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The American daughters : a novel / by Ruffin, Maurice Carlos,author.;
"When Adebimpe is ten, she is sold with her mother, Sanite, to plantation owner John du Marche. He soon renames her Ady but Sanite never lets her daughter forget who she really is - a person who can read and write and understand numbers. Most importantly, Sanite reminds Ady that she must never reveal these abilities to a white person, especially not her true name. Tasked with maintaining du Marche's home in vibrant New Orleans, Ady takes in the city and starts to envision life beyond her dire circumstances. One day, she notices a beautiful stranger, radiant and poised with a colorful Tignon wrapped regally around her head. Ady realizes that she is a Free Woman. Inexplicably drawn to her, but not knowing who she is or what she does, Ady begins to search for answers - which eventually brings her to Lenore, a free woman who owns the Mockingbird Inn. When Lenore invites Ady to join The Daughters, Ady finds spiritual and sexual liberation, and with their help, imagines a new future for herself and her family"--
Subjects: Historical fiction.; Novels.; Enslaved women; Slavery; Women;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Bittersweet : how sorrow and longing make us whole / by Cain, Susan,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."With her mega-bestseller Quiet, Susan Cain urged our society to cultivate space for the undervalued, indispensable introverts among us, thereby revealing an untapped power hidden in plain sight. Now, she employs the same mix of research, storytelling, and memoir to explore why we experience sorrow and longing, and the surprising lessons these states of mind teach us about creativity, compassion, leadership, spirituality, mortality and love. Bittersweetness is a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy when beholding beauty. It recognizes that light and dark, birth and death-bitter and sweet-are forever paired. A song in a minor key, an elegiac poem, or even a touching television commercial all can bring us to this sublime, even holy, state of mind-and, ultimately, to greater kinship with our fellow humans. But bittersweetness is not, as we tend to think, just a momentary feeling or event. It's also a way of being, a storied heritage. Our artistic and spiritual traditions - amplified by recent scientific and management research - teach us its power. Cain shows how a bittersweet state of mind is the quiet force that helps us transcend our personal and collective pain. If we don't acknowledge our own sorrows and longings, she says, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, or neglect. But if we realize that all humans know - or will know - loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other. And we can learn to transform our own pain into creativity, transcendence, and connection. At a time of profound discord and personal anxiety, Bittersweet brings us together in deep and unexpected ways"--
Subjects: Desire.; Grief.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Gently to Nagasaki / by Kogawa, Joy,author.;
Includes bibliographical references."Gently to Nagasaki is a spiritual pilgrimage, an exploration both communal and intensely personal. Set in Vancouver and Toronto, the outposts of Slocan and Coaldale, the streets of Nagasaki and the high mountains of Shikoku, Japan, it is also an account of a remarkable life. As a child during WWII, Joy Kogawa was interned with her family and thousands of other Japanese Canadians by the Canadian government. Her acclaimed novel Obasan, based on that experience, brought her literary recognition and played a critical role in the movement for redress. Kogawa knows what it means to be classified as the enemy, and she seeks urgently to get beyond false and dangerous distinctions of "us" and "them." Interweaving the events of her own life with catastrophes like the bombing of Nagasaki and the massacre by the Japanese imperial army at Nanking, she wrestles with essential questions like good and evil, love and hate, rage and forgiveness, determined above all to arrive at her own truths. Poetic and unflinching, this is a longawaited memoir from one of Canada's most distinguished literary elders."--
Subjects: Autobiographies.; Biographies.; Kogawa, Joy.; Kogawa, Joy; Japanese Canadians; Japanese Canadians; Authors, Canadian (English);
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Sun house / by Duncan, David James,author.;
"A bolt from an Aero México DC-8 falls from the sky, killing a Mexican girl and throwing the faith of a young American Jesuit into crisis. Jamey van Zandt's mother dies on his fifth birthday, sparking a lifetime of repressed anger that he only unlashes once a year when he recklessly duels the Fate, God, or Power who let the coincidence happen. A young woman, Risa McKeig, runs through the streets of Seattle searching for a "shooting star moment" that will pierce her world with a love that will eventually help heal both the Jesuit and the angry actor. The sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes hilarious journeys of this "unintentional menagerie" carry them to the healing lands of Montana's Elkmoon Beguine & Cattle Company, where nothing tastes better than four fingers of Maker's Mark mixed with glacier ice, nothing sounds lovelier than a lone flycatcher's mating song, and nothing seems less likely than the delight a bunch of urban sophisticates, Montana cowboys, road-weary musicians, and spiritual refugees begin to find in each other's company"--
Subjects: Humorous fiction.; Epic fiction.; Novels.; Anger; Conduct of life; Love; Meaning (Philosophy); Nature; Transcendence (Philosophy);
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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This ordinary stardust : a scientist's path from grief to wonder / by Townsend, Alan R.,author.;
"A decade ago, Dr. Alan Townsend's family received two unthinkable, catastrophic diagnoses: his 4-year-old daughter and his brilliant and vivacious wife developed unrelated, life-threatening forms of brain cancer. As he witnessed his young daughter fight during the courageous final months of her mother's life, Townsend -- a lifelong scientist -- was indelibly altered. He began to see scientific inquiry as more than a source of answers to a given problem, but also as a lifeboat: a lens on the world that could help him find peace with the painful realities he could not change. Through scientific wonder, he found ways to bring meaning to his darkest period. At a time when society's relationship with science is increasingly polarized while threats to human life on earth continue to rise, Townsend offers a balanced, moving perspective on the common ground between science and religion through the spiritual fulfillment he found in his work. Awash in Townsend's electrifying and breathtaking prose, This ordinary stardust offers hope that life can carry on even in the face of near-certain annihilation"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Personal narratives.; Townsend, Alan R.; Townsend, Alan R.; Biogeochemistry.; Brain; Grief.; Religion and science.; Spouses of cancer patients;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The sunset route : freight trains, forgiveness, and freedom on the rails in the American West / by Quinn, Carrot,author.;
