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Desert Year

by Joseph Wood Krutch

26,43€ + 10% CARD

 <div><p>Now back in print, Joseph Wood Krutch’s Burroughs Award-winning <i>The Desert Year</i> is as beautiful as it is philosophically profound. Although Krutch—often called the Cactus Walden—came to the desert relatively late in his life, his curiosity and delight in his surroundings abound throughout <i>The Desert Year,</i> whether he is marveling at the majesty of the endless dry sea, at flowers carpeting the desert floor, or at the unexpected appearance of an army of frogs after a heavy rain.</p><p>Krutch’s trenchant observations about life prospering in the hostile environment of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert turn to weighty questions about humanity and the precariousness of our existence, putting lie to Western denials of mind in the "lower" forms of life: "Let us not say that this animal or even this plant has ‘become adapted’ to desert conditions. Let us say rather that they have all shown courage and ingenuity in making the best of the world as they found it. And let us remember that if to use such terms in connection with them is a fallacy then it can only be somewhat less a fallacy to use the same terms in connection with ourselves."</p><p>This edition contains 33 exacting drawings by noted illustrator Rudolf Freund. Closely tied to Krutch’s uncluttered text, the drawings tell a story of ineffable beauty.</p></div>
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Running To The Fire : An American Missionary Comes Of Age In Revolutionary Ethiopia - An American Missionary Comes Of Age In Revolutionary Ethiopia

by Bascom Tim Bascom

26,43€ + 10% CARD

 <div>In the streets of Addis Ababa in 1977, shop-front posters illustrate Uncle Sam being strangled by an Ethiopian revolutionary, parliamentary leaders are executed, student protesters are gunned down, and Christian mission converts are targeted as imperialistic sympathizers. Into this world arrives sixteen-year-old Tim Bascom, whose missionary parents have brought their family from a small town in Kansas straight into Colonel Mengistu’s Marxist "Red Terror." Here they plan to work alongside a tiny remnant of western missionaries who trust that God will somehow keep them safe.<br><br><i>Running to the Fire</i> focuses on the turbulent year the Bascom family experienced upon traveling into revolutionary Ethiopia. The teenage Bascom finds a paradoxical exhilaration in living so close to constant danger. At boarding school in Addis Ababa, where dorm parents demand morning devotions and forbid dancing, Bascom bonds with other youth due to a shared sense of threat. He falls in love for the first time, but the young couple is soon separated by the politics that affect all their lives. Across the country, missionaries are being held under house arrest while communist cadres seize their hospitals and schools. A friend’s father is imprisoned as a suspected CIA agent; another is killed by raiding Somalis.<br><br>Throughout, the teenaged Bascom struggles with his faith and his role within the conflict as a white American Christian missionary’s child. Reflecting back as an adult, he explores the historical, cultural, and religious contexts that led to this conflict, even though in doing so he is forced to ask himself questions that are easier left alone. Why, he wonders, did he find such strange fulfillment in being young and idealistic in the middle of what was essentially a kind of holy war?<br></div>
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Happenstance

by Robert Root

33,13€ + 10% CARD

 Reflecting on how a student's parents met because of a fly ball to center field in a summer softball game, author Robert Root wondered how the lives of that student's parents and of the student himself would have changed had the batter bunted or struck out. Haunted by this pure example of happenstance, he began to ponder his own existence.
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Stories We Tell Ourselves - "Dream Life" And "Seeing Things"

by Michelle Herman

23,85€ + 10% CARD

 <div> <div>The two thought-provoking, extended essays that make up <i>Stories We Tell Ourselves</i> draw from the author’s richly diverse experiences and history, taking the reader on a deeply pleasurable walk to several unexpectedly profound destinations. A steady accumulation of fascinating science, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural history—ranging as far and wide as neuro-ophthalmology, ancient dream interpretation, and the essential differences between Jung and Freud—is smoothly intermixed with vivid anecdotes, entertaining digressions, and a disarming willingness to risk everything in the course of a revealing personal narrative.<br> <br></div> <div>"Dream Life" plumbs the depth of dreams—conceptually, biologically, and as the nursery of our most meaningful metaphors—as it considers dreams and dreaming every whichway: from the haruspicy of the Roman Empire to contemporary sleep and dream science, from the way birds dream to the way babies do, from our longing to tell them to the reasons we wish other people wouldn’t.</div> <div><br> "Seeing Things" recounts a journey of mother and daughter—a Holmes-and-Watson pair intrepidly working their way through the mysteries of a disorder known as Alice in Wonderland Syndrome—even as it restlessly detours into the world beyond the looking glass of the unconscious itself. In essays that constantly offer layers of surprises and ever-deeper insights, the author turns a powerful lens on the relationships that make up a family, on expertise and unsatisfying diagnoses, on science and art and the pleasures of contemplation and inquiry—and on our fears, regrets, hopes, and (of course) dreams. </div> </div>
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Fluency Of Light - Coming Of Age In A Theater Of Black And White

