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Witness: Stories
By Jamel Brinkley. 2023
DAISY audio (Direct to player), DAISY audio (Zip)
Royalty biography, European history
Human-narrated audio
What does it mean to really see the world around you—to bear witness? And what does it cost us, both…
to see and not to see? In these ten stories, each set in the changing landscapes of contemporary New York City, a range of characters—from children to grandmothers to ghosts—live through the responsibility of perceiving and the moral challenge of speaking up or taking action. Though they strive to connect with, stand up for, care for, and remember one another, they often fall short, and the structures they build around these ambitions and failures shape their futures as well as the legacies and prospects of their communities and their city. In its portraits of families and friendships lost and found, the paradox of intimacy, the long shadow of grief, and the meaning of home, Witness enacts its own testimony. Here is a world where fortunes can be made and stolen in just a few generations, where strangers might sometimes show kindness while those we trust—doctors, employers, siblings—too often turn away, where joy comes in snatches: flowers on a windowsill, dancing in the street, glimpsing your purpose, change on the horizon. With prose as upendingly beautiful as it is artfully, seamlessly crafted, Jamel Brinkley offers nothing less than the full scope of life and death and change in the great, unending drama of the city
The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise
By Pico Iyer. 2023
Braille (Contracted), Electronic braille (Contracted), DAISY Audio (Direct to Player), DAISY Audio (Zip), DAISY text (Direct to player), DAISY text (Zip), Word (Zip), ePub (Zip)
Health and medicine, Religion, Spirituality
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
From &“one of the most soulful and perceptive writers of our time&” (Brain Pickings): a journey through competing ideas of paradise…
to see how we can live more peacefully in an ever more divided and distracted world. &“Nothing less than a guided tour of the human soul…A masterpiece.&” — #1 New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert &“Immersive and profound…. Iyer matches penetrating insights with some of the most transportive prose around. This further burnishes Iyer&’s reputation as one of the best.&” — starred Publishers WeeklyParadise: that elusive place where the anxieties, struggles, and burdens of life fall away. Most of us dream of it, but each of us has very different ideas about where it is to be found. For some it can be enjoyed only after death; for others, it&’s in our midst—or just across the ocean—if only we can find eyes to see it. Traveling from Iran to North Korea, from the Dalai Lama&’s Himalayas to the ghostly temples of Japan, Pico Iyer brings together a lifetime of explorations to upend our ideas of utopia and ask how we might find peace in the midst of difficulty and suffering. Does religion lead us back to Eden or only into constant contention? Why do so many seeming paradises turn into warzones? And does paradise exist only in the afterworld – or can it be found in the here and now? For almost fifty years Iyer has been roaming the world, mixing a global soul&’s delight in observing cultures with a pilgrim&’s readiness to be transformed. In this culminating work, he brings together the outer world and the inner to offer us a surprising, original, often beautiful exploration of how we might come upon paradise in the midst of our very real lives.