"After an abusive, neglected childhood spent on welfare and in and out of homelessness in Alaska, raised by a mother who believed she was the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary, Carrot Quinn moved out on her own. She found a sense of belonging with a bunch of straight-edge anarchists who taught her how to traverse the country by freight trains, sleep in fields under the stars, and find her food by foraging in dumpsters. Her new life was one of thrilling adventure and freedom, but still, the ghosts of her lonely and traumatic childhood continued to haunt her. The Sunset Route is a powerful and brazingly honest adventure memoir set in the unseen corners of the United States--in the unforgiving Alaskan tundra, on trains rattling through forests and deserts, as well as in low-income apartments and crowded punk houses--following a remarkable protagonist who has witnessed more tragedy than she thought she could ever hold and who must learn to heal her own heart. Ultimately, it is a meditation on the natural world as a spiritual anchor, revealing all the ways that forgiveness can set us free"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Quinn, Carrot.; Alternative lifestyles; Street children;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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People change / by Shraya, Vivek,1981-author.;
"Returning to the powerful single-essay format of I'm Afraid of Men, Vivek Shraya summons her signature wisdom to reflect on a topic she's uniquely qualified to explore: reinvention. Growing up surrounded by Hindu lore, Vivek Shraya first learned to model change after gods who assumed various forms and humans who believed in being born again and again. As a child she worshiped Sathya Sai Baba, an Indian guru who claimed to be the reincarnation of a beloved spiritual master. As a teen she adored Madonna, an idol and a shapeshifter in her own right. But after enacting her own transformations--motivated by both survival and creative expression--she came to see change itself as sacred. People Change is a thought-provoking meditation on reinvention from an artist who has actively refused a single, static shape in both her career and in her personal life. With great intelligence and candour, she mines her own experience to get to the heart of what motivates us to change and what limitations and cultural myths trap us in place. What emerges is a lesson in embracing our multiplicity, honouring the many different versions of ourselves, and celebrating the beauty of transformation, both inside and out"--
Subjects: Essays.; Self-help publications.; Change.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Mindful of murder / by Juby, Susan,1969-author.;
"Meet Helen Thorpe. She's smart, preternaturally calm, deeply insightful and a freshly trained butler. On the day she is supposed to start her career as an unusually equanimous domestic professional serving one of the wealthiest families in the world, she is called back to a spiritual retreat where she used to work, the Yatra Institute, on one of British Columbia's gulf islands. The owner of the lodge, Helen's former employer Edna, has died while on a three-month silent self-retreat, leaving Helen instructions to settle her affairs. But Edna's will is more detailed than most, and getting things in order means Helen must run the retreat for a select group to determine which of Edna's relatives will inherit the institute. Helen's classmates, newly minted butlers themselves, decide they can't let her go it alone and arrive to help Helen pull things off. After all, is there anything three butlers can't handle? As Helen carries out the will's instructions, she begins to think that someone had reason to want Edna dead. A reluctantly suspicious investigator, Helen and her band of butlers find themselves caught up in the mystery."--Provided by publisher.
Subjects: Detective and mystery fiction.; Novels.; Butlers; Murder; Women private investigators;
Available copies: 2 / Total copies: 3
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The way of integrity : finding the path to your true self / by Beck, Martha Nibley,1962-author.;
"As Martha Beck says in her book, "Integrity is the cure for psychological suffering. Period." In The Way of Integrity, Beck presents a four-stage process that anyone can use to find integrity, and with it, a sense of purpose, emotional healing, and a life free of mental suffering. Much of what plagues us--people pleasing, staying in stale relationships, negative habits--all point to what happens when we are out of touch with what truly makes us feel whole. Inspired by The Divine Comedy, Beck uses Dante's classic hero's journey as a framework to break down the process of attaining personal integrity into small, manageable steps. She shows how to read our internal signals that lead us towards our true path, and to recognize what we actually yearn for versus what our culture sells us. With techniques tested on hundreds of her clients, Beck brings her expertise as a social scientist, life coach and human being to help readers to uncover what integrity looks like in their own lives. She takes us on a spiritual adventure that not only will change the direction of our lives, but bring us to a place of genuine happiness"--
Subjects: Happiness.; Meaning (Psychology); Self-confidence.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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We loved it all : a memory of life / by Millet, Lydia,1968-author.;
"A personal evocation of the glory of nature, our vexed position in the animal kingdom, and the difficulty of adoring what we destroy. Acclaimed novelist Lydia Millet's first work of nonfiction, We Loved It All, is a genre-defying tour de force that makes an impassioned argument for people to see their emotional and spiritual lives as infinitely dependent on the lives of nonhuman beings. Drawing on a quarter-century of experience as an advocate for endangered species at the Center for Biological Diversity, Millet offers intimate portraits of what she calls "the others"--the extraordinary animals with whom we still share the world, along with those already lost. Humans, too, fill this book, as Millet touches on the lives of her world-traveling parents, fascinating partners and friends, and colorful relatives, from diplomats to nut farmers--all figures in the complex tapestry each of us weaves with the surrounding world. Written in the tradition of Annie Dillard or Robert Macfarlane, We Loved It All is an incantatory work that will appeal to anyone concerned about the future of life on earth-including our own"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; Millet, Lydia, 1968-; Authors, American; Authors, American; Human-animal relationships.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Results 301 to 310 of 380 | « previous |