Book picks similar to
Sufism as Therapy by Omar Ali-Shah
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Bloody Mary: The Life of Mary Tudor
Carolly Erickson - 1978
Her death was a national holiday for 200 years. But, in this biography, Carolly Erickson tells of how she survived an agonizing adolescence and how after winning the throne, she met her challenges with courage.
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
Erich Auerbach - 1942
A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. This new expanded edition includes a substantial essay in introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay, never before translated into English, in which Auerbach responds to his critics.A German Jew, Auerbach was forced out of his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935. He left for Turkey, where he taught at the state university in Istanbul. There he wrote "Mimesis," publishing it in German after the end of the war. Displaced as he was, Auerbach produced a work of great erudition that contains no footnotes, basing his arguments instead on searching, illuminating readings of key passages from his primary texts. His aim was to show how from antiquity to the twentieth century literature progressed toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. This essentially optimistic view of European history now appears as a defensive--and impassioned--response to the inhumanity he saw in the Third Reich. Ranging over works in Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English, Auerbach used his remarkable skills in philology and comparative literature to refute any narrow form of nationalism or chauvinism, in his own day and ours. For many readers, both inside and outside the academy, "Mimesis" is among the finest works of literary criticism ever written.
Psicomagia
Alejandro Jodorowsky - 1995
He realized that it is easier for the unconscious to understand the language of dreams than that of rationality. Illness can even be seen as a physical dream that reveals unresolved emotional and psychological problems. Psychomagic presents the shamanic and genealogical principles Jodorowsky discovered to create a healing therapy that could use the powers of dreams, art, and theater to empower individuals to heal wounds that in some cases had traveled through generations. The concrete and often surreal poetic actions Jodorowsky employs are part of an elaborate strategy intended to break apart the dysfunctional persona with whom the patient identifies in order to connect with a deeper self. That is when true transformation can manifest. For a young man who complained that he lived only in his head and was unable to grab hold of reality and advance toward the financial autonomy he desired, Jodorowsky gave the prescription to paste two gold coins to the soles of his shoes so that all day he would be walking on gold. A judge whose vanity was ruling his every move was given the task of dressing like a tramp and begging outside one of the fashionable restaurants he loved to frequent while pulling glass doll eyes out of his pockets. The lesson for him was that if a tramp can fill his pockets with eyeballs, then they must be of no value, and thus the eyes of others should have no bearing on who you are and what you do. Taking his patients directly at their words, Jodorowsky takes the same elements associated with a negative emotional charge and recasts them in an action that will make them positive and enable them to pay the psychological debts hindering their lives.
Broken Vessels: Essays
Andre Dubus - 1992
Especially moving are his descriptions of his children, his wrenching account of the 1986 automobile accident that cost him his leg, and of the ensuing struggle for his spiritual and physical survival.
Broken Vessels
is a book that, in its scope and sympathy, its grace and courage, never fails to startle with the sudden impact of quiet truths, passionately felt and powerfully expressed.
The Egyptians
Cyril Aldred - 1961
Aidan Dodson has completely revised the book whilst carefully preserving its succinct and lucid qualities.
Korea Unmasked
Won-bok Rhie - 2002
It brings the reader a fascinating exploration of the Korean mindset and weaves together history, sociology and cultural anthropology. The book introduces an insight in subjects like; Korean history, traditions, culture, food, life, economy, tension between South and N. Korea and more. The book will introduce the reader to Korea and their people and discuss many subjects and attitudes that are sometimes unknown or misunderstood by westerners. The insightful discussions about Korea and differences/similarities with other countries emphasized on the neighbors China, Japan, will help to clear the picture who the Korean people really are. The author, Won-bok Rhie provides a delightful and humorous portrait of the Korean people. It's comical yet serious well-written and informative pictured by the author. If you only have time for one book about Korea, this is the book! ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Won-bok Rhie is one of Korea's most famous cartoonists. After achieved a bachelor's degree in architecture at Seoul National University, he studied graphic design in Germany and obtained a degree of Dipl. Designer. He is the author of numerous comic books introducing historical, cultural and economic subjects. He have also written many comic series in Korea newspapers and magazines. Korea Unmasked is part of a 9-volume series of comic books about several European countries, Korea and Japan, which all became bestsellers in Korea. Rhie is also a professor of graphic design in University in Seoul, Korea. In 1993, he achieved a prestigious Award in recognition of his development and contributions to the Korean cartoon industry. From 1998 to 2000, he also served as the president of the Korean Society of Cartoon and Animation Studies.
