Maryland's Vanishing Lives
Maryland's Vanishing Lives

Author: John Sherwood

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 1995-10

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 9780801852497

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For more than two years, John Sherwood roamed Maryland's small towns and city neighborhoods, traveled Appalachian back roads, and sailed the Chesapeake looking for people whose work or way of life recalled the state's rich and varied tradition. Maryland's Vanishing Lives is his vivid account of the people he met on those journeys. Working in a country store or an old-time movie house, on a small tobacco farm or a weathered skipjack, Sherwood's subjects interest us as people, as stubborn survivors who have watched—sometimes defiantly, sometimes wistfully—as the world moved on. These Marylanders' stories poignantly show what happens to family businesses and ordinary folk in the face of new technology, suburban sprawl, franchise outlets, and changing tastes. But Maryland's Vanishing Lives is also an engaging celebration of pride and craft, and the ability to survive. In this collection of sixty-six short profiles, illustrated with memorable photographs by Edwin Remsberg, Sherwood preserves for posterity the lives of Marylanders who hang on to values and skills that are quickly disappearing.

On Vanishing
On Vanishing

Author: Lynn Casteel Harper

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2020-04-14

Total Pages: 126

ISBN-13: 1948226294

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A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice An essential book for those coping with Alzheimer’s and other cognitive disorders that “reframe[s] our understanding of dementia with sensitivity and accuracy . . . to grant better futures to our loved ones and ourselves” (The New York Times). An estimated fifty million people in the world suffer from dementia. Diseases such as Alzheimer's erase parts of one's memory but are also often said to erase the self. People don't simply die from such diseases; they are imagined, in the clichés of our era, as vanishing in plain sight, fading away, or enduring a long goodbye. In On Vanishing, Lynn Casteel Harper, a Baptist minister and nursing home chaplain, investigates the myths and metaphors surrounding dementia and aging, addressing not only the indignities caused by the condition but also by the rhetoric surrounding it. Harper asks essential questions about the nature of our outsized fear of dementia, the stigma this fear may create, and what it might mean for us all to try to “vanish well.” Weaving together personal stories with theology, history, philosophy, literature, and science, Harper confronts our elemental fears of disappearance and death, drawing on her own experiences with people with dementia both in the American healthcare system and within her own family. In the course of unpacking her own stories and encounters—of leading a prayer group on a dementia unit; of meeting individuals dismissed as “already gone” and finding them still possessed of complex, vital inner lives; of witnessing her grandfather’s final years with Alzheimer’s and discovering her own heightened genetic risk of succumbing to the disease—Harper engages in an exploration of dementia that is unlike anything written before on the subject. A rich and startling work of nonfiction, On Vanishing reveals cognitive change as it truly is, an essential aspect of what it means to be mortal.

The Vanishing American Adult
The Vanishing American Adult

Author: Ben Sasse

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin

Published: 2017-05-16

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1250114411

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THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In an era of safe spaces, trigger warnings, and an unprecedented election, the country's youth are in crisis. Senator Ben Sasse warns the nation about the existential threat to America's future. Raised by well-meaning but overprotective parents and coddled by well-meaning but misbegotten government programs, America's youth are ill-equipped to survive in our highly-competitive global economy. Many of the coming-of-age rituals that have defined the American experience since the Founding: learning the value of working with your hands, leaving home to start a family, becoming economically self-reliant—are being delayed or skipped altogether. The statistics are daunting: 30% of college students drop out after the first year, and only 4 in 10 graduate. One in three 18-to-34 year-olds live with their parents. From these disparate phenomena: Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse who as president of a Midwestern college observed the trials of this generation up close, sees an existential threat to the American way of life. In The Vanishing American Adult, Sasse diagnoses the causes of a generation that can't grow up and offers a path for raising children to become active and engaged citizens. He identifies core formative experiences that all young people should pursue: hard work to appreciate the benefits of labor, travel to understand deprivation and want, the power of reading, the importance of nurturing your body—and explains how parents can encourage them. Our democracy depends on responsible, contributing adults to function properly—without them America falls prey to populist demagogues. A call to arms, The Vanishing American Adult will ignite a much-needed debate about the link between the way we're raising our children and the future of our country.

The Point of Vanishing
The Point of Vanishing

Author: Howard Axelrod

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2015-09-22

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 0807075477

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Into the Wild meets Walden—a lyrical memoir for nature lovers and for anyone who has wondered what it would be like to disconnect from our hyper-connected culture and seek more meaningful connections After losing vision in one eye and becoming estranged from his family and friends, a young man spent two years searching for identity in self-imposed solitude in the backwoods of northern Vermont, where he embarked on a project of stripping away facades and all social ties--and learned to face himself. On a clear May afternoon at the end of his junior year at Harvard, Howard Axelrod played a pick-up game of basketball. In a skirmish for a loose ball, a boy’s finger hooked behind Axelrod’s eyeball and left him permanently blinded in his right eye. A week later, he returned to the same dorm room, but to a different world. A world where nothing looked solid, where the distance between how people saw him and how he saw had widened into a gulf. Desperate for a sense of orientation he could trust, he retreated to a jerry-rigged house in the Vermont woods, where he lived without a computer or television, and largely without human contact, for two years. He needed to find a more lasting sense of meaning away from society’s pressures and rush. Named one of the best books of the year by Slate, Chicago Tribune, Entropy Magazine, and named one of the top 10 memoirs by Library Journal

Vanishing Life
Vanishing Life

Author: Jeff Hecht

Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers

Published: 2009-02-06

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781416994220

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From the author of Optics and Shifting Shores comes a detailed and mesmerizing look into the mystery of mass extinctions. Vanishing Life takes readers into the fascinating phenomenon of mass extinction as Jeff Hecht bust myths with shocking facts in this spellbinding book. In clear and lucid style, Hecht explores the geological evidence of extinction and its interpretation, the evolution of species, fossilization, and the theories by which science attempts to explain various “dyings.”