by Aisha Sabatini Sloan

26,43€ + 10% CARD

 "In these intertwined essays on art, music, and identity, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, the daughter of African American and Italian American parents, examines the experience of her mixed-race identity. Embracing the far-ranging stimuli of her media-obsessed upbringing, she grasps at news clippings, visual fragments, and lyrics from past and present in order to weave together a world of sense"--P. (4) of cover.
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Mythical Bill - A Neurological Memoir

by Mcauliffe Jody Mcauliffe

23,85€ + 10% CARD

 Part medical mystery, part war story, and part social and family history, The Mythical Bill is the story of how one man's physical and mental pain radiates outward into the life and mind of each member of his family. Weaving together diary entries, correspondence, and scrupulous research, Jody McAuliffe examines her father's life before, during, and after WWII, seeking answers to the questions of what really happened to Bill McAuliffe and what caused his disintegration. His initial postwar diagnosis was torticollis: a condition of persistent involuntary contraction of the neck muscles, causing the head to be twisted to an abnormal position. But torticollis was only the beginning of Bill's suffering and his daughter's efforts to understand it. The condition becomes a metaphor for things that refuse to fall into place: the body not in accord with the mind, the head that turns away from reality.From this drama of dislocation and disjointed truths, two braided selves emerge: the I of Jody and the I of Bill. Through this doubleness, the writer probes a set of questions about how much we shape ourselves and how much we are shaped by forces beyond our control.The Mythical Bill, a moving and unusual book, is for people who suffer the devastating effects of combat on the psyche, for those who encounter any debilitating disease, and for those who grow up with a father only partially present. McAuliffe's ear-catching, evocative, and often breathtaking writing forces readers to confront the most terrifying question posed by a parent's mental illness: will I get it too? Her narrative voice is searching, compassionate, and self-deprecating, but cut through with welcome bits of humor in this daughter's story of confusion, sadness, and loss.
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Detailing Trauma - A Poetic Anatomy

by Arianne Zwartjes

23,85€ + 10% CARD

 In a series of linked lyric essays, "Detailing Trauma" explores in vivid, sometimes graphic detail the many types of wounds from which the human body and spirit may suffer and heal. Mapping the diseases and injuries that can afflict the body, the author asks how we can continue to live and love in the face of the great potential for suffering and loss."
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Essays Of Elia

by Charles Lamb

31,80€ + 10% CARD

 Charles Lamb, one of the most engaging personal essayists of all time, began publishing his unforgettable, entertaining Elia essays in the London Magazine in 1820; they were so immediately popular that a book-length collection was published in 1823. Inventing the persona of "Elia" allowed Lamb to be shockingly honest and to gain a playful distance for self-examination. The resulting essays touch upon a wide range of compelling subjects from the deliciously humorous "Dissertation upon Roast Pig" to the poignantly reflective "New Year's Eve." Yet collectively they also comprise a fascinating personal memoir, veiled under the pseudonymous disguise of Elia. Now back in print with a new foreword by the distinguished personal essayist Phillip Lopate and with useful annotations, Essays of Elia will provide a delicious stylistic treat for all readers.
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Trespasses - A Memoir

by Johnson Lacy M Johnson

26,43€ + 10% CARD

 A series of vividly rendered personal narratives, Trespasses: A Memoir recounts the coming of age of three generations in the rural Great Plains. In examining how class, race, and gender play out in the lives of two farm families who simultaneously love and hate the place they can't escape, Lacy Johnson presents rural whiteness as an ethnicity worthy of study. As she dismantles the complex history of a forgotten place while fighting to keep its people whole, Johnson reflects on a place that outsiders can cross into or pass through, but may never fully know. From formal and informal research methods, Johnson has produced an innovative collection of prose poems and essays that together create an exciting work of contemporary nonfiction.Examining region through the lenses of memory (experience), history (memory made public), and theory (experience abstracted), Trespasses is a deeply intelligent work, at the center of which is the author, always feeling as if she doesn't belong but not sure where she else she should be. In this profound work, Johnson drifts gracefully back and forth between timelines and voices in a way that illustrates how her present is connected to the many pasts she chronicles.
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In Defense Of Nature

