A Portal to Paradise

A Portal to Paradise

Author: Alden C. Hayes

Publisher:

Published: 1999-07

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13:

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Arizona's rugged Chiricahua Mountains have a special place in frontier history. They were the haven of many well-known personalities, from Cochise to Johnny Ringo, as well as the home of prospectors, cattlemen, and hardscrabble farmers eking out a tough living in an unforgiving landscape. In this delightful and well-researched book, Alden Hayes shares his love for the area, gained over fifty years. From his vantage point near the tiny twin communities of Portal and Paradise on the eastern slopes of the Chiricahuas, Hayes brings the famous and the not-so-famous together in a profile of this striking landscape, showing how place can be a powerful formative influence on people's lives. When Hayes first arrived in 1941 to manage his new father-in-law's apple orchard, he met folks who had been born in Arizona before it became a state. Even if most had never personally worried about Indian attacks, they had known people who had. Over the years, Hayes heard the handed-down stories about the area's early days of Anglo settlement. He also researched census records, newspaper archives, and the files of the Arizona Historical Society to uncover the area's natural history, prehistory, Spanish and Mexican regimes, and particularly its Anglo history from the mid nineteenth century to the beginning of World War II. His book is a rich account of the region and more, a celebration of rural life, brimming with tales of people whose stories were shaped by the landscape. Today the Chiricahuas are a magnet for outdoor enthusiasts and the site of the American Museum of Natural History's Southwestern Research Station—and still a rugged area that remains off the beaten track. Hayes brings his straightforward and articulate style to this captivating account of earlier days in southeastern Arizona and opens up a portal to paradise for readers everywhere.


See You in Paradise

See You in Paradise

Author: J. Robert Lennon

Publisher: Graywolf Press

Published: 2014-11-04

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1555973280

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The first substantial collection of short fiction from "a writer with enough electricity to light up the country" (Ann Patchett) "I guess the things that scare you are the things that are almost normal," observes one narrator in this collection of effervescent and often uncanny stories. Drawing on fifteen years of work, See You in Paradise is the fullest expression yet of J. Robert Lennon's distinctive and brilliantly comic take on the pathos and surreality at the heart of American life. In Lennon's America, a portal to another universe can be discovered with surprising nonchalance in a suburban backyard, adoption almost reaches the level of blood sport, and old pals return from the dead to steal your girlfriend. Sexual dysfunction, suicide, tragic accidents, and career stagnation all create surprising opportunities for unexpected grace in this full-hearted and mischievous depiction of those days (weeks, months, years) we all have when things just don't go quite right.


Pacal's Portal to Paradise at Palenque

Pacal's Portal to Paradise at Palenque

Author: Graeme R. Kearsley

Publisher: Yelsraek Publishing

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 9780954115814

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The Maya are held up as the supreme apogee of indigenous Amerindian peoples in Central America - but is that true? Why are the imagery, deity, hero and god names so remarkably similar to that in Ancient India? The Pacific Ocean equatorial currents provide direct marine highways from Asia direct to central America and the Maya and vice versa. This book provides comparative aspects of archaeology, iconography, mythology and available history that focuses on Palenque where the architecture, sculpture, architectural construction and design are unusual even for the Maya to show that they relate directly, and certainly originates, from many examples in India. The supreme iconographical monument from the Maya civilisation is thought by many to be Pacal's Funerary Slab at Palenque and this is shown to reflect this same iconography originating in India but assimilated into the finest achievement of Mesoamerican civilisation.


Fool's Paradise

Fool's Paradise

Author: Steven Gaines

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2009-12-29

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0307346285

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From the acclaimed bestselling author of Philistines at the Hedgerow comes a remarkably revealing profile of the Miami Beach no one knows–a tale of fabulous excess, thwarted power, and rekindled lives that will take its place among the decade’s best works of social portraiture. Created from a mix of swampland and dredged-up barrier reef, Miami Beach has always been one part drifter-mecca and one part fantasyland, simultaneously a catch basin for con men, fast-talk artists, and shameless self-promoters, and a Shangri-La for sun worshippers and hardcore hedonists. In Miami Beach it’s often said that "if you’re not indicted you’re not invited." But the city’s mad, fascinating complexity resists easy stereotyping. Fool’s Paradise is more than just a present-day profile of a dark Eden. Gaines journeys back into the city’s social and cultural history, unearthing stories of the resort’s past that are every bit as absorbing–and jaw-dropping–as those of its present. The book begins with a snapshot of the city’s current excess (this is, after all, a sun-washed hamlet that boasts, on a per capita basis, more bars–and breast implants–than any other place in America), then plunges into the Beach’s origins, chronicling the audacious rise of such hoteliers as the Fontainebleau’s Ben Novack and the Eden Roc’s Harry Mufson, the sharp-elbowed tactics of Al Capone and Frank Sinatra, and the Mac-10 shooting sprees of the Marielito and Colombian drug lords. From there, the narrative shifts to two wildly eccentric souls who gave their lives to preserving the city’s architectural dazzle and creating its color palette, introduces us to "the Most Powerful Man in Miami Beach," and arrives finally in the modern day, where we meet, among others, a kinky German playboy who once owned a quarter of South Beach and publicly flaunts his sexual escapades; a fabulously successful nightclub promoter whose addictive past seems to have given him a portal into the night world’s id; and a gaggle of young sexy models, dreamers, and schemers on a mission to achieve significance. Evoking the Beach’s surreal blend of flashy Vegas and old Hollywood glamour, as well as its manic desperation and reckless wealth, Gaines persuasively demonstrates that though the Beach is–in the words of its most famous drag queen–"an island of broken toys . . . a place where people get away with things they’d never get away with anyplace else," it casts an irresistible spell.


