Search results for ""farrar straus and giroux""

The Control of Nature is John McPhee''s bestselling account of places where people are locked in combat with nature. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strageties and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking is his depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those attempting to wrest control from her - stubborn, sometimes foolhardy, more often ingenious, and always arresting characters.

Read more less

When John McPhee returned to the island of his ancestorsColonsay, twenty-five miles west of the Scottish mainlanda hundred and thirty-eight people were living there. About eighty of these, crofters and farmers, had familial histories of unbroken residence on the island for two or three hundred years; the rest, including the English laird who owned Colonsay, were incomers. Donald McNeill, the crofter of the title, was working out his existence in this last domain of the feudal system; the laird, the fourth Baron Strathcona, lived in Bath, appeared on Colonsay mainly in the summer, and accepted with nonchalance the fact that he was the least popular man on the island he owned. While comparing crofter and laird, McPhee gives readers a deep and rich portrait of the terrain, the history, the legends, and the people of this fragment of the Hebrides.

Read more less

From acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, a meditation on what we must give up to feel more alive.To give up or not to give up?The question can feel inescapable but the answer is never simple.Giving up our supposed vices is one thing; giving up on life itself is quite another. One form of self-sacrifice feels positive, something to admire and aspire to, while the other is profoundly unsettling, if not actively undesirable.There are always, it turns out, both good and bad sacrifices, but it is not always clear beforehand which is which. We give something up because we believe we can no longer go on as we are. In this sense, giving up is a critical momentan attempt to make a different future.In On Giving Up, the acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips illuminates both the gaps and the connections between the many ways of giving up and helps us to address the central question: What must we give up in order to feel more alive?

Read more less

This is a book only Questlove could have written: a perceptive and personal reflection on the first half-century of hip-hop.When hip-hop first emerged in the 1970s, it wasn't expected to become the cultural force it is today. But for a young Black kid growing up in a musical family in Philadelphia, it was everything. He stayed up late to hear the newest songs on the radio. He saved his money to buy vinyl as soon as it landed. He even started to try to make his own songs. That kid was Questlove, and decades later, he is a six-time Grammy Awardwinning musician, an Academy Awardwinning filmmaker, a New York Times bestselling author, a producer, an entrepreneur, a cofounder of one of hip-hop's defining acts (the Roots), and the genre's unofficial in-house historian.In this landmark book, Hip-Hop Is History, Questlove skillfully traces the creative and cultural forces that made and shaped hip-hop, highlighting both the forgotten but influential gems a

Read more less

One of Literary Hub's most anticipated books of 2024A lyrical meditation on how Black Americans have envisioned utopia-and sought to transform their lives.How do the disillusioned, the forgotten, and the persecuted not merely hold on to life but expand its possibilities and preserve its beauty? What, in other words, does utopia look like in black?These questions animate Aaron Robertson's exploration of Black Americans' efforts to remake the conditions of their lives. Writing in the tradition of Saidiya Hartman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robertson makes his way from his ancestral hometown of Promise Land, Tennessee, to Detroit-the city where he was born, and where one of the country's most remarkable Black utopian experiments got its start. Founded by the brilliant preacher Albert Cleage Jr., the Shrine of the Black Madonna combined Afrocentric Christian practice with radical social projects to transform the self-conception of its member

Read more less

From the Pulitzer Prize winner Eliza Griswold, Circle of Hope is an intimate portrait of a church, its radical mission, and its riveting crisis. The revolution I wanted to be part of was in the church. Americans have been leaving their churches. Some drift away. Some stay home. And some have been searching for-and finding-more authentic ways to find and follow Jesus. This is the story of one such radical outpost of Jesus followers dedicated to service, the Sermon on the Mount, and working toward justice for all in this life, not just salvation for some in the next. Part of a little-known yet influential movement at the edge of American evangelicalism, Philadelphia's Circle of Hope grew for forty years, planted four congregations, and then found itself in crisis.The story that follows is an American allegory full of questions with urgent relevance for so many of us, not just the faithful: How do we commit to one another and our bet

Read more less

The essential coming-of-age novel by Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John is a haunting and provocative story of a young girl growing up on the island of Antigua. Kincaid''s novel focuses on a universal, tragic, and often comic theme: the loss of childhood. Annie''s voiceurgent, demanding to be heardis one that will not soon be forgotten by readers.An adored only child, Annie has until recently lived an idyllic life. She is inseparable from her beautiful mother, a powerful presence, who is the very center of the little girl''s existence. Loved and cherished, Annie grows and thrives within her mother''s benign shadow. Looking back on her childhood, she reflects, It was in such a paradise that I lived. When she turns twelve, however, Annie''s life changes, in ways that are often mysterious to her. She begins to question the cultural assumptions of her island world; at school she instinctively rebels against authority; and most frighteningly, her mother, seeing

Read more less

A no-holds-barred biography of the great poet and sexual rebel, who could give the dead a voice, make them sing (Hilton Als, The New Yorker). Thom Gunn was not a confessional poet, and he withheld much, but inseparable from his rigorous, formal poetry was a ravenous, acute experience of life and death. Raised in Kent, England, and educated at Cambridge, Gunn found a home in San Francisco, where he documented the city's queerness, the hippie mentality (and drug use) of the sixties, and the tragedy and catastrophic impact of the AIDS crisis in the eighties and beyond. As Jeremy Lybarger wrote in The New Republic, the author of Moly and The Man with Night Sweats was an agile poet who renovated tradition to accommodate the rude litter of modernity. Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life chronicles, for the first time, the largely undocumented life of this revolutionary poet. Michael Nott, a coeditor of The Letters of Thom Gunn, draw

Read more less

The bestselling author of Other Minds shows how we and our ancestors have reinvented our planet.If the history of the Earth were compressed down to a year, our species would arise in the last thirty minutes or so of the final hour. But life itself is not such a late arrival: It has existed on Earth for something like 3.7 billion yearsmost of our planet's history and over a quarter of the age of the universe (as far as we can tell). What have these organismsbacteria, animals, plants, and the restdone in all this time? In Living on Earth, the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith proposes a new way of understanding how the actions of living beings have shaped our planet. Where his acclaimed books Other Minds and Metazoa explored the riddle of how conscious minds came to exist on Earth, Living on Earth turns to what happens when we look at the mind from another sidewhen we come to see organisms as active causes, not merely as results

Read more less