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Showing 1 - 20 of 20862 items
By Aldous Huxley. 1952
A reconstruction of sensational occurrences at the Ursuline Convent in Loudun during the early 1600s. After a group of nuns…
were swept into a prolonged state of frenzy, they accused Urbain Grandier, Loudun's parson, of witchcraft. Huxley includes insights of modern psychology as well as his own speculations on good and evil. 1952.By Frank Donovan. 1971
By Kevin Toolis. 2018
By Caitlin Doughty. 2017
Fascinated by our pervasive terror of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty set out to discover how other cultures care for…
their dead. In rural Indonesia, she observes a man clean and dress his grandfather's mummified body. Grandpa's mummy has lived in the family home for two years, where the family has maintained a warm and respectful relationship. She meets Bolivian natitas (cigarette-smoking, wish-granting human skulls), and introduces us to a Japanese kotsuage, in which relatives use chopsticks to pluck their loved-ones' bones from cremation ashes. With curiosity and morbid humour, Doughty encounters vividly decomposed bodies and participates in compelling, powerful death practices almost entirely unknown in America. Introduces death-care innovators researching green burial and body composting, explores new spaces for mourning--including a glowing Buddha columbarium in Japan and America's only open-air pyre--and reveals unexpected new possibilities for our own death rituals. Bestseller. 2017.By Jen Sookfong Lee. 2017
From its beginnings as a farming celebration marking the end of winter to its current role as a global party…
featuring good food, lots of gifts and public parades, 'Chinese New Year' is a snapshot of Chinese culture. Award-winning author and broadcaster Jen Sookfong Lee recalls her childhood in Vancouver, British Columbia, and weaves family stories into the history, traditions and evolution of Chinese New Year. Grades 3-6. 2017.By Jan Wong. 2017
Jan Wong knows food is better when shared, so when she set out to write a book about home cooking…
in France, Italy, and China, she asked her 22-year-old son, Sam, to join her. While he wasn't keen on spending excessive time with his mom, he dreamed of becoming a chef. Ultimately, it was an opportunity he couldn't pass up. On their journey, Jan and Sam live and cook with locals, seeing how globalization is changing food, families, and cultures. In southeast France, they move in with a family sheltering undocumented migrants. From Bernadette, the housekeeper, they learn classic French family fare such as blanquette de veau. In a hamlet in the heart of Italy's Slow Food country, the locals teach them how to make authentic spaghetti alle vongole and a proper risotto with leeks. In Shanghai, they cook firecracker chicken and scallion pancakes with the nouveaux riches and their migrant maids, who are part of the biggest demographic shift in world history. Along the way, mother and son explore their sometimes-fraught relationship, uniting--and occasionally clashing--over their mutual love of cooking. 2017.By Lois Bourne. 1985
The author, a "white" witch who uses her powers to cure illness and solve problems, recounts the experiences and visions…
that convinced her of her powers, and the ways she has used her gift. 1985.By Aleister Crowley, Victor B Neuburg, Mary Desti. 1998
This text is the record of Aleister Crowley's exploration of the 30 Aethyrs of the Enochian system of magick developed…
by the Elizabethan magicians Dr John Dee and Edward Kelly. Crowley obtained these visions in Mexico in 1900, and in Algeria in 1909. They are the source of many key spiritual doctrines of Thelema. They give an account of the transcendence of the Ego by crossing the Abyss, and the attainment of the grade of Master of the Temple. 1998. Uniform title: Equinox (New York, N.Y.)By Shoba Narayan. 2018
When Shoba Narayan, a writer and cookbook author who had lived for years in Manhattan, moves back to Bangalore with…
her family, she befriends the milk lady, from whom she buys fresh milk every day. These two women from very different backgrounds bond over not only cows, considered holy in India, but also family, food, and life. After Narayan agrees to buy her milk lady a new cow (she needs one and Narayan can afford it, so why not?), they set off looking for just the right cow. What was at first a simple economic transaction becomes something much more complicated, though never without a hint of slapstick. 2018.By David Carroll. 1974
A journey into the world of magic and the lives of its magicians, from ancient times to the present. Explains…
the difference between white and black magic and where magic begins and where it ends. 1974.By Benjamin Woo. 2018
Comic book superheroes, fantasy kingdoms, and futuristic starships have become inescapable features of today’s pop-culture landscape, and the people we…
