National Dreams

National Dreams PDF Author: Daniel Francis
Publisher: arsenal pulp press
ISBN: 1551523302
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
As Canadians, we remember the stories told to us in high-school history class as condensed images of the past--the glorious Mountie, the fearsome Native, the Last Spike. National Dreams is an incisive study of the most persistent icons and stories in Canadian history, and how they inform our sense of national identity: the fundamental beliefs that we Canadians hold about ourselves. National Dreams is the story of our stories; the myths and truths of our collective past that we first learned in school, and which we carry throughout our adult lives as tangible evidence of what separates us from other nationalities. Francis examines various aspects of this national mythology, in which history is as much storytelling as fact. Textbooks were an important resource for Francis. "For me, these books are interesting not because they explain what actually happened to us, but because they explain what we think happened to us." For example, Francis documents how the legend of the CPR as a country-sustaining, national affirming monolity was created by the company itself--a group of capitalists celebrating the privately-owned railway, albeit one which was generously supported with public land and cash--and reiterated by most historians ever since. Similarly, we learn how the Mounties were transformed from historical police force to mythic heroes by a vast army of autobiographers, historians, novelists, and Hollywood filmmakers, with little attention paid to the true role of the force in such incidents as the Bolshevik rebellion, in which a secret conspiracy by the Government against its people was conducted through the RNWMP. Also revealed in National Dreams are the stories surrounding the formation and celebration of Canadian heroes such as Louis Riel and Billy Bishop.

National Dreams

National Dreams PDF Author: Daniel Francis
Publisher: arsenal pulp press
ISBN: 1551523302
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description
As Canadians, we remember the stories told to us in high-school history class as condensed images of the past--the glorious Mountie, the fearsome Native, the Last Spike. National Dreams is an incisive study of the most persistent icons and stories in Canadian history, and how they inform our sense of national identity: the fundamental beliefs that we Canadians hold about ourselves. National Dreams is the story of our stories; the myths and truths of our collective past that we first learned in school, and which we carry throughout our adult lives as tangible evidence of what separates us from other nationalities. Francis examines various aspects of this national mythology, in which history is as much storytelling as fact. Textbooks were an important resource for Francis. "For me, these books are interesting not because they explain what actually happened to us, but because they explain what we think happened to us." For example, Francis documents how the legend of the CPR as a country-sustaining, national affirming monolity was created by the company itself--a group of capitalists celebrating the privately-owned railway, albeit one which was generously supported with public land and cash--and reiterated by most historians ever since. Similarly, we learn how the Mounties were transformed from historical police force to mythic heroes by a vast army of autobiographers, historians, novelists, and Hollywood filmmakers, with little attention paid to the true role of the force in such incidents as the Bolshevik rebellion, in which a secret conspiracy by the Government against its people was conducted through the RNWMP. Also revealed in National Dreams are the stories surrounding the formation and celebration of Canadian heroes such as Louis Riel and Billy Bishop.

Arctic Dreams

Arctic Dreams PDF Author: Barry Lopez
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1668080028
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Winner of the National Book Award This bestselling, groundbreaking exploration of the Far North is a classic of natural history, anthropology, and travel writing. The Arctic is a perilous place. Only a few species of wild animals can survive its harsh climate. In this modern classic, Barry Lopez explores the many-faceted wonders of the Far North: its strangely stunted forests, its mesmerizing aurora borealis, its frozen seas. Musk oxen, polar bears, narwhal, and other exotic beasts of the region come alive through Lopez’s passionate and nuanced observations. And, as he examines the history and culture of its indigenous communities, along with parallel narratives of intrepid, often underprepared and subsequently doomed polar explorers, Lopez drives to the heart of why the austere and formidable Arctic is also a constant source of breathtaking beauty, mystery, and wonder. Written in prose as pure as the land it describes, Arctic Dreams is a timeless mediation on the ability of the landscape to shape our dreams and to haunt our imaginations.

National Dreams

National Dreams PDF Author: Jennifer Schacker
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204166
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
Fairy tales and folktales have long been mainstays of children's literature, celebrated as imaginatively liberating, psychologically therapeutic, and mirrors of foreign culture. Focusing on the fairy tale in nineteenth-century England, where many collections found their largest readership, National Dreams examines influential but critically neglected early experiments in the presentation of international tale traditions to English readers. Jennifer Schacker looks at such wondrous story collections as Grimms' fairy tales and The Arabian Nights in order to trace the larger stories of cross-cultural encounter in which these books were originally embedded. Examining aspects of publishing history alongside her critical readings of tale collections' introductions, annotations, story texts, and illustrations, Schacker's National Dreams reveals the surprising ways fairy tales shaped and were shaped by their readers. Schacker shows how the folklore of foreign lands became popular reading material for a broad English audience, historicizing assumed connections between traditional narrative and children's reading. The tales imported and presented by such British writers as Edgar Taylor, T. Crofton Croker, Edward Lane, and George Webbe Dasent were intended to stimulate readers' imaginations in more ways than one. Fairy-tale collections provided flights of fancy but also opportunities for reflection on the modern self, on the transformation of popular culture, and on the nature of "Englishness." Schacker demonstrates that such critical reflections were not incidental to the popularity of foreign tales but central to their magical hold on the English imagination. Offering a theoretically sophisticated perspective on the origins of current assumptions about the significance of fairy tales, National Dreams provides a rare look at the nature and emergence of one of the most powerful and enduring genres in English literature.

Book of Dreams

Book of Dