An End to Ordinary History

An End to Ordinary History PDF Author: Michael Murphy
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453218831
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
DIVDIVGolf in the Kingdom author Michael Murphy’s Cold War thriller, based on true events/divDIV /divDIVSomeone is tracking Darwin Fall, a scholar whose expertise in supernormal powers is second to none. As Darwin begins a search of his own for the legendary Soviet spy Vladimir Kirov, he uncovers a secret network of spies, scientists, and rogue agents working together to harness the occult powers that could put “an end to ordinary history.”/divDIV /divMichael Murphy, a master of fusing fact and fiction, deftly uses his characters to blur the lines between the ordinary and the mysterious, between what is real and what is possible. /div

An End to Ordinary History

An End to Ordinary History PDF Author: Michael Murphy
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453218831
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Get Book Here

Book Description
DIVDIVGolf in the Kingdom author Michael Murphy’s Cold War thriller, based on true events/divDIV /divDIVSomeone is tracking Darwin Fall, a scholar whose expertise in supernormal powers is second to none. As Darwin begins a search of his own for the legendary Soviet spy Vladimir Kirov, he uncovers a secret network of spies, scientists, and rogue agents working together to harness the occult powers that could put “an end to ordinary history.”/divDIV /divMichael Murphy, a master of fusing fact and fiction, deftly uses his characters to blur the lines between the ordinary and the mysterious, between what is real and what is possible. /div

Esalen

Esalen PDF Author: Jeffrey J. Kripal
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226453715
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 590

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Book Description
Jeffrey Kripal here recounts the spectacular history of Esalen, the institute that has long been a world leader in alternative and experiential education and stands today at the center of the human potential movement. Forged in the literary and mythical leanings of the Beat Generation, inspired in the lecture halls of Stanford by radical scholars of comparative religion, the institute was the remarkable brainchild of Michael Murphy and Richard Price. Set against the heady backdrop of California during the revolutionary 1960s, Esalen recounts in fascinating detail how these two maverick thinkers sought to fuse the spiritual revelations of the East with the scientific revolutions of the West, or to combine the very best elements of Zen Buddhism, Western psychology, and Indian yoga into a decidedly utopian vision that rejected the dogmas of conventional religion. In their religion of no religion, the natural world was just as crucial as the spiritual one, science and faith not only commingled but became staunch allies, and the enlightenment of the body could lead to the full realization of our development as human beings. “An impressive new book. . . . [Kripal] has written the definitive intellectual history of the ideas behind the institute.”—San FranciscoChronicle “Kripal examines Esalen’s extraordinary history and evocatively describes the breech birth of Murphy and Price’s brainchild. His real achievement, though, is effortlessly synthesizing a dizzying array of dissonant phenomena (Cold War espionage, ecstatic religiosity), incongruous pairings (Darwinism, Tantric sex), and otherwise schizy ephemera (psychedelic drugs, spaceflight) into a cogent, satisfyingly complete narrative.”—Atlantic Monthly “Kripal has produced the first all-encompassing history of Esalen: its intellectual, social, personal, literary and spiritual passages. Kripal brings us up-to-date and takes us deep beneath historical surfaces in this definitive, elegantly written book.”—Playboy

The End of the End of History

The End of the End of History PDF Author: Alex Hochuli
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 178904524X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
'It's been a long time since a text was so useful in helping me think through our present moment and my role within it. The End of The End of History is a clear, powerful and panoramic analysis of our world at the dawn of the 2020s.' Vincent Bevins, author, The Jakarta Method The “End of History” is over. The idea that Western liberal democracy was the “final form of human government” has been exposed as bluster: the old order is crumbling before our eyes. Angry anti-politics have arisen to threaten political establishments across the world. Elites have fallen into hysteria, blaming voters, “populism”, Putin, Facebook... anyone but themselves. They are suffering from Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome. Emerging from four years of interviews and debates on the popular global politics podcast Aufhebunga Bunga, The End of the End of History examines how the political consequences of the 2008 financial crisis have come home to roost. If Trump and Brexit shattered the liberal-democratic consensus in 2016, then the global pandemic of 2020 put a final end to the “End of History”. Politics is back, but it's stranger than ever.

