In this eminently readable guide to his abiding passion, he has distilled the essense of a library's--and a lifetime's--worth of delight.The pleasures of his own verse can be found in abundance here: economy, a natural ease, and most of all, surprise. What is English poetry? Fenton argues that it includes any recited words in English that marshall rhythm for their meaning--among them prisoners's work songs, Broadway show tunes, and the cries of street vendors captured in verse. From these beginnings, Fenton describes the rudiments of--and, most important, the inspiration for--the musical verse we find in books, and concludes with an illuminating discussion of operas and songs. Fenton illustrates his comments with verse from all over the English-speaking world.Catholic in his taste, shrewd in his distinctions, and charmingly frank, Fenton is an ideal guide to everything to do with poetry, from the temperament of poets to their accomplishment, in all its variety. In all his writing, prose or verse, Fenton has always had the virtue of saying, in a way that seems effortless, precisely what lies at the heart of the matter. In this vein, An Introduction to English Poetry is one of his highest accomplishments.

    A series of essays including: Stealing Tomorrow, Down the Rabbit-Hole to TV-Land, Rolling Dat Ole Debbil Electronic Stone, Defeating the Green Slime, Fear Not your Enemies, From Albany, With Hate, Centerpunching, Voe Doe Dee Oh Doe, Cheap Thrills on the Road to H*ll, and more.

    It depicts a literal battle between books in the King's Library (housed in St James's Palace at the time of the writing), as ideas and authors struggle for supremacy. Because of the satire, "The Battle of the Books" has become a term for the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. It is one of his earliest well-known works.

    An illustrated edition of the classic poem, in which a British soldier recalls his experiences in the army in India and pays homage to the courage of the Indian water carrier Gunga Din.

    This widely used undergraduate text is now available in a new edition. Thoroughly updated, the fourth edition includes expanded sections on numerous topics, among which are samurai values, Zen Buddhism, the tea ceremony, Confucianism in the Tokugawa period, the story of the forty-seven ronin, Mito scholarship in the early nineteenth century, and mass culture and comics in contemporary times.

    

    Some mammoths were smaller than children. Owls are the dumbest birds in the world. Very few people with Tourette's syndrome swear. You can't get a six-pack from doing sit-ups. King Arthur's sword wasn't called Excalibur. Milk doesn't make your bones strong. There's no bones in your fingers. The Bible states that humans can't become angels. Humans have more than two nostrils. It's impossible to slide down a bannister. At a wedding, the bride doesn't walk down the aisle. Ties were invented for war, not fashion. Most Disney classics made almost no money. Slavery has only been illegal in the UK since 2010. George Washington wasn't the first American President. Velcro doesn’t exist. Nobody knows why we sleep.

    I know from experience. In the summer of 2016, I decided to learn hand lettering to create coloring pages for my book, Broken Crayons Still Color. I watched every video I could find and tried all the recommended techniques. However, no matter what I did, even with the best of pens, my lettering looked horrible. Let's admit it: Learning calligraphy is not as easy as some of the artists online make it look. And I was frustrated. I continued my research and discovered faux calligraphy. I decided to use it, along with block lettering, to create my hand-drawn coloring pages. What is Faux Calligraphy? It's fake calligraphy. In my opinion, it is the easiest way to get started. You can achieve a beautiful outcome almost right away, even with your own handwriting. In this book, Calligraphy for Beginners, I will walk you through the steps of how to get started as well as the mistakes to avoid. In calligraphy, your letters will have thick downstrokes and thin upstrokes. With faux calligraphy, you simply add the thickness to your downstrokes after you write the letters. It's a three-step process you'll learn in chapter three. Traditional calligraphy and brush lettering require months of consistent practice to train your hand and develop the muscle memory required to achieve the thick and thin strokes. Even after years of practice, I continue to improve every day. And, honestly, I notice the difference in my lettering if I don't practice consistently for several weeks. Therefore, if you want to achieve a beautiful outcome right away or need to use lettering for a project immediately (like I did), faux calligraphy is a great way to get started. It's a fun way to add text to coloring pages and create beautiful artwork, hand-lettered cards, bookmarks, and so much more. Bonus: As a bonus to this book, you get free access to my faux calligraphy online class ($39 value). To make it as easy as possible for you, I filmed a video demonstrating every letter in the alphabet. Plus, you can download my practice sheets to print off for reference and blank practice sheets for your own lettering. Click the buy button and let's get started!

