Search results for ""Author Scott""

Evoking the times and styles of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, this collection of original stories is set in 18th and 19th century New England—when restless spirits seemed to roam more freely. Not quite horror, not quite mystery, these dark yet spellbindingly eloquent tales hover on the edge, threatening at every page to plunge the characters into madness.

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Scott Weidensaul follows hawks over the Mexican coastal plains, Bar-tailed Godwits that hitchhike on gale winds 7,000 miles nonstop across the Pacific from Alaska to New Zealand, and the Myriad Songbirds whose numbers have dwindled so dramatically in recent years.

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No genre manifests the pleasure of reading - and its power to consume and enchant - more than romance. In suspending the category of the novel to rethink the way prose fiction works, Without the Novel demonstrates what literary history looks like from the perspective of such readerly excesses and adventures.Rejecting the assumption that novelistic realism is the most significant tendency in the history of prose fiction, Black asks three intertwined questions: What is fiction without the novel? What is literary history without the novel? What is reading without the novel? In answer, this study draws on the neglected genre of romance to reintegrate eighteenth-century British fiction with its classical and Continental counterparts. Black addresses works of prose fiction that self-consciously experiment with the formal structures and readerly affordances of romance: Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Story, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and Burney’s The Wanderer. Each text presents itself as a secondary, satiric adaptation of anachronistic and alien narratives, but in revising foreign stories each text also relays them. The recursive reading that these works portray and demand makes each a self-reflexive parable of romance itself. Ultimately, Without the Novel writes a wider, weirder history of fiction organized by the recurrences of romance and informed by the pleasures of reading that define the genre.

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This collection of 22 stories set on fabled waters from Alaska to Baja confirms Scott Sadil's reputation as a writer of literary fiction in the best sporting tradition. The stories capture the beauty of wild fish and the waters and landscapes where we find them and go beyond the fishing to explore relationships—between parents and children, husbands and wives, siblings, lovers, and friends—the real life situations that evoke the same win-lose drama played out between anglers and their prey. A master of language and sophisticated storytelling, Sadil brings a warm-hearted appreciation to the graceful messiness of human lives, especially the moments—sometimes humorous, always intimate—when we're hooked to something we feel certain we care about more than anything else in our lives.

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Founded in 1917, Paramount Records incongruously was one of several homegrown record labels of a Wisconsin chair-making company. The company pinned no outsized hopes on Paramount. Its founders knew nothing of the music business, and they had arrived at the scheme of producing records only to drive sales of the expensive phonograph cabinets they had recently begun manufacturing.Lacking the resources and the interest to compete for top talent, Paramount's earliest recordings gained little foothold with the listening public. On the threshold of bankruptcy, the label embarked on a new business plan: selling the music of Black artists to Black audiences. It was a wildly successful move, with Paramount eventually garnering many of the biggest-selling titles in the "race records" era. Inadvertently, the label accomplished what others could not, making blues, jazz, and folk music performed by Black artists a popular and profitable genre. Paramount featured a deep roster of legendary performers, including Louis Armstrong, Charley Patton, Ethel Waters, Son House, Fletcher Henderson, Skip James, Alberta Hunter, Blind Blake, King Oliver, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ma Rainey, Johnny Dodds, Papa Charlie Jackson, and Jelly Roll Morton. Scott Blackwood's The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records is the story of happenstance. But it is also a tale about the sheer force of the Great Migration and the legacy of the music etched into the shellacked grooves of a 78 rpm record. With Paramount Records, Black America found its voice. Through creative nonfiction, Blackwood brings to life the gifted artists and record producers who used Paramount to revolutionize American music. Felled by the Great Depression, the label stopped recording in 1932, leaving a legacy of sound pressed into cheap 78s that is among the most treasured and influential in American history.

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As the 2012 presidential campaign begins, Almost President profiles a dozen men who have run for the American presidency and lost—but who, even in defeat, have had a greater impact on American history than many of those who have served as president. Scott Farris tells us the stories of legendary figures from Henry Clay to Stephen Douglas, William Jennings Bryan to Thomas Dewey. He also includes mini-profiles on every major candidate nominated for president who never reached the White House but who helped ensure the success of American democracy. Farris explains how Barry Goldwater achieved the party realignment that had eluded FDR, how George McGovern paved the way for Barack Obama, and how Ross Perot changed the way all presidential candidates campaign. There is Al Smith, the first Catholic nominee for president; and Adlai Stevenson, the candidate of the "eggheads" who remains the beau ideal of a liberal statesman. Others covered by this book include Al Gore, John Kerry, and John McCain. The mini profiles also include evocative portraits of such men as John C. Fremont, the first Republican Party presidential candidate; and General Winfield Scott, whose loss helped guarantee the Union victory in the Civil War.

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Extreme poverty does not have to exist. When Christians accept that fact and start living accordingly, we will find the solution is already within our reach.Worldwide, 18,000 children die from preventable causes every day. If that statistic leaves you feeling powerless, you are not alone—but you are wrong. If a false sense of powerlessness has lulled you into apathy, it’s time to shake off the grogginess of low expectations and get to work. We can make this world a place where kids do not die from easily preventable diseases.In Hope Rising, Scott Todd of Compassion International pens a galvanizing, comprehensive vision of the movement that will eradicate extreme global poverty through transformative Christian generosity—and do it within our lifetime. Todd provides riveting evidence to show that we are much closer to that goal than you might think.According to Todd, we live in an historic moment, and chances are you are already part of it. The gospel is already reshaping lives from thoughtless consumption to informed concern. Twenty-first-century Christians are generating multi-continent grassroots movements through communications and travel. Public and private sectors are working together. It’s a whole new era of philanthropy, compassion, and justice aimed at eradicating the pandemic of extreme global poverty. This is a future we have the God-given power to create. This is the history we hope to write.As Todd envisions, “The twenty-first-century Christians embraced the entirety of their gospel—the truths it proclaims and the muscles it demands—with a new integrity. They did not deteriorate into humanist liberalism, as some had feared. Nor did they pile works on top of Grace…They simply determined that their world did not need to have children dying of preventable causes such as dirty water.”

