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Seed to dust : life, nature, and a country garden / by Hamer, Marc,author.;
"For readers of Late Migrations and Vesper Flights From the acclaimed author of How to Catch a Mole, this meditative memoir explores the wisdom of plants, the joys of manual labor, and the natural cycle of growth and decay that runs through both the garden's life and our own. Marc Hamer has nurtured the same 12-acre garden in the Welsh countryside for over two decades. The garden is vast and intricate. It's rarely visited, and only Hamer knows of its secrets. But it's not his garden. It belongs to his wealthy and elegant employer, Miss Cashmere. But the garden does not really belong to her, either. As Hamer writes, 'Like a book, a garden belongs to everyone who sees it.' In Seed to Dust, Marc Hamer paints a beautiful portrait of the garden that 'belongs to everyone.' He describes a year in his life as a country gardener, with each chapter named for the month he's in. As he works, he muses on the unusual folklores of his beloved plants. He observes the creatures who scurry and hide from his blade or rake. And he reflects on his own life: living homeless as a young man, his loving relationship with his wife and children, and--now--feeling the effects of old age on body and mind. As the seasons change, Hamer also reflects on the changes he has observed in Miss Cashmere's life from afar: the death of her husband and the departure of her children from the stately home where she now lives alone. At the book's end, Hamer's connection to Miss Cashmere changes shape, and new insights into relationships and the beauty and brutality of nature emerge. Just like all good books and gardens, Seed to Dust is filled with equal parts life and death, beauty and decay, and every reader will find something different to admire."-- Provided by publisher.
Subjects: Hamer, Marc.; Gardening; Gardens; Natural history;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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My left foot [videorecording] / by Bernstein, Elmer.; motion picture adaptation of (work):Brown, Christy,1932-1981.My left foot.; Connaughton, Shane,screenwriter.; Cusack, Cyril,1910-1993,actor.; Day-Lewis, Daniel,actor.; Dunbar, Adrian,1958-actor.; Fricker, Brenda,actor.; McAnally, Ray,actor.; McCabe, Ruth,actor.; O'Conor, Hugh,1975-actor.; Pearson, Noel,film producer.; Shaw, Fiona,1958-actor.; Sheridan, Jim,1949-film director,screenwriter.; Whelan, Alison,actor.; Granada Films,production company.; Lions Gate Films,production company.; Miramax Films,presenter.; Miramax Home Entertainment (Firm),publisher.;
Director of photography, Jack Conroy ; editor, J. Patrick Duffner ; music composed and conducted by Elmer Bernstein ; production designer, Austen Spriggs ; special advisor to the production, Gene Lambert.Daniel Day Lewis, Ray McAnally, Brenda Fricker, Fiona Shaw, Hugh O'Conor, Adrian Dunbar, Ruth McCabe, Alison Whelan, Cyril Cusack.Born with cerebral palsy, the 10th of 22 children of a Dublin bricklayer and his wife, Christy Brown was doomed to life as a vegetable by physicians in 1932. His strong-willed mother's love and faith encouraged him to overcome this label. At age seven, he made a mark with chalk grasped between the toes of his left foot, the only limb on his body he could control. With this proof of intelligence, his schooling begins, and aided by his loving family, Christy learns to grapple with life's physical tasks and psychological pains. His courage and determination inspire a teacher, who lends support as he develops into a brilliant if cantankerous writer, poet, and painter. The astounding story of an artist who defeated a physical disability, degrading stereotypes, and poverty to fulfill his dreams.Canadian Home Video Rating: 14A.MPAA rating: R.DVD ; widescreen presentation ; Dolby Digital 5.1.Academy Award best actor (Daniel Day-Lewis), 1989, and best supporting actress (Brenda Fricker), 1989
Subjects: Biographical films.; Feature films.; Brown, Christy, 1932-1981.; Brown, Christy, 1932-1981; Cerebral palsied; Mouth and foot painting artists; People with disabilities; Young men;
For private home use only.