by John Hay

26,43€ + 10% CARD

 Presages the tenuous state of our environment and our place in it. As our technical abilities have moved forward, our judgment has not kept pace. "What we call natural resources cannot be limited to gas, oil, pulpwood, or uranium - we are starving the natural resources in ourselves. The soul needs to stretch; being needs to exercise."
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In Earshot Of Water - Notes From The Columbia Plateau

by Paul Lindholdt

25,18€ + 10% CARD

 <div> <p>p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }</p> <p>Whether the subject is the plants that grow there, the animals that live there, the rivers that run there, or the people he has known there, Paul Lindholdt’s <i>In Earshot of Water</i> illuminates the Pacific Northwest in vivid detail. Lindholdt writes with the precision of a naturalist, the critical eye of an ecologist, the affection of an apologist, and the self-revelation and self-awareness of a personal essayist in the manner of Annie Dillard, Loren Eiseley, Derrick Jensen, John McPhee, Robert Michael Pyle, and Kathleen Dean Moore.</p> <p>Exploring both the literal and literary sense of place, with particular emphasis on environmental issues and politics in the far Northwest, Lindholdt weds passages from the journals of Lewis and Clark, the log of Captain James Cook, the novelized memoir of Theodore Winthrop, and Bureau of Reclamation records growing from the paintings that the agency commissioned to publicize its dams in the 1960s and 1970s, to tell ecological and personal histories of the region he knows and loves.</p> <p>In Lindholdt’s beautiful prose, America’s environmental legacies—those inherited from his blood relatives as well as those from the influences of mass culture—and illuminations of the hazards of neglecting nature’s warning signs blur and merge and reemerge in new forms. Themes of fathers and sons layer the book, as well—the narrator as father and as son—interwoven with a call to responsible social activism with appeals to reason and emotion. Like water itself, <i>In Earshot of Water</i> cascades across boundaries and blends genres, at once learned and literary.</p> </div>
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Little Big World - Collecting Louis Marx And The American Fifties

by Jeffrey Hammond

30,41€ + 10% CARD

 <div> <p>Jeffrey Hammond’s <i>Little Big World: Collecting Louis Marx and the American Fifties</i> is the story of a middle-aged man’s sudden compulsion to collect the toys of his childhood: specifically themed playsets produced by the Louis Marx Toy Company. Hammond never made a conscious decision to become a collector of any kind, so he was surprised when his occasional visits to web sites turned into hours spent gazing at, and then impulsively purchasing, the tiny plastic people and animals in the Civil War set, the Fort Apache set, Roy Rogers Ranch, and Happi-Time Farm—just a few of the dozens of playsets the Marx Company produced.</p> <p> Hammond interweaves childhood memories with reflections on what they reveal about the culture and values of cold war America, offering an extended meditation on toys as powerful catalysts for the imagination of both children and adults. Never sentimentalizing his childhood in an effort to get his old toys back, Hammond exposes the dangers of nostalgia by casting an unsettling light on the culture of the fifties and the era’s lasting impact on those who grew up in it.</p> <p> Writing in a lovably quirky voice, Hammond not only attempts to understand his personal connection to the Marx toys but also examines the psychology of his fellow eBay denizens. In this warm, funny, and contemplative work, the reader encounters an online community of serious adult collectors who, as the author suspects, are driven to obsession by middle-aged nostalgia. When Hammond questions this preoccupation with the past, he comes to realize that his own collecting has prevented him from moving forward. With this insight, he offers an insider’s take on the culture and psychology of collecting.</p> </div>
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Great Chain Of Life

by Joseph Wood Krutch

26,43€ + 10% CARD

 Originally published in 1956, The Great Chain of Life brings a humanist's keen eye and ear to one of the great questions of the ages: "What am I?" Originally a scholar of literature and theater, toward the end of his career Joseph Wood Krutch turned to the study of the natural world. Bringing his keen intellect to bear on the places around him, Krutch crafted some of the most memorable and important works of nature writing extant.Whether anticipating the arguments of biologists who now ascribe high levels of cognition to the so-called lower animals, recognizing the importance of nature for a well-lived life, or seeing nature as an elaborately interconnected, interdependent network, Krutch's seminal work contains lessons just as resonant today as they were when the book was first written.Lavishly illustrated with thirteen beautiful woodcuts by Paul Landacre, an all-but-lost yet important Los Angeles artist whom Rockwell Kent called "the best American wood engraver working," The Great Chain of Life will be cherished by new generations of readers.
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Great Expectation - A Father''S Diary

