Three Years in the Klondike (1904)


Jeremiah Lynch - 1904
    He had, therefore, full opportunities of seeing the country and its life from various points of view. He has utilized his observations in an entertaining book. It is not — and does not pretend lo be — a scientific work, or technical in any sense. It gives, however, an excellent idea of conditions and ways of living in the Klondike at all seasons, and of the hardships which the pioneers had to undergo. Nothing but gold — the prospect of wealth — could induce men to live in such a climate, and to combat the many difficulties which it entails. Mr. Lynch, a Californian of means and position, arrived at Dawson in the summer of 1898. As the first discoveries of gold in the Klondike valley were made in August of 1896, Mr. Lynch found a mining town not two years old, unpaved and insanitary, crowded with adventurers of every nation, in fact still a typical “ tough" mining-camp, except that lawlessness and crime were sternly repressed by the vigilant Mounted Police. He spent the following winter in the town, making expeditions to the gold-bearing creeks, examining mines and studying the methods of working them. Early in the spring of 1899 he bought a claim which he believed would repay him and set himself at once to develop it thoroughly. During his stay he had seen Dawson transformed into a paved, sewaged, well built, well lighted city, and the streets, no longer thronged with rough-mannered miners and adventurers, had become the promenade of well dressed business men and ladies (real ladies !) intent on shopping. As one of the earliest of the new species of Klondike miner, he is able to give an account of the transition that took place, largely owing to the enterprise of men of his own stamp, and the book is an interesting addition to Klondike literature. Mr. Lynch's narrative is plainly written, in a way which leads one to believe in its substantial truth. It reads well, and brings out many points which will interest the miner, as well as the casual reader. He had confidence in the future of the country, and believed that it would hold a large population for many years, in spite of the drawbacks of climate.

Monrovia Mon Amour: Travels in Liberia


Theodore Dalrymple - 2012
    In the film, Johnson – now a Liberian senator – calmly sips a Budweiser as the naked Doe’s ears are hacked off. Unsurprisingly, Dalrymple forms the professional opinion that Johnson is a psychopath.Monrovia was once a peaceful and reasonably ordered city; now, it has been almost completely sacked. Burnt-out cars are everywhere; doors have been chopped up for firewood; rubble lines the streets, with the vandalism forming a systematic attempt to destroy every vestige of the old regime (and, the author speculates, of civilisation itself). The destruction of the university and library, for instance, seems to be little more that the revenge of the ignorant upon the educated. In a local hospital (once the pride of West Africa, now long ruined and abandoned), the professor of surgery’s office has been ransacked, and medical books and papers have been ripped up; in another, infant welfare records have been smeared with faeces. In the wrecked Centennial Hall, the body of a beautiful Steinway grand piano lies on the floor, its legs senselessly sawn off. In a Lutheran church, Dalrymple finds the floor covered in the blood silhouettes of 600 Liberians massacred by Doe’s soldiers.Dalrymple – who achieves the near-impossible by making a book about such barbarism at times amusing – lays much of the blame for what happened at the feet of Western intellectuals and their African counterparts.Monrovia Mon Amour is a profoundly moving and interesting book about a country which is little-understood and less visited.

The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature


Gilbert Highet - 1954
    This landmark book explores the ways in which the Greco-Roman tradition has shaped modern European and American literature.

Defending Identity


Natan Sharansky - 2008
    Better to have hostile identities framed by democracy than democrats indifferent to identity.In a vigorous, insightful challenge to the left and right alike, Natan Sharansky, as he has proved repeatedly, is at the leading edge of the issues that frame our times.

The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions


Paula Gunn Allen - 1986
    This pioneering work, first published in 1986, documents the continuing vitality of American Indian traditions and the crucial role of women in those traditions.

The Culture of Counter-Culture: Edited Transcripts (Love of Wisdom)


Alan W. Watts - 1998
    In these lectures given during the late 1960s, Alan Watts addresses such questions as what is the nature of reality, and how does our individual relationship to society affect this reality?

Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms


Franco Moretti - 1987
    However, it is the fact that these texts are so central to our contemporary notion of literature that sometimes hinders our ability to understand them. Franco Moretti applies himself to this problem by drawing skilfully on structuralist, sociological and psycho-analytic modes of enquity in order to read these texts as literary systems which are tokens of wider cultural and political realities. In the process, Moretti offers us compelling accounts of various literary genres, explores the relationships between high and mass culture in this century, and considers the relevance of tragic, Romantic and Darwinian views of the world.

The Book of the Damned


Daniel Quinn - 1982
    It wasn't work on a single book. Rather, it was work on different versions of what eventually became a single book: Ishmael, the eighth version and the only one in which the teacher Ishmael appears. When I started writing The Book of the Damned in 1981, I was sure I'd found the book I was born to write. The versions that came before had been like rainy days with moments of sunshine. THIS was a thunderstorm, and the lines crossed my pages like flashes of lightning. When, after a few thousand words I came to a clear climax, I said, "This MUST be seen," so I put Part One into print. Parts Two and Three followed, and I began searching for the switch that would turn on Part Four . . . but it just wasn't there. I clung to it for a long time after issuing the first three parts, desperately hoping to find a way to produce additional parts that would bring it to the conclusion I knew was "out there.” What I'd done was terrific—and complete in its own way—but at last I faced the fact that the whole thing just couldn't be done in lightning strikes . . . Another ten years passed before I found the way, a completely different way . . . in Ishmael, which was the embodiment of my message, providing the foundation for the clarifications, amplifications, and extensions still to come. But publishing The Book of the Damned had been no mistake. It deserved to be published, and it still does. Those lightning strikes illuminate an apocalyptic landscape never seen before—or after, in any of my later books (including Ishmael).