    The course as a whole is the evolution of story telling; it explores cross-cultural themes, techniques, and modes of representation over nearly 5000 years of history.Course Lecture Titles, 48 Lectures, 30 minutes / lecture1. Stories and Storytellers 2. The Epic of Gilgamesh3. The Hebrew Bible 4. Homer's Iliad 5. Homer's Odyssey 6. Chinese Classical Literature7. Greek Tragedy 8. Virgil's Aeneid 9. Bhagavad Gita 10. The New Testament11. Beowulf 12. Indian Stories 13. T'ang Poetry 14. Early Japanese Poetry15. The Tale of Genji 16. Inferno, from Dante's Divine Comedy17. Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales18. 1001 Nights 19. Wu Ch'eng-en's Monkey20. The Heptameron 21. Shakespeare 22. Cervantes's Don Quixote23. Molière's Plays24. Voltaire's Candide 25. Cao Xueqin's The Story of the Stone 26. Goethe's Faust 27. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights 28. Pushkin's Eugene Onegin 29. Flaubert's Madame Bovary30. Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground 31. Twain's Huckleberry Finn 32. Dickinson's Poetry 33. Ibsen and Chekhov—Realist Drama 34. Rabindranath Tagore's Stories and Poems 35. Higuchi Ichiyō's "Child's Play" 36. Proust's Remembrance of Things Past 37. Joyce's Dubliners 38. Kafka's "The Metamorphosis"39. Pirandello's Six Characters 40. Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan 41. Anna Akhmatova's Requiem 42. Kawabata Yasunari's Snow Country 43. Faulkner—Two Stories and a Novel 44. Naguib Mahfouz's The Cairo Trilogy 45. Achebe's Things Fall Apart 46. Beckett's Plays 47. Borges's Labyrinths 48. Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories

    His novels The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman became instant classics upon publication. Here, with Wormholes, for the first time is a representative gathering of Fowles's fugitive and intensely personal nonfiction writings: essays, literary criticism, commentaries, autobiographical statements, memoirs, and musings. It is a delicious sampling of the various matters that have plagued, preoccupied, or delighted Fowles throughout his life.

