On impulse, Jenna Rosen leaves the party she and her real estate developer husband, Robert, are attending in Seattle, takes his BMW and drives north to Bellingham. Again on impulse, she hops on the ferry to the Alaskan town where her Tlingit Indian grandmother lived and died. But there's more than impulse at work here: Jenna and Robert's 5-year-old son, Bobby, drowned in Alaska just two years ago, and something is drawing Jenna back to the scene. On the ferry, she's given a carved silver charm of a Tlingit spirit called a kushtaka, a stealer of souls.
This book was written in 1991–1992 but incorporates elements of research that I carried out much earlier, in fact, since the beginning of the 1970s. It is an account of my work over a period of time when I was labouring ad maiorem Orientis antiquissimi gloriam only in my spare time, having had, principally for existential reasons, quite different official commitments. A further impulse towards the writing of this text has been constituted by my lectures on the archaeology of ancient Mesopotamia at the Faculty of Philosophy of Charles University, Prague, in 1982–1983 and then in 1990–1991.
Plenty of people want to write poetry - yet while it is not necessarily difficult to write poetry badly, it is harder to write it well. In this guide Fred Sedgwick explains - with numerous examples from successful poets - how the creative process works, from the initial impulse to write all the way through to the crafted and expressive poetry at the end.
A demanding but productively provocative analysis..
strongly recommended as a stimulating and perceptive examination of issues and questions relating to our attitudes toward the misfortunes of other people with which all of us are familiar in our moral lives
John Portmann's "When Bad Things Happen to Other People" is a serious look at our mysterious human impulse to take perverse pleasure in each other's pain and a noble attempt to understand a basic and often unbidden response.
This collection of funny sayings from around the world - covering subjects from pessimism and money to happiness, drink and getting old - is an ideal gift, impulse buy or Christmas present, guaranteed to raise a laugh.