Portal to Paradise

Portal to Paradise

Author: Alice Eastlake Chew

Publisher:

Published: 2016-07-06

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781367493773

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Long time residents of Portal, Arizona, and well known desert ecologists, Alice and Robert Chew, share their poetic and photographic art.


The Battle for Paradise

The Battle for Paradise

Author: Naomi Klein

Publisher: Haymarket Books

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 53

ISBN-13: 1608464318

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Fearless necessary reporting . . . Klein exposes the ‘battle of utopias’ that is currently unfolding in storm-ravaged Puerto Rico” (Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) “We are in a fight for our lives. Hurricanes Irma and María unmasked the colonialism we face in Puerto Rico, and the inequality it fosters, creating a fierce humanitarian crisis. Now we must find a path forward to equality and sustainability, a path driven by communities, not investors. And this book explains, with careful and unbiased reporting, only the efforts of our community activists can answer the paramount question: What type of society do we want to become and who is Puerto Rico for?” —Carmen Yulín Cruz, Mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico In the rubble of Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricans and ultrarich “Puertopians” are locked in a pitched struggle over how to remake the island. In this vital and startling investigation, bestselling author and activist Naomi Klein uncovers how the forces of shock politics and disaster capitalism seek to undermine the nation’s radical, resilient vision for a “just recovery.” All royalties from the sale of this book in English and Spanish go directly to JunteGente, a gathering of Puerto Rican organizations resisting disaster capitalism and advancing a fair and healthy recovery for their island. “Klein chronicles the extraordinary grassroots resistance by the Puerto Rican people against neoliberal privatization and Wall Street greed in the aftermath of the island’s financial meltdown, of hurricane devastation, and of Washington’s imposition of an outside control board over the most important U.S. colony.” —Juan González, cohost of Democracy Now! and author of Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America


A Step Away from Paradise

A Step Away from Paradise

Author: Thomas K. Shor

Publisher: Penguin Books India

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0143415468

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WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED... If Lewis Carroll had proclaimed the reality of Alice's Wonderland? What if he had gathered a following & launched an expedition? THE TRUE STORY OF A JOURNEY TO A FANTASTIC LAND IT WAS THE EARLY 1960s. The place, a far-off corner of the Himalayas long fabled in Tibetan tradition to be hiding a valley of immortality among its peaks and glaciers--a real-life Shangri-La. They waited generations for the prophesied lama to come, the one with the secret knowledge of how to 'open' the Hidden Land. Then, one day, he came. His name was Tulshuk Lingpa. THIS BOOK TELLS THE TRUE STORY of this charismatic visionary lama and his remarkable expedition. Against the wishes of the kings of both Sikkim and Nepal, he and over three hundred followers ventured up the snowy slopes of the third highest mountain of the planet. Their aim: to open a crack in the very fabric of reality and go to a land we would all wish to inhabit if it were only there--a land of peace and concord. FORTY YEARS LATER, the author spends over five years tracking down the surviving members of this extraordinary expedition. He deftly weaves their stories together with humor, wisdom, and scholarly research into Tibetan traditions of Hidden Lands, all the while reflecting on what this means for the rest of us. "LIKE NO OTHER BOOK I have ever read...a riveting tale of adventure...honest to the real spirit of Tibet...both unique and intriguing...an engrossing read. Highly recommended." JETSUNMA TENZIN PALMO, from the Foreword From Tulshuk Lingpa's Guidebook to the Hidden Land: "DON'T LISTEN TO ANYBODY. Decide by yourself and practise madness. Develop courage for the benefit of all sentient beings. Then you will automatically be free from the knot of attachment. Then you will continually have the confidence of fearlessness and you can then try to open the Great Door of the Hidden Place." FIRST PUBLISHED BY PENGUIN 2011 CITY LION PRESS EDITION 2017 THIS EDITION IS NOT FOR SALE IN SOUTH ASIA, MALAYSIA, OR SINGAPORE


Trouble in Paradise

Trouble in Paradise

Author: Slavoj Žižek

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2014-11-27

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 0141979550

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In Trouble in Paradise, Slavoj Žižek, one of our most famous, most combative philosophers, explains how by drawing on the ideas of communism, we can find a way out of the crisis of capitalism. There is obviously trouble in the global capitalist paradise. But why do we find it so difficult to imagine a way out of the crisis we're in? It is as if the trouble feeds on itself: the march of capitalism has become inexorable, the only game in town. Setting out to diagnose the condition of global capitalism, the ideological constraints we are faced with in our daily lives, and the bleak future promised by this system, Slavoj Žižek explores the possibilities - and the traps - of new emancipatory struggles. Drawing insights from phenomena as diverse as Gangnam Style to Marx, The Dark Knight to Thatcher, Trouble in Paradise is an incisive dissection of the world we inhabit, and the new order to come. 'The most dangerous philosopher in the West' - Adam Kirsch, New Republic 'The most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged in many decades' - Terry Eagleton 'Žižek leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized, and is master of the counterintuitive observation' - New Yorker Slavoj Žižek is a Hegelian philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst, and political activist. He is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and the author of numerous books on dialectical materialism, critique of ideology and art, including Less Than Nothing, Living in the End Times, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce and, most recently, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously.


The Portal

The Portal

Author: Andrew Norriss

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2007-08-02

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 014132158X

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William and his brother Daniel come home from school one day to find their parents have disappeared - It's the first of a series of shocks they have to cope with, not the least of which is finding that their house has been built over an inter-stellar portal - It's some time before they can solve the mystery of where their parents have gone and why - and in the meantime they have to cope with visiting aliens, chickens, and making their own lunch - It's not easy - Not easy at all.