    Our language even has a word—Machiavellian—that encapsulates the images those responses conjure up: An indistinct figure quietly making his way through the darkest corridors of power, hatching plots to play one rival against another A cold-blooded political liar, ready to justify any duplicity undertaken in the name of a noble end that will ultimately justify the most malignant means A coolly practical leader—amoral at best—willing to do whatever is necessary in a world governed not by ideas of right or wrong, but by solutions dictated by realpolitik.But does the Machiavelli most of us think we know bear any resemblance to the Machiavelli who lived, pondered, and wrote?According to Professor William R. Cook, a reading of Machiavelli that considers only those qualities that we today call "Machiavellian" is incomplete, and Machiavelli himself "certainly would not recognize" such sinister interpretations or caricatures of his writings and beliefs. Indeed, The Prince—on the pages of which so much of this image was built—was not even published in his lifetime.In the 24 lectures that make up Machiavelli in Context, Professor Cook offers the opportunity to meet an extraordinarily thoughtful and sincere student of history and its lessons, and to learn that there is far more to him than can be gleaned from any reading of The Prince, no matter how thorough.Although The Prince is the work by which most of us think we know Machiavelli, and although some have indeed called it the first and most important book of political science ever written, it was not, according to Professor Cook, either Machiavelli's most important work or the one most representative of his beliefs. Those distinctions belong, instead, to his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy, a longer work started at about the same time and which would, like The Prince, not be published until well after his death."Everyone who has seriously studied the works of Machiavelli agrees that he ... believed in the superiority of a republican form of government, defined as a mixed constitution with elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy."Once we recover the context of the writing of The Prince, and analyze it along with the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy, it will be clear how The Prince can be read as a book designed to guide leaders in the creation—for Machiavelli, restoration—of republican government in Italy."Ultimately, Machiavelli's goal wasn't much different from ours. It was to live in a free and equal participatory society, because he believed that was the greatest way in which human beings could live and flourish."In fact, says Professor Cook, "Machiavelli's republican thought influenced the development of institutions and values both in Europe and in America."To present a complete and well-rounded picture of Machiavelli's ideas on how human societies should be organized and governed, Professor Cook sets aside much of Machiavelli's written output—which included the political work The Art of War, a biography, many letters, and even some plays—to focus on The Prince, the Discourses, and, more briefly, his Florentine Histories.In doing so, Professor Cook draws on the same qualities so evident in his previous courses for The Teaching Company: Tocqueville and the American Experience, Dante's Divine Comedy, Francis of Assisi, and St. Augustine's Confessions.Teaching in the relaxed and informal style of those courses, Professor Cook moves easily among the different disciplines so pertinent to an understanding of Machiavelli's ideas, including history, philosophy, government, and the elements of leadership. He is unfailingly clear, always provides any definitions needed to understand the material at hand, and is always ready with a touch of wit whenever that is appropriate.Because so much of our contemporary misunderstanding of Machiavelli's ideas comes from a lack of context, Professor Cook carefully sets the stage for a complete perspective of Machiavelli's world.Long before he turns to the works themselves, you'll have learned about Florence and its political history, both before and during Machiavelli's lifetime; the developing Renaissance culture of Machiavelli's time, especially as it bears on the use of ancient political thought by writers and political leaders; and Machiavelli's own life story, including his education, service to the Florentine Republic, years spent in exile south of Florence, and the ways each period of his life affected his writings.The result is a thorough grounding in the information one needs to understand and appreciate this stunningly original thinker.You'll learn, for example, what Machiavelli means when he discusses the important ideas of virtù and Fortuna.Though these are today invariably translated as virtue and fortune, Machiavelli's meanings can involve much more. Though he sometimes uses virtù in the sense we would understand today, he often uses the word—which comes from the classical Latin word for Man—as a means of describing the way one practices successful statecraft: aggressively, with no reluctance to use lies, deceit, and cruelty that may be required to maintain power, and hence the stability the people deserve.In a similar way Machiavelli uses Fortuna in a different sense than might have been used by, say, Dante when he describes the vagaries of fate over which we have no control.Instead, Machiavelli uses the adage, "Fortune is like a river." Though we cannot control fortune, which may well choose to make the river flood, a good ruler, practicing virtù, can indeed prepare for it, and thus modify its effects.You'll see how Machiavelli first became exposed to history and one of its earliest great practitioners—the Roman historian, Livy—through his own experience of Fortuna.Though printed books such as Livy's Early History of Rome were too expensive for a family like the young Machiavelli's in the 15th century, his father did own a copy. He had written the index, and a copy of the book had been part of his payment. Thus Machiavelli grew up with the volumes about which he would one day write his own most important work, Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy.You'll be introduced to Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI and the man regarded as Machiavelli's model for The Prince, especially in the way his actions embodied the virtù so important to Machiavelli.Professor Cook brings this out in a shocking story of Borgia's use of a tough and merciless Spaniard—Ramiro d'Orco—to impose order and stability on the area of north central Italy known as the Romagna that had come under Borgia's rule and was beset by crime and violence.D'Orco's brutal methods had the desired effect. And when the job was completed, the local people emerged from their homes one morning to find the two halves of Ramiro d'Orco's body on opposite sides of the town square of Cesana, because d'Orco had been too tough, and Cesare Borgia needed a way to advertise further his concern for the people whose loyalty he wanted.The story also embodies, for Machiavelli, the idea that cruelty can be "well-used," just as being merciful—withholding such cruelty when a leader deems it needed—may be less than merciful in its long-term impact.Finally, you will get to see, throughout these lectures, the development of Machiavelli's reliance on history for its lessons, his role as a Renaissance Humanist thinker, and the emergence of his republican views, which still have tremendous influence today as we ask how republics start, grow, succeed, or fail.As Professor Cook notes, we are not going to agree with all of Machiavelli's answers. But his commitment to asking the right questions—to thinking, reflecting, and learning everything history has to teach us about the best ways to govern and safeguard the future—was total.