by Dan Roche

33,06€ + 10% CARD

 Through a series of diary entries, the author describes his own thoughts and concerns during the nine months of his wife's pregnancy. From revelling in the joys of pregnancy; to assuaging the parental anxieties of choosing the right obstetrician, correcting the mistakes one made with the first child, he records his emotions.
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Oppenheimer Is Watching Me - A Memoir

by Jeff Porter

33,06€ + 10% CARD

 Takes readers back to the cold war, when men in lab coats toyed with the properties of matter and fears of national security troubled our sleep. With an eye for strange symmetries, this work traces how one panicky moment shaped the lives of a generation.
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Return To Warden'S Grove - Science, Desire, And The Lives Of Sparrows

by Christopher Norment

34,45€ + 10% CARD

 Based on the author's three seasons of field research in the Canadian Arctic, this book reflects on timeless questions, and keen observations of the world and our place in it.
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Grammar Lessons - Translating A Life In Spain

by Michele Morano

29,81€ + 10% CARD

 <div>In the thirteen personal essays in <i>Grammar Lessons</i>, Michele Morano connects the rules of grammar to the stories we tell to help us understand our worlds. Living and traveling in Spain during a year of teaching English to university students, she learned to translate and interpret her past and present worlds—to study the surprising moments of communication—as a way to make sense of language and meaning, longing and memory.<br> Morano focuses first on her year of living in Oviedo, in the early 1990s, a time spent immersing herself in a new culture and language while working through the relationship she had left behind with an emotionally dependent and suicidal man. Next, after subsequent trips to Spain, she explores the ways that travel sparks us to reconsider our personal histories in the context of larger historical legacies. Finally, she turns to the aftereffects of travel, to the constant negotiations involved in retelling and understanding the stories of our lives. Throughout she details one woman’s journey through vocabulary and verb tense toward a greater sense of her place in the world.<br> <i> Grammar Lessons</i> illustrates the difficulty and delight, humor and humility of living in a new language and of carrying that pivotal experience forward. Michele Morano’s beautifully constructed essays reveal the many grammars and many voices that we collect, and learn from, as we travel.</div>
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Dream Not Of Other Worlds - Teaching In A Segregated Elementary School, 1970

by Huston Diehl

33,06€ + 10% CARD

 Set in the waning days of the Jim Crow South, this title chronicles an important moment in American history. It examines the history of black education in the South and narrates the dramatic struggle to integrate Virginia's public schools.
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Family Bible

by Melissa J. Delbridge

22,53€ + 10% CARD

 A memoir that shows us what really happened in the 'stew of religion and sex' that was 1960s Tuscaloosa.
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Letters To Kate - Life After Life

by Klaus H. Carl

30,41€ + 10% CARD

 When Carl Klaus's wife of thirty-five years died suddenly from a cerebral hemorrhage, right before Thanksgiving in 2002, he took the only road toward recovery that made sense to him: he started writing letters to her, producing a history of grief, solace, and love. This book presents a collection of his thoughtful letters.
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Men In My Country

by Abildskov Marilyn Abildskov

39,68€ + 10% CARD

 In the early 1990s, at the watershed age of thirty, Marilyn Abildskov decided she needed to start over. She accepted an offer to move from Utah to Matsumoto, Japan, to teach English to junior high school students. "All I knew is that I had to get away and when I stared at my name on the Japanese contract, the squiggles of katakana, my name typed in English sturdily beneath, I liked how it looked. As if it-as if I-were translated, transformed, emerging now as someone new."The Men in My Country is the story of an American woman living and loving in Japan. Satisfied at first to observe her exotic surroundings, the woman falls in love with the place, with the light, with the curve of a river, with the smell of bonfires during obon, with blue and white porcelain dishes, with pencil boxes, and with small origami birds. Later, struggling for a deeper connection-"I wanted the country under my skin"-Abildskov meets the three men who will be part of her transformation and the one man with whom she will fall deeply in love.A travel memoir offering an artful depiction of a very real place, The Men in My Country also covers the terrain of a complex emotional journey, tracing a geography of the heart, showing how we move to be moved, how in losing ourselves in a foreign place we can become dangerously-and gloriously-undone.
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Body Of Brooklyn