Death as a Way of Life: Ten Years After Oslo
David Grossman - 2003
The ten years that followed were charted first by hope and optimism only to deteriorate into violence. This book presents a collection of articles which mark ten years to the dream of Oslo.
Applied Ballardianism: Memoir From a Parallel Universe
Simon Sellars - 2018
Ballard, voluptuary of the car crash, surgeon of the pathological virtualities pulsing beneath reality's surface.Defeated by obsessive fears and the stultifying tedium of academia, yet certain that everything connects to Ballard, his thesis collapses into a series of delirious travelogues, deranged speculations and tormented meditations on time, memory, and loss. Renouncing all scholarly distance, he finally accepts the deep assignment that has plagued him throughout his life and embarks on a rogue fieldwork project: Applied Ballardianism.Only the darkest impulses and the most apocalyptic paranoia can uncover the technological mutations of inner space...
The Ends of the World
Déborah Danowski - 2014
Environmental catastrophe and planetary apocalypse are subjects of enduring fascination and, as ethnographic studies show, human cultures have approached them in very different ways. Indeed, in the face of the growing perception of the dire effects of global warming, some of these visions have been given a new lease on life. Information and analyses concerning the human causes and the catastrophic consequences of the planetary 'crisis' have been accumulating at an ever-increasing rate, mobilising popular opinion as well as academic reflection.In this book, philosopher D�borah Danowski and anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro offer a bold overview and interpretation of these current discourses on 'the end of the world', reading them as thought experiments on the decline of the West's anthropological adventure � that is, as attempts, though not necessarily intentional ones, at inventing a mythology that is adequate to the present. This work has important implications for the future development of ecological practices and it will appeal to a broad audience interested in contemporary anthropology, philosophy, and environmentalism.
The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942
Christopher R. Browning - 2003
By the fall of 1941, these plans had shifted from expulsion to systematic and total mass murder of all Jews within the Nazi grasp. The Origins of the Final Solution is the most detailed and comprehensive analysis ever written of what took place during this crucial period—of how, precisely, the Nazis’ racial policies evolved from persecution and “ethnic cleansing” to the Final Solution of the Holocaust.Focusing on the months between the German conquest of Poland in September 1939–which brought nearly two million additional Jews under Nazi control—and the beginning of the deportation of Jews to the death camps in the spring of 1942, Christopher R. Browning describes how Poland became a laboratory for experiments in racial policies, from expulsion and decimation to ghettoization and exploitation under local occupation authorities. He reveals how the subsequent attack on the Soviet Union opened the door for an immense radicalization of Nazi Jewish policy—and marked the beginning of the Final Solution. Meticulously documenting the process that led to this fatal development, Browning shows that Adolf Hitler was the key decision-maker throughout, approving major escalations in Nazi persecution of the Jews at victory-induced moments of euphoria. Thoroughly researched and lucidly written, this groundbreaking work provides an essential chapter in the history of the Holocaust.
Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013
Philip Roth - 2017
As a retrospective summation of his essays and interviews, it is essential reading in tandem with Roth’s novels, both for the discussions of his own books and as a record of his profound engagement with other writers: Kafka, Bellow, Malamud, and the leading figures of Cold War–era Czechoslovakia among them.Divided into three sections, Why Write? begins with Roth’s selection of the indispensable core of Reading Myself and Others, first published in 1975 and expanded for a second edition ten years later. It opens with the remarkable hybrid story-essay, “‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka,” a critical evaluation that yields to a fictional imagination of Kafka as young Roth’s Hebrew School teacher in 1940s Newark, the first of the provocative forays into speculative alternative realities that would take shape in novels like The Ghost Writer and The Plot Against America. In the essays and interviews given in the wake of the explosive release of Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth clarifies how he sought to “raise obscenity to the level of a subject,” provides sharp-edged insights into an America wracked by political turmoil and sexual revolution, and defends the imaginative freedom of writers and readers alike.The volume’s second section presents in its entirety the 2001 book Shop Talk, a series of conversations with writers such as Aharon Appelfeld, Primo Levi, and Edna O’Brien, as well as essays on Malamud, Bellow, and the artist Philip Guston. The collection highlights Roth’s skill as an astute literary interlocutor, engaged with writers whose traditions, assumptions, and experience can differ markedly from those of the American world of his own fiction.The concluding section, “Explanations,” comprises fourteen later pieces collected here for the first time, six of them never before published. Among the essays gathered are “My Uchronia,” an account of the genesis of The Plot Against America, a novel grounded in the insight that “all the assurances are provisional, even here in a two-hundred-year-old democracy”; “Errata,” the unabridged version of the “Open Letter to Wikipedia” published on The New Yorker’s website in 2012 to counter the online encyclopedia’s egregious errors about his life and work; “Forty-Five Years On,” Roth’s absolute last word on Portnoy; and “The Ruthless Intimacy of Fiction,” a speech delivered on the occasion of his eightieth birthday that evokes the Newark of Roth’s childhood and examines the “refractory way of living” of Sabbath’s Theater’s Mickey Sabbath. Also included are two lengthy interviews given after Roth’s retirement, which take stock of a lifetime of work: “Morning after morning for fifty years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. Writing for me was a feat of self-preservation.”
The Stones of Venice
John Ruskin - 1853
Destroy its claims to admiration there, and it can assert them nowhere else." This was Ruskin's war cry as he entered the now almost forgotten Battle of the Styles on the side against "the school which has conducted men's inventive and constructional faculties from the Grand Canal to Gower Street."But first the reader must know the difference between right and wrong; he must find out for himself the best way of doing everything. "I shall give him stones, and bricks and straw, chisels and trowels and the ground, and then ask him to build, only helping him if I find him puzzled."Unhappily, both these exciting objectives were attained only after the expenditure of nearly half-a-million words; glorious words, but too many. For fifty years, The Stones of Venice was read by all who went there and thousands who could not; the sightseers whom the city captivates today seldom have its greatest guidebook with them.It is the aim of this new edition to put a fascinating book within reach of travelers--active or armchair--with limited resources of time. Much that was superfluous has been omitted; what remains is the essence of a now very readable and portable book. It is a book for the lover of architecture, the lover of Venice, the lover of lost causes, and, perhaps above all, for the lover of fine writing.
The Moro Affair
Leonardo Sciascia - 1978
Within three minutes the gang killed his escort and bundled Moro into one of three getaway cars. An hour later the terrorist group the Red Brigades announced that Moro was in their hands; on March 18 they said he would be tried in a "people's court of justice." Seven weeks later Moro's body was discovered in the trunk of a car parked in the crowded center of Rome.The Moro Affair presents a chilling picture of how a secretive government and a ruthless terrorist faction help to keep each other in business.Also included in this book is "The Mystery of Majorana," Sciascia's fascinating investigation of the disappearance of a major Italian physicist during Mussolini's regime.
The Book Your Church Doesn't Want You to Read
Tim C. Leedom - 1993
Now into its 3rd printing. A Best-seller. This popular anthology tells it all, the textbook of Freethought, edited by Tim C. Leedom.
The Grammar of Fantasy: An Introduction to the Art of Inventing Stories
Gianni Rodari - 1973
In this delightful classic -- now translated into English for the first time -- Rodari presents numerous and wonderful techniques for creating stories. He discusses these specific techniques in the context of the imagination, fairy tales, folk tales, children's stories, cognitive development, and compassionate education. Gianni Rodari was one of the founders of the innovative educational approach that began in Reggio Emilia, Italy, and is now making itself felt throughout the U.S. The Grammar of Fantasy grew out of a series of informal workshops that Rodari conducted for the teachers of Reggio Emilia.