Are Citizens Of A Made Up Country is an exploration of family emigration in the context of global migration. It seeks to display the increasingly universal reality of displacement as a lived experience. In a sequence of interlinked chapter essays migrant reality is married to one family's history.
Demonstrates how ten hypothetical situations would affect our planet and life on it. Topics include: what if the moon didn't exist, what if earth were tilted like Uranus, what if a black hole passed through earth, and so on.