    English is now the world's most popular second language, understood by over 700 million people across the globe. Its use is amazingly broad: not only is it the language of Chaucer and Shakespeare, but also of hip-hop, international business and the internet (over 80% of home pages are in English). So where exactly do English words come from? They come from everywhere. English is a vast, rambling conglomeration of words and phrases from a huge variety of times and places, and every word has its own intriguing history. Balderdash & Piffle is a guidebook—an entertaining look at what falls out of the chaotic family tree of English words when you uproot it and give it a damn good shake. Shaking the tree is writer, humourist and word-sleuth Alex Games. If you've ever wondered who first used 'cuppa' in print, what language gave us 'shampoo', when we started saying 'window', where 'minging' comes from, what Shakespeare had to say about 'geeks' and why 'berk' is really, really rude, you'll find it all (and much more) inside. You'll also have the chance to do your own word-sleuthing, through the BBC Wordhunt appeal. Who knows—if you have written evidence of a 'bouncy castle' from before 1986, you could even re-write history.

    The author, editor, or translator of nearly three dozen books of criticism and works of literature, Keene now offers an enjoyable and beautifully written introduction to traditional Japanese culture for the general reader.The book acquaints the reader with Japanese aesthetics, poetry, fiction, and theater, and offers Keene's appreciations of these topics. Based on lectures given at the New York Public Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the University of California, Los Angeles, the essays -though written by a renowned scholar- presuppose no knowledge of Japanese culture. Keene's deep learning, in fact, enables him to construct an overview as delightful to read as it is informative.His insights often illuminate aspects of traditional Japanese culture that endure today. One of these is the appreciation of "perishability." this appreciation os seen in countless little bits of Japanese life: in temples made of wood instead of durable materials; in the preference for objects -such as pottery- that are worn, broken, or used rather than new; and in the national love of the delicate cherry blossom, which normally falls after a brief three days of flowering. Keene quotes the fourteenth-century Buddhist monk Kenko, who wrote that "the most precious thing about life is its uncertainty."Throughout the volume, Keene demonstrates that the rich artistic and social traditions of Japan can indeed be understood by readers from our culture. This book will enlighten anyone interested in Japanese literature and culture.

    With a logical, body-systems organization and engaging terminology exercises throughout, it's your key to communicating confidently and effectively with other health care professionals.Systematic approach to terminology prepares you to recognize and define new words as you encounter them and build the medical vocabulary you'll need in the health care setting.Pronunciation key provides quick access to frequently referenced material.Complimentary and Alternative Medicine terms boxes highlight words and phrases associated with this increasingly popular discipline.Case studies encourage critical thinking and demonstrate how to apply the information you've learned.Terminology flash cards, included with every book, give you valuable review and self-assessment tools you can take anywhere for study on the go.Evolve resources enhance your learning and reinforcement opportunities with additional exercises, a Spanish/English glossary, and the Body Spectrum Electronic Anatomy Coloring Book.Medical Terminology Online, available at an additional charge, gives you access to a complete online course for the most advanced learning and understanding.New terms and abbreviations familiarize you with the latest terminology in use in health care.New images and illustrations visually acquaint you with pathologic information and procedures you'll encounter in the clinical setting.Enhanced chapter features highlight important concepts and provide guidance for more effective learning and study.CD references within the text direct you to expanded learning opportunities on the companion CD.More than 20 new medical records let you practice medical terminology using the forms you'll encounter in the clinical setting.New icons make it easy to distinguish a variety of helpful boxes and reference the material you need quickly.Answers to review exercises help you gauge your strengths and weaknesses and configure the most effective study plan for you.Website boxes refer you to valuable content you can access online for further learning.Revised pharmacy appendix helps you easily reference key pharmaceutical terms.The vastly updated companion CD provides fun alternatives for reinforcing what you've learned with new learning games, including Medical Millionaire and Termbusters.Enhanced audio companion, available on CD or as iTerms downloads for portable media players, helps you perfect your pronunciation skills and confidently use the terms you've learned in practice.

     You will learn how to pray for financial miracles and what to do when the answer is not forthcoming. You must simply read this book to gain a better understanding of prayer for finances.