used to deride as “nerds” or “geeks” have ridden their popularity and visibility to mainstream recognition. Yet these conventionalized representations of geek culture typically ignore the real people who have invested time and resources to make it what it is. Woo recentres our understanding of geek culture on the everyday lives of its participants, drawing on fieldwork in comic book shops, game stores, and conventions. He shows how geek culture is a set of interconnected social practices that are associated with popular media and argues that typical depictions of mass-mediated entertainment as something that isolates and pacifies its audiences are flawed because they do not account for the conversations, relationships, communities, and identities that are created by engaging with the products of mass culture. 2018. "What is a nerd?" -- Talk nerdy to me: the meaning of geek culture -- Taking geek culture seriously: a practice-theoretic account -- Values and virtues: what is best in life? -- Careers: boldly going on -- Making communities from mass culture -- Institutions: building worlds between production and consumption -- The limits of participation -- The geek, the bad, and the ugly --By Doug Bock Clark. 2019
Journalist Doug Bock Clark tells the stunning inside story of the Lamalerans, an ancient tribe of 1,500 hunter-gatherers who live…
on a volcanic island so remote it is known by other Indonesians as "The Land Left Behind." They have survived for centuries by taking whales with bamboo harpoons, but now are being pushed toward collapse by the encroachment of the modern world. 2019.By Milton Meltzer. 1999
Examines witch-hunts around the world from medieval Europe to the present day. Reveals how innocent people become accused of imaginary…
crimes due to fear, ignorance, and mass hysteria. Includes the Salem witch trials, Shakespeare's witches, and twentieth-century examples of persecution. For junior high and older readers. c1999.By Judith Flanders. 2014
Flanders traces the evolution of the house from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century across northern Europe and America,…
showing how the homes we know today bear only a faint resemblance to homes though history. What turned a house into a home? Why did northwestern Europe, a politically unimportant, sociologically underdeveloped region of the world, suddenly became the powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution, the capitalist crucible that created modernity? While investigating these important questions, Flanders uncovers the fascinating development of ordinary household items--from cutlery, chairs and curtains, to fitted kitchens, plumbing and windows--while also dismantling many domestic myths.By Michael Eric Dyson. 2019
"If you want the definitive treatment of a man who took it from Marcy Projects to the White House with…
wit, wisdom, and talent, and changed hip hop along the way, look no further than this insightful, brilliant and moving book." -Common JAY-Z is America at its scrappy, brash, irreverent, soulful, ingenious best: as transcendent a cultural icon as Frank Sinatra, as adventurous a self-made billionaire as Mark Zuckerberg, as gifted a poet as Walt Whitman. As he reaches the half-century mark, logs thirty years as a recording artist, becomes the genre's first billionaire, reigns as an elder statesman in a field teeming with artists half his age, and continues to make relevant rap records that chart-and that chart an artistic and political response to revived racism and renewed hostility to blackness-it is an auspicious time to examine JAY-Z's ideas, gifts and impact, to take measure of his stride as a cultural colossus. And there is no one better suited to the task than Michael Eric Dyson, who has investigated and championed hip hop, and the work of JAY-Z, as a critical American art form, for decades.By Ayaz Virji. 2019
A powerful true story about a Muslim doctor's service to small-town America and the hope of overcoming our country's climate…
of hostility and fear. In 2013, Ayaz Virji left a comfortable job at an East Coast hospital and moved to a town of 1,400 in Minnesota, feeling called to address the shortage of doctors in rural America. But in 2016, this decision was tested when the reliably blue, working-class county swung for Donald Trump. Virji watched in horror as his children faced anti-Muslim remarks at school and some of his most loyal patients began questioning whether he belonged in the community. Virji wanted out. But in 2017, just as he was lining up a job in Dubai, a local pastor invited him to speak at her church and address misconceptions about what Muslims practice and believe. That invitation has grown into a well-attended lecture series that has changed hearts and minds across the state, while giving Virji a new vocation that he never would have expected. In Love Thy Neighbor, Virji relates this story in a gripping, unforgettable narrative that shows the human consequences of our toxic politics, the power of faith and personal conviction, and the potential for a renewal of understanding in America's heartland.By John Von Sothen. 2019
A hilarious, candid account of what life in France is actually like, from a writer for Vanity Fair and GQ…
Americans love to love Paris. We buy books about how the French parent, why French women don't get fat, and how to be Parisian wherever you are. While our work hours increase every year, we think longingly of the six weeks of vacation the French enjoy, imagining them at the seaside in stripes with plates of fruits de mer. John von Sothen fell in love with Paris through the stories his mother told of her year spent there as a student. And then, after falling for and marrying a French waitress he met in New York, von Sothen moved to Paris. But fifteen years in, he's finally ready to admit his mother's Paris is mostly a fantasy. In this hilarious and delightful collection of essays, von Sothen walks us through real life in Paris-not only myth-busting our Parisian daydreams but also revealing the inimitable and too often invisible pleasures of family life abroad. Relentlessly funny and full of incisive observations, Monsieur Mediocre is ultimately a love letter to France-to its absurdities, its history, its ideals-but it's a very French love letter: frank, smoky, unsentimental. It is a clear-eyed ode to a beautiful, complex, contradictory country from someone who both eagerly and grudgingly calls it home.By Meghan Daum. 2019