by David Lazar

33,06€ + 10% CARD

 <div>Even before the controversy that surrounded the publication of <i>A Million Little Pieces</i>, the question of truth has been at the heart of memoir. From Elie Wiesel to Benjamin Wilkomirski to David Sedaris, the veracity of writers'' claims has been suspect. In this fascinating and timely collection of essays, leading writers meditate on the subject of truth in literary nonfiction. As David Lazar writes in his introduction, "How do we verify? Do we care to? (Do we dare to eat the apple of knowledge and say it''s true? Or is it a peach?) Do we choose to? Is it a subcategory of faith? How do you respond when someone says, ''This is really true''? Why do they choose to say it then?"</div> <div>The past and the truth are slippery things, and the art of non-fiction writing requires the writer to shape as well as explore. In personal essays, meditations on the nature of memory, considerations of the genres of memoir, prose poetry, essay, fiction, and film, the contributors to this provocative collection attempt to find answers to the question of what truth in nonfiction means.</div> <div> <div>Contributors: </div> <div> <div> <div>John D''Agata, Mark Doty, Su Friedrich, Joanna Frueh, Ray González, Vivian Gornick, Barbara Hammer, Kathryn Harrison, Marianne Hirsch, Wayne Koestenbaum, Leonard Kriegel, David Lazar, Alphonso Lingis, Paul Lisicky, Nancy Mairs, Nancy K. Miller, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Phyllis Rose, Oliver Sacks, David Shields, and Leo Spitzer.</div> </div> </div> </div>
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Currency Of The Heart - A Year Of Investing, Death, Work, And Coins

by Donald Nichols

37,10€ + 10% CARD

 <div>In 1998, Don Nichols returned regularly to Iowa from his life and job in Washington, D.C., to be with his dying father and to oversee his parents’ investments. A veteran investor and investment author, Nichols found that managing the portfolio entrusted to him brought a larger understanding of mortality, family, love, work, and the choices he had made as "an agri-kid who took the road out of town and kept going." In this insightful and money-wise book that grew out of that experience, he merges the emotions of a dutiful son with the actions of a knowledgeable investor.<br> <div><br> Nichols uses money in myriad forms—a grandfather‘s silver dollar, stocks and bonds, salaries, pallets of coins at the U.S. Mint, on-the-job dealings with coin collectors—as touchstones for reflections on relationships, motives, and a career "like one of those moving walkways in airports." His father''s health is measured, tested, and evaluated in part by the health of his finances; at the same time, the turmoil and mystery surrounding both money and relationships are reflected in this memorable story.</div> <div>Wry, unsentimental, and financially savvy, <i>Currency of the Heart</i> is about rediscovering family, managing a portfolio, honoring promises, grieving, and healing; it is about a father and a son who once "fought like medieval villagers in a Thirty Years‘ War" and the deepening bond between a middle-age son and his aging mother. It is a multilayered story for everyone who will manage, financially and emotionally, a parent''s death.</div> </div>
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Shadow Girl - A Memoir Of Attachment

by Deb Abramson

37,03€ + 10% CARD

 <div>As the good little girl in an unhappy family who hid her darker troubles, Deb Abramson felt like she was living with another girl, a shadowy being who would neither leave nor make herself known. Crushed beneath the burden of her parents‘ rigid expectations yet driven to satisfy their needs, Abramson becomes bulimic, then severely depressed and suicidal, retreating more and more from the troubling outside world to the seeming haven of home, to a cycle of comfort from and competition with her depressed mother, to the frightening but alluring intimacy of her father''s affections. Her struggle to extricate herself from the "impermeable, immutable knot" of her family forms the heart of her dazzling book.<br> <br> In this psychological portrait of a family bound together by the uneasy permutations of love, Abramson relies not on sensationalist narrative but on a collection of the many small moments that glitter along the bumpy path of her life. Now and then she provides a broader, connecting perspective by stepping out of her story to reflect on the meaning of it all from the standpoint of the insightful, healed person she has managed—against all odds—to become.<br> <br> Rich in metaphor and intimate detail, this is a lyrical story about moving from isolation toward connection, about seeing childhood not as a crippling refuge but as a point of departure, about discovering that it is possible to "have your shadows as well as your light."</div>
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