Elena Vanishing
Elena Vanishing

Author: Elena Dunkle

Publisher: Chronicle Books

Published: 2015-05-19

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 145213068X

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Seventeen-year-old Elena is vanishing. Every day means renewed determination, so every day means fewer calories. This is the story of a girl whose armor against anxiety becomes artillery against herself as she battles on both sides of a lose-lose war in a struggle with anorexia. Told entirely from Elena's perspective over a five-year period and cowritten with her mother, award-winning author Clare B. Dunkle, Elena's memoir is a fascinating and intimate look at a deadly disease, and a must read for anyone who knows someone suffering from an eating disorder.

The Art of Vanishing
The Art of Vanishing

Author: Laura Smith

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2018-02-06

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 039956358X

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A young woman chafing at the confines of marriage confronts the high cost of craving freedom and adventure in a memoir that "pushes literary boundaries" (The Atlantic) At twenty-five, as her wedding date approached, Laura Smith began to feel trapped. Not by her fiancé, who shared her appetite for adventure, but by the unsettling idea that it was hard to be at once married and free. Laura wanted her life to be different. She wanted her marriage to be different. And she found in the strangely captivating story of another restless young woman determined to live without constraints both an enticement and a challenge. Barbara Newhall Follett was a free-spirited trailblazer who published her first novel at 11, enlisted as a deck hand on a boat bound for the south China seas at 15 and was one of the first women to hike the Appalachian trail. Then in December 1939, when she was not much older than Laura, she walked out of her apartment on a quiet tree-lined street in Brookline, leaving behind a fraying marriage, and vanished without a trace. Obsessed by her story, Laura set off to find out what had happened. The Art of Vanishing is a riveting mystery and a piercing exploration of marriage and convention that asks deep and uncomfortable questions: Why do we give up on our childhood dreams? Is marriage a golden noose? Must we find ourselves in the same row houses with Pottery Barn lamps telling our kids to behave? Searingly honest and written with a raw intensity, it will challenge you to rethink your most intimate decisions and may just upend your life.

The Mothers
The Mothers

Author: Brit Bennett

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0399184511

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It is the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken beauty. Mourning her mother's recent suicide, she takes up with the local pastor's son. Luke Sheppard is twenty-one, a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting tables at a diner. It's not serious-- until the pregnancy. As years move by, Nadia, Luke, and her friend Aubrey are living in debt to the choices they made that one seaside summer, caught in a love triangle they must carefully maneuver, and dogged by the constant, nagging question: What if they had chosen differently?

Vanishing Ireland
Vanishing Ireland

Author: James Fennel

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Published: 2012-01-17

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780340920275

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In Vanishing Ireland II, the follow up to the bestselling Vanishing Ireland I, we take another journey down memory lane and, through a unique collection of portrait interviews, we look at the dying ways and traditions of Irish life. Illustrated with over a hundred evocative and stunning photographs, we meet the people and the customs that are fast becoming a distant memory. Through their own words and memories, men and women from every corner of Ireland transport us back to a simpler time when people lived off the land and the sea, and when music and storytelling were essential parts of life. Vanishing Ireland brings together the stories of those who lived through Ireland's formative years. These poignant interviews and photographs will make you laugh and cry but, above all, will provide a valuable chronicle that connects twenty-first century Ireland to a rapidly disappearing world.

American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land
American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land

Author: Monica Hesse

Publisher: Liveright Publishing

Published: 2017-07-11

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1631490524

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A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year One of Amazon’s 20 Best Books of the Year Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Buzzfeed, Bustle, NPR, NYLON, and Thrillist Finalist for the Goodreads Book Award (Nonfiction) Finalist for the Edgar Award (Best Fact Crime) A Book of the Month Club Selection A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection “A brisk, captivating and expertly crafted reconstruction of a community living through a time of fear.... Masterful.” —Washington Post The arsons started on a cold November midnight and didn’t stop for months. Night after night, the people of Accomack County waited to see which building would burn down next, regarding each other at first with compassion, and later suspicion. Vigilante groups sprang up, patrolling the rural Virginia coast with cameras and camouflage. Volunteer firefighters slept at their stations. The arsonist seemed to target abandoned buildings, but local police were stretched too thin to surveil them all. Accomack was desolate—there were hundreds of abandoned buildings. And by the dozen they were burning. “One of the year’s best and most unusual true-crime books” (Christian Science Monitor), American Fire brings to vivid life the reeling county of Accomack. “Ace reporter” (Entertainment Weekly) Monica Hesse spent years investigating the story, emerging with breathtaking portraits of the arsonists—troubled addict Charlie Smith and his girlfriend, Tonya Bundick. Tracing the shift in their relationship from true love to crime spree, Hesse also conjures the once-thriving coastal community, decimated by a punishing economy and increasingly suspicious of their neighbors as the culprits remained at large. Weaving the story into the history of arson in the United States, the critically acclaimed American Fire re-creates the anguished nights this quiet county lit up in flames, evoking a microcosm of rural America—a land half-gutted before the fires began.