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An illuminating, reassuring explanation of the Catholic Church’s teachings on confession and forgiveness by the bestselling author of The Lamb’s Supper and Hail, Holy Queen.Jesus told his first clergy, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” In Lord, Have Mercy, Scott Hahn explores the sacrament of reconciliation and shows why it is the key to spiritual growth, particularly in these times of intense anxiety and uncertainty. Drawing on the history of ancient Israel, the Gospels, the writings of the early Church, and the lives of the saints, Hahn reveals the living, scriptural heart of the Church’s teachings on penance, forgiveness, and reconciliation. It is a story that begins with the sin of Adam and Eve, continues in the biographies of Moses, King David, and the Apostle Peter, and reverberates in the lives of believers today. Hahn presents the Catholic and biblical perspective on sin and mercy, elucidating in clear, easily understood language the true import of Jesus’ simple, yet profound promise–“I am the door; if anyone enters by Me, he will be saved (John 10:9). Like Hahn’s earlier books, Lord, Have Mercy offers thoughtful, authoritative insights into controversial issues and disputed doctrines in a manner that will enlighten lay readers yet is thorough enough for scholars to appreciate. More than just a Bible study, it is a guide for the perplexed, providing practical advice and inspiration that will help readers come to a deeper knowledge of themselves and of Jesus through the sacrament of penance.

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A major biography-intimate, gripping, revelatory-of an artist who revolutionized American comedy. Richard Pryor may have been the most unlikely star in Hollywood history. Raised in his family's brothels, he grew up an outsider to privilege. He took to the stage, originally, to escape the hard-bitten realities of his childhood, but later came to a reverberating discovery: that by plunging into the depths of his experience, he could make stand-up comedy as exhilarating and harrowing as the life he'd known. He brought that trembling vitality to Hollywood, where his movie career-Blazing Saddles, the buddy comedies with Gene Wilder, Blue Collar-flowed directly out of his spirit of creative improvisation. The major studios considered him dangerous. Audiences felt plugged directly into the socket of life. Becoming Richard Pryor brings the man and his comic genius into focus as never before. Drawing upon a mountain of original research-interviews with family and friends, court transcripts, unpublished journals, screenplay drafts-Scott Saul traces Pryor's rough journey to the heights of fame: from his heartbreaking childhood, his trials in the Army, and his apprentice days in Greenwich Village to his soul-searching interlude in Berkeley and his ascent in the "New Hollywood" of the 1970s. Becoming Richard Pryor illuminates an entertainer who, by bringing together the spirits of the black freedom movement and the counterculture, forever altered the DNA of American comedy. It reveals that, while Pryor made himself a legend with his own account of his life onstage, the full truth of that life is more bracing still.

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After the Communist victory in China's civil war, Taiwan, then governed by the KMT (or Nationalist Party), became a focal point for both Buddhist and Christian activity in the Chinese world. Focusing on some of the most influential monastics of the time, this study considers Buddhist responses to Christianity during its subsequent period of growth on the island. Drawing on Buddhist and Christian publications, it shows that interfaith competition, and political context, are important in shaping religious identity and driving the religious engagement with modernity. Buddhist Responses to Christianity in Postwar Taiwan: Awakening the World will be of interest to historians of Buddhism, Chinese religion and Taiwanese society, and to those with an interest in interfaith dialogue more generally.

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The cache of bamboo texts unearthed in the village of Guodian, Hubei Province, in 1993 is a rare and unique find in the history of Chinese philosophy and literature. This study renders the complex corpus of the Guodian texts into a more easily manageable form, incorporating the past several years of scholarly activity on these texts and providing them with a comprehensive introduction along with a complete and well-annotated translation into English. As the only archaeologically excavated corpus of philosophical manuscripts to emerge from a Warring States–period tomb, the Guodian texts provide us with a wealth of reliable information for gaining new insights into the textual and intellectual history of pre-imperial China. Given the prominence of Confucian works in the corpus, they serve to fill out much of the intellectual historical picture for the doctrines of roughly three generations of Confucian disciples who fell between the times of Confucius (551–479 BC) and Mencius (c. 390–305 BC). The manuscripts also hold great significance for the study of early Chinese paleography and phonology. Volume II offers introductions to and annotated translations of the manuscripts "Cheng zhi," "Zun deyi," "Xing zi ming chu," "Liu de," and "Yucong" 1-4, along with various appendixes. These include collation tables of witnesses to the Guodian "Laozi" passages and a running translation of all the Guodian texts.

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The cognitive neuroscience of long-term memory is ingrained with the assumptions that a particular task measures a single cognitive process and that each cognitive process is mediated by a single brain region. However, these assumptions are simplistic and currently hindering progress toward understanding the true mechanisms of memory. This special issue of Cognitive Neuroscience presents five empirical papers and two theoretical discussion papers with peer commentaries on the spatial and/or temporal mechanisms of memory. These papers embrace more complex cognitive and neural processes, and thus will provide a framework for future studies to investigate the true mechanisms of memory.

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