The Story Behind

The Story Behind PDF Author: Emily Prokop
Publisher: Mango Media Inc.
ISBN: 163353829X
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Surprising history of ordinary things Learn the fascinating history and trivia you never knew about things we use daily from the host of The Story Behind podcast. Everyday objects and major events in history: Every single thing that surrounds us has a story behind it. Many of us learn the history of humans and the major inventions that shaped our world. But what you may not have learned is the history of objects we surround ourselves with every day. You might not even know how the major events in history (World Wars, ancient civilizations, revolutions, etc.) influenced the inventions of things we use today. The history and science behind the ordinary: From the creator of The Story Behind podcast comes this revelatory new book. The Story Behind will give insight into everyday objects we don’t think much about when we use them. Topics covered in the podcast will be examined in more detail along with many new fascinating topics. Learn how lollipops got started in Ancient Egypt, how podcasts were invented, and why Comic Sans was created. Learn the torture device origins of certain exercise equipment and the espionage beginnings of certain musical instruments. Ordinary things from science to art, food to sports, customs to fashion, and more are explored. Readers will: • Understand the wonders behind everyday objects • Learn truly obscure history and fun facts that will change the way they see the world • Learn how major historic events still affect us today through seemingly mundane things • Become formidable trivia masters

Shaping History

Shaping History PDF Author: Wayne Ph Te Brake
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520213181
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
"A superb synthesis of popular politics in early modern western and central Europe. . . . Te Brake has cut across the barriers to find common properties and principles of variation in the politics of ordinary people."—Charles Tilly, Columbia University

An Extraordinary Time

An Extraordinary Time PDF Author: Marc Levinson
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465096565
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The decades after World War II were a golden age across much of the world. It was a time of economic miracles, an era when steady jobs were easy to find and families could see their living standards improving year after year. And then, around 1973, the good times vanished. The world economy slumped badly, then settled into the slow, erratic growth that had been the norm before the war. The result was an era of anxiety, uncertainty, and political extremism that we are still grappling with today. In An Extraordinary Time, acclaimed economic historian Marc Levinson describes how the end of the postwar boom reverberated throughout the global economy, bringing energy shortages, financial crises, soaring unemployment, and a gnawing sense of insecurity. Politicians, suddenly unable to deliver the prosperity of years past, railed haplessly against currency speculators, oil sheikhs, and other forces they could not control. From Sweden to Southern California, citizens grew suspicious of their newly ineffective governments and rebelled against the high taxes needed to support social welfare programs enacted when coffers were flush. Almost everywhere, the pendulum swung to the right, bringing politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to power. But their promise that deregulation, privatization, lower tax rates, and smaller government would restore economic security and robust growth proved unfounded. Although the guiding hand of the state could no longer deliver the steady economic performance the public had come to expect, free-market policies were equally unable to do so. The golden age would not come back again. A sweeping reappraisal of the last sixty years of world history, An Extraordinary Time forces us to come to terms with how little control we actually have over the economy.

History of a Disappearance

History of a Disappearance PDF Author: Filip Springer
Publisher: Restless Books
ISBN: 1632061163
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Lying at the crucible of Central Europe, the Silesian village of Kupferberg suffered the violence of the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, the World War I. After Stalin's post-World War II redrawing of Poland's borders, Kupferberg became Miedzianka, a town settled by displaced people from all over Poland and a new center of the Eastern Bloc's uranium-mining industry. Decades of neglect and environmental degradation led to the town being declared uninhabitable, and the population was evacuated. Today, it exists only in ruins, with barely a hundred people living on the unstable ground above its collapsing mines. Springer catalogs the lost human elements: the long-departed tailor and deceased shopkeeper; the parties, now silenced, that used to fill the streets with shouts and laughter, and the once-beautiful cemetery, with gravestones upended by tractors and human bones scattered by dogs. In Miedzianka, Springer sees a microcosm of European history, and a powerful narrative of how the ghosts of the past continue to haunt us in the present--Provided by the publisher.