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The last days of Roger Federer : and other endings / by Dyer, Geoff,author.;
Includes bibliographical references."When artists and athletes age, what happens to their work? Does it ripen or rot? Achieve a new serenity or succumb to an escalating torment? As our bodies decay, how do we keep on? In this beguiling meditation, Geoff Dyer sets his own encounter with late middle age against the last days and last works of writers, painters, footballers, musicians, and tennis stars who've mattered to him throughout his life. With a playful charm and penetrating intelligence, he recounts Friedrich Nietzsche's breakdown in Turin, Bob Dylan's reinventions of old songs, J. M. W. Turner's paintings of abstracted light, John Coltrane's cosmic melodies, Bjorn Borg's defeats, and Beethoven's final quartets -and considers the intensifications and modifications of experience that come when an ending is within sight. Throughout, he stresses the accomplishments of uncouth geniuses who defied convention, and went on doing so even when their beautiful youths were over. Ranging from Burning Man and the Doors to the nineteenth-century Alps and back, Dyer's book on last things is also a book about how to go on living with art and beauty--and on the entrancing effect and sudden illumination that an Art Pepper solo or Annie Dillard reflection can engender in even the most jaded and ironic sensibilities"--
Subjects: Artists; Athletes; Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.); Gifted older people.; Gifted persons.; Older artists.; Older athletes.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Who will remember / by Harris, C. S.,author.;
"August 1816. England is in the grip of what will become known as the Year Without a Summer. Facing the twin crises of a harvest-destroying volcanic winter and the economic disruption caused by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the British monarchy finds itself haunted by the looming threat of bloody riots not seen since the earliest days of the French Revolution. Amidst the turmoil, a dead man is found hanging upside down by one leg in an abandoned chapel, his hands tied behind his back. The pose eerily echoes the image depicted on a tarot card known as Le Pendu, the Hanged Man. The victim-Lord Preston Farnsworth, the younger brother of one of the Regent's boon companions-was a passionate crusader against what he called the forces of darkness, namely criminality, immorality, and sloth. His brutal murder shocks the Palace and panics the already troubled populace. Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, learns of the murder from a ragged orphan who leads him to the corpse and then disappears. At first, everyone in the dead man's orbit paints Lord Preston as a selfless saint. But as Sebastian delves deeper into his life, he quickly realizes that the man had accumulated more than his fair share of enemies, including Major Hugh Chandler, a close friend who once saved Sebastian's life. Sebastian also discovers that the pious Lord Preston may have been much more dangerous than those he sought to redeem. As dark clouds press down on the city and the rains fall unceasingly, two more victims are found, one strangled and one shot, with ominous tarot cards placed on their bodies. The killer is sending a gruesome message and Sebastian is running out of time to decipher it before more lives are lost and a fraught post-war London explodes"--
Subjects: Detective and mystery fiction.; Novels.; Murder; Regency; Saint Cyr, Sebastian (Fictitious character); Secrecy; Serial murderers;
Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1
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Tripping on utopia : Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the troubled birth of psychedelic science / by Breen, Benjamin,1985-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index.""It was not the Baby Boomers who ushered in the first era of widespread drug experimentation. It was their parents." Far from the repressed traditionalists they are often painted as, the generation that survived the second World War emerged with a profoundly ambitious sense of social experimentation. In the '40s and '50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated. American physician John C. Lilly infamously dosed dolphins (and himself) with LSD in a NASA-funded effort to teach dolphins to talk. A tripping Cary Grant mumbled into a Dictaphone about Hegel as astronaut John Glenn returned to Earth. At the center of this revolution were the pioneering anthropologists-and star-crossed lovers-Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Convinced the world was headed toward certain disaster, Mead and Bateson made it their life's mission to reshape humanity through a new science of consciousness expansion, but soon found themselves at odds with the government bodies who funded their work, whose intentions were less than pure. Mead and Bateson's partnership unlocks an untold chapter in the history of the twentieth century, linking drug researchers with CIA agents, outsider sexologists, and the founders of the Information Age. As we follow Mead and Bateson's fractured love affair from the malarial jungles of New Guinea to the temples of Bali, from the espionage of WWII to the scientific revolutions of the Cold War, a new origin story for psychedelic science emerges"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; Bateson, Gregory, 1904-1980.; Mead, Margaret, 1901-1978.; Anthropology; Cold War.; Hallucinogenic drugs;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Trail of the lost : the relentless search to bring home the missing hikers of the Pacific Crest Trail / by Lankford, Andrea,author.;
"As a park ranger on the National Park Service's law enforcement team, Andrea Lankford led search and rescue missions in some of the most beautiful (and dangerous) landscapes in America, from Yosemite and Zion to the Grand Canyon. But though she had the official support of the agency, Andrea found herself increasingly frustrated with the service's bureaucratic idiosyncrasies, and after twelve years, she finally left the force, haunted by her own failure to find a lost hiker in 1995. Two decades later, however, she stumbles across a mystery that pulls her right back where she left off: three young men have vanished from the Pacific Crest Trail, the 2,650-mile trek made famous by Cheryl Strayed, and no one has been able to find them. It's bugging the hell out of her. Andrea's concern leads her to a wild environment she didn't have to traverse when she last searched for the lost: missing person Facebook groups. Andrea launches an investigation, joining forces with an eclectic team of amateurs who are determined to solve the cases by land and by screen: a mother of the missing, a retired pharmacy manager, and a mapmaker who monitors terrorist activity for the government. Together, they track the activities of kidnappers and murderers, investigate a cult, rescue a psychic in peril, cross paths with an unconventional scientist, and reunite an international fugitive with his family. Searching for the missing is a brutal psychological and physical test with the highest possible stakes, and it takes its toll on each of them. And the insidious nature of the internet wreaks havoc on their investigation, with obsessive "fans" of missing person pages offering fabricated clues, financial requests, and, most damaging of all, false hope. But their hardships begin to bear strange fruits. They discover clues -- bloody socks on the trail, a novel with underlined passages, bones in the desert -- that were missed by the authorities, ones that lead them to places and people they never saw coming. TRAIL OF THE LOST is a female-driven true crime adventure that explores the power and limits of determination, generosity, and hope. It paints a vivid picture of hiker culture and its complicated relationship with the ever-expanding online realm. It offers a deep awe of the natural world, even as it unearths just how vast and treacherous it can be. And along the way, Andrea tells the tale of the incredible strength and inventiveness that brought three bodies home, and that changed the searchers' lives forever. On the TRAIL OF THE LOST, you may not find what you are looking for, but you will certainly find more than you seek"--
Subjects: Hikers.; Missing persons.; Park rangers.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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