If water is life, rainwater is a fountain of life. The purpose of this book is to show how various communities have caught that fountain of life using rainwater catchment systems. This book looks at real, practical, global experiences of rainwater catchment (a.k.a. rainwater harvesting) on individual, financially constrained, and community based levels through academic, mathematical and practical perspectives. This book can be used to learn practical skills, see inspiring examples, and to make math have more meaning. This book is for practitioners, DIYers, community members looking for water solutions, as well as for students and teachers in environmental science, environmental studies, sustainable design, international development, engineering, and mathematics. The book is broken into sections on rainwater catchment in general, types, components, gravity, calculations, implementation stories, useful links, conversions, and problem-sets.
Colliding with the Call takes the reader on a journey through the wilderness of faith that often happens after a Christian decides to follow and serve God. Both those in ministry and missions and those curious about life on the "frontlines" will find encouragement and inspiration in these pages.Back cover copy:I've surrendered to following God's will, but this is not what I expected. Where's the peace? The joy? The fruit? Did I somehow miss the call, God?Sound familiar? Those were Corella's questions, too, as she found herself in a literal and spiritual wilderness after answering the call to become a missionary teacher in remote Alaska. Through these pages, you'll journey with her to unearth glimpses of God's purpose for those seven dark years. With tenderness and conviction, she examines the reality of the wilderness in the life of the believer and the scriptural truths that offer hope in the midst of disappointment.Corella's story of undoing and rebirth in the wilderness just might be your story, too, if you dare to let God take you there.
A New York Times Best Seller 2019 National Book Award Longlist, Nonfiction 2019 Kirkus Book Prize Finalist, Nonfiction A February IndieNext Pick Named A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 by Buzzfeed, Nylon, The A. V. Club, CBC Books, and The Rumpus, and a Winter's Most Anticipated Book by Vanity Fair and The Week Starred Reviews: Kirkus and Booklist "Warm, immediate and intensely personal."—New York Times How does one pay homage to A Tribe Called Quest? The seminal rap group brought jazz into the genre, resurrecting timeless rhythms to create masterpieces such as The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders. Seventeen years after their last album, they resurrected themselves with an intense, socially conscious record, We Got It from Here . . . Thank You 4 Your Service, which arrived when fans needed it most, in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib digs into the group’s history and draws from his own experience to reflect on how its distinctive sound resonated among fans like himself. The result is as ambitious and genre-bending as the rap group itself. Abdurraqib traces the Tribe's creative career, from their early days as part of the Afrocentric rap collective known as the Native Tongues, through their first three classic albums, to their eventual breakup and long hiatus. Their work is placed in the context of the broader rap landscape of the 1990s, one upended by sampling laws that forced a reinvention in production methods, the East Coast–West Coast rivalry that threatened to destroy the genre, and some record labels’ shift from focusing on groups to individual MCs. Throughout the narrative Abdurraqib connects the music and cultural history to their street-level impact. Whether he’s remembering The Source magazine cover announcing the Tribe’s 1998 breakup or writing personal letters to the group after bandmate Phife Dawg’s death, Abdurraqib seeks the deeper truths of A Tribe Called Quest; truths that—like the low end, the bass—are not simply heard in the head, but felt in the chest.
Growing up in a house full of women, fourteen-year-old Grayling learns to deal with death, love, and the unanswered questions raised by her widowed mother's apparent abandonment.
At fifty, Alix Kates Shulman left a city life dense with political activism, family, and literary community, and went to stay alone in a small cabin on an island off the Maine coast.
This is a story about faith. As simple as that sounds, sometimes all of us need an example of how faith inevitably becomes the single most important component of who we are, what we do, and what we will become. At forty-seven, Mike suffered a widow-maker heart attack, which stopped his heart. This event resulted in multiple cardiac arrests, cardiogenic shock, respiratory failure, pulmonary embolisms, and acute kidney injury. He was given a 0.5 percent chance of survival. His parents were advised to plan his funeral. Mike was unconscious for over two weeks, but he was never alone. Bring the Rain is an inspirational and personal account of Mike Mitcheners encounter with death and his time in heaven. This book is a quick read for anyone who is searching. Mike hopes that sharing his story will encourage others in their spiritual journey.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves—and our world today. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR, Time, San Francisco Chronicle, Esquire, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Town & Country, The Rumpus, Electric Lit, Thrillist, BookPage • “[A] worship song to writers and readers.”—Oprah Daily For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?” He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.