History at the Limit of World-History

History at the Limit of World-History PDF Author: Ranajit Guha
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231505094
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
The past is not just, as has been famously said, another country with foreign customs: it is a contested and colonized terrain. Indigenous histories have been expropriated, eclipsed, sometimes even wholly eradicated, in the service of imperialist aims buttressed by a distinctly Western philosophy of history. Ranajit Guha, perhaps the most influential figure in postcolonial and subaltern studies at work today, offers a critique of such historiography by taking issue with the Hegelian concept of World-history. That concept, he contends, reduces the course of human history to the amoral record of states and empires, great men and clashing civilizations. It renders invisible the quotidian experience of ordinary people and casts off all that came before it into the nether-existence known as "Prehistory." On the Indian subcontinent, Guha believes, this Western way of looking at the past was so successfully insinuated by British colonization that few today can see clearly its ongoing and pernicious influence. He argues that to break out of this habit of mind and go beyond the Eurocentric and statist limit of World-history historians should learn from literature to make their narratives doubly inclusive: to extend them in scope not only to make room for the pasts of the so-called peoples without history but to address the historicality of everyday life as well. Only then, as Guha demonstrates through an examination of Rabindranath Tagore's critique of historiography, can we recapture a more fully human past of "experience and wonder."

Golf in the Kingdom

Golf in the Kingdom PDF Author: Michael Murphy
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453218815
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
A spiritual journey, a lush travelogue, a parable of sports and philosophy—John Updike called this unique novel “a golf classic if any exists in our day.” When an American traveler on his way to India stops to play a round on one of the most beautiful and legendary golf courses in Scotland, he doesn’t know that his game—and his life—are about to change forever. He is introduced to Shivas Irons, a mysterious golf pro whose sublime insights stick with him long after the eighteenth hole. From the first swing of the Scotsman’s club, he realizes he is in for a most extraordinary day. By turns comic, existential, and semiautobiographical, Michael Murphy’s tale traces the arc of twenty-four hours, from a round of golf on the Links of Burningbush to a night fueled by whiskey, wisdom, and wandering—even a sighting of Seamus MacDuff, the holy man who haunts the hole they call Lucifer’s Rug. “Murphy’s book is going to alter many visions,” The New York Times Book Review declared. More than an unforgettable approach to one of the world’s most popular sports, Golf in the Kingdom is a meditation on the power of a game to transform the self.

Year Zero

Year Zero PDF Author: Ian Buruma
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143125974
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
A marvelous global history of the pivotal year 1945 as a new world emerged from the ruins of World War II Year Zero is a landmark reckoning with the great drama that ensued after war came to an end in 1945. One world had ended and a new, uncertain one was beginning. Regime change had come on a global scale: across Asia (including China, Korea, Indochina, and the Philippines, and of course Japan) and all of continental Europe. Out of the often vicious power struggles that ensued emerged the modern world as we know it. In human terms, the scale of transformation is almost impossible to imagine. Great cities around the world lay in ruins, their populations decimated, displaced, starving. Harsh revenge was meted out on a wide scale, and the ground was laid for much horror to come. At the same time, in the wake of unspeakable loss, the euphoria of the liberated was extraordinary, and the revelry unprecedented. The postwar years gave rise to the European welfare state, the United Nations, decolonization, Japanese pacifism, and the European Union. Social, cultural, and political “reeducation” was imposed on vanquished by victors on a scale that also had no historical precedent. Much that was done was ill advised, but in hindsight, as Ian Buruma shows us, these efforts were in fact relatively enlightened, humane, and effective. A poignant grace note throughout this history is Buruma’s own father’s story. Seized by the Nazis during the occupation of Holland, he spent much of the war in Berlin as a laborer, and by war’s end was literally hiding in the rubble of a flattened city, having barely managed to survive starvation rations, Allied bombing, and Soviet shock troops when the end came. His journey home and attempted reentry into “normalcy” stand in many ways for his generation’s experience. A work of enormous range and stirring human drama, conjuring both the Asian and European theaters with equal fluency, Year Zero is a book that Ian Buruma is perhaps uniquely positioned to write. It is surely his masterpiece.