The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader


Henry Abelove - 1993
    Featuring essays by such prominent scholars as Judith Butler, John D'Emilio, Kobena Mercer, Adrienne Rich, Gayle Rubin, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader explores a multitude of sexual, ethnic, racial, and socio-economic experiences.Ranging across disciplines including history, literature, critical theory, cultural studies, African American studies, ethnic studies, sociology, anthropology, psychology, classics, and philosophy, this anthology traces the inscription of sexual meanings in all forms of cultural expression. Representing the best and most significant English language work in the field, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader addresses topics such as butch-fem roles, the cultural construction of gender, lesbian separatism, feminist theory, AIDS, safe-sex education, colonialism, S/M, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, children's books, black nationalism, popular films, Susan Sontag, the closet, homophobia, Freud, Sappho, the media, the hijras of India, Robert Mapplethorpe, and the politics of representation. It also contains an extensive bibliographical essay which will provide readers with an invaluable guide to further reading.Contributors: Henry Abelove, Tomas Almaguer, Ana Maria Alonso, Michele Barale, Judith Butler, Sue-Ellen Case, Danae Clark, Douglas Crimp, Teresa de Lauretis, John D'Emilio, Jonathan Dollimore, Lee Edelman, Marilyn Frye, Charlotte Furth, Marjorie Garber, Stuart Hall, David Halperin, Phillip Brian Harper, Gloria T. Hull, Maria Teresa Koreck, Audre Lorde, Biddy Martin, Deborah E. McDowell, Kobena Mercer, Richard Meyer, D. A. Miller, Serena Nanda, Esther Newton, Cindy Patton, Adrienne Rich, Gayle Rubin, Joan W. Scott, Daniel L. Selden, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Barbara Smith, Catharine R. Stimpson, Sasha Torres, Martha Vicinus, Simon Watney, Harriet Whitehead, John J. Winkler, Monique Wittig, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano

Bhagavad Gita for Dummies


Vishnuvarthanan Moorthy - 2013
    The Human (Arjuna) had lot of Questions to Supreme God (Krishna) and he got answers from God for all those. Most of the time to understand those complex words, people giving explanations and interpretation with someone’s life. We are also very comfortable to listen them and read them, but the moment we are back to our normal life, we forget everything. This book is written for you! Considering a common man life like yours! And how to live our life as per the Supreme God’s wordings! What it offers to you:>> All the 18 Chapters of Gita in Plain English>> Interpretations with our Common life examples>> You have funny and logical questions to god; it’s there inside this book>> Guides you to self evaluate, are you ready for it?>> How far you are from your God? Check hereRecommended:>> For the one, who wants to practice and experience Bhagavad Gita in Life>> For the one, who wants to understand Gita in its real essence>> For the one, who wants to understand Hinduism in true meaningYou too have these Views, then Read this Book:>> There can’t be multiple gods in one world>> If my birth is given by god, then why am i not part of God>> Science is a language to explain his creations and not a mode to reach>> Belief and honesty can take me to my Supreme Power>>Why don’t new Living beings born as per Darwin>>How to see others grow in life>>The Richest and Poorest all have Equanimity with happiness and sadnessAnd So on.•Order Bhagavad Gita here for practicing and experiencing it in your life

And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos


John Berger - 1984
    This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless . . . . In our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses."This brooding, provocative, and almost unbearably lovely book displays one of the great writers of our time at his freest and most direct, addressing the themes that run beneath the surface of all his work, from Ways of Seeing to his Into Their Labours trilogy.In an extraordinary distillation of his gifts as a novelist, poet, art critic, and social historian, John Berger reveals the ties between love and absence, the ways poetry endows language with the assurance of prayer, and the tensions between the forward movement of sexuality and the steady backward tug of time. He re-creates the mysterious forces at work in a Rembrandt painting, transcribes the sensorial experience of viewing lilacs at dusk, and explores the meaning of home to early man and to the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in our cities today.A work of unclassifiable innovation and consummate beauty, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos reminds us of Nabokov and Auden, Brecht and Lawrence, in its seamless fusion of the political and the personal.

Corpus (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)


Jean-Luc Nancy - 1992
    How have we thought "the body"? How can we think it anew? The body of mortal creatures, the body politic, the body of letters and of laws, the "mystical body of Christ"-all these (and others) are incorporated in the word Corpus, the title and topic of Jean-Luc Nancy's masterwork.

Character Building


Booker T. Washington - 1910
    This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

Ancient Gods


Levon Shant - 1908
    Here two worlds stand face to face, love for a woman and the longing for God. Both of them do not cease, for the inner conflict of feeling and thought is continuos.A drama of inner dreams and desires, lofty stubborn idealism and stormy, soul-searching upheaval.

Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion


Jack D. Zipes - 1983
    But until Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, little attention had been paid to the ways in which the writers and collectors of tales used traditional forms and genres in order to shape children's lives - their behavior, values, and relationship to society. As Jack Zipes convincingly shows, fairy tales have always been a powerful discourse, capable of being used to shape or destabilize attitudes and behavior within culture.For this new edition, the author has revised the work throughout and added a new introduction bringing this classic title up to date.