From "one of the most emotionally exacting, mercilessly candid, deeply funny, and intellectually rigorous writers of our time" (Cheryl Strayed,…
author of Wild) comes a seminal new book that reaches surprising truths about feminism, the Trump era, and the Resistance movement. You won't be able to stop thinking about it and talking about it. In the fall of 2016, acclaimed author Meghan Daum began working on a book about the excesses of contemporary feminism. With Hillary Clinton soon to be elected, she figured even the most fiercely liberal of her friends and readers could take the criticisms in stride. But after the election, she knew she needed to do more, and her nearly completed manuscript went in the trash. What came out in its place is the most sharply-observed, all-encompassing, and unputdownable book of her career. In this gripping new work, Meghan examines our country's most intractable problems with clear-eyed honesty instead of exaggerated outrage. With passion, humor, and most importantly nuance, she tries to make sense of the current landscape-from Donald Trump's presidency to the #MeToo movement and beyond. In the process, she wades into the waters of identity politics and intersectionality, thinks deeply about the gender wage gap, and tests a theory about the divide between Gen Xers and millennials. This signature work may well be the first book to capture the essence of this era in all its nuances and contradictions. No matter where you stand on its issues, this book will strike a chord.By Joe Posnanski. 2019
Award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author Joe Posnanski enters the world of Harry Houdini and his legions of…
devoted fans in an immersive, entertaining, and magical work on the illusionist's impact on American culture-and why his legacy endures to this day. Harry Houdini. Say his name and a number of things come to mind. Escapes. Illusions. Magic. Chains. Safes. Live burials. Close to a century after his death, nearly every person in America knows his name from a young age, capturing their imaginations with his death-defying stunts and daring acts. He inspired countless people, from all walks of life, to find something magical within themselves. This is a book about a man and his extraordinary life, but it is also about the people who he has inspired in death. As Joe Posnanski delves into the deepest corners of Houdini-land, visiting museums (one owned by David Copperfield), attractions, and private archives, he encounters a cast of unforgettable and fascinating characters: a woman who runs away from home to chase her dream of becoming a magician; an Italian who revives Houdini's most famous illusion every night; a performer at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles who calls himself Houdini's Ghost; a young boy in Australia who, one day, sees an old poster and feels his life change; and a man in Los Angeles whose sole mission is life has been to keep the legend's name alive. Both a personal obsession and an odyssey of discovery, Posnanski draws inspiration from his lifelong passion for and obsession with magic, blending biography, memoir, and first-person reporting to examine Harry Houdini's life and legacy. This is the ultimate journey to uncover why this magic man endures, and what he still has to teach the world about wonder.By Augusten Burroughs. 2019
From the number one New York Times bestselling author comes another stunning memoir that is tender, touching...and just a little…
spooky. "Here's a partial list of things I don't believe in: God. The Devil. Heaven. Hell. Bigfoot. Ancient Aliens. Past lives. Vampires. Zombies. Homeopathy. Bigfoot. Canola oil, because there's no such thing as a canola. Note that "witches" and "witchcraft" are absent from this list. When really they should be right there at the top. The thing is, I wouldn't believe in them, and I would privately ridicule any idiot who did, except for one thing: I am a witch."-From Toil & Trouble For as long as Augusten Burroughs could remember, he knew things he shouldn't have known. He manifested things that shouldn't have come to pass. And he told exactly no one about this, save one person: his mother. His mother reassured him that it was all perfectly normal, that he was descended from a long line of witches, going back to the days of the early American colonies. And that this family tree was filled with witches. It was a bond that he and his mother shared - until the day she left him in the care of her psychiatrist to be raised in his family (but that's a whole other story). After that, Augusten was on his own. On his own to navigate the world of this tricky power; on his own to either use or misuse this gift. From the hilarious to the terrifying, Toil & Trouble is a chronicle of one man's journey to understand himself, to reconcile the powers he can wield with things with which he is helpless. There are very few things that are coincidences, as you will learn in Toil & Trouble. Ghosts are real, trees can want to kill you, beavers are the spawn of satan, houses are alive, and in the end, love is the most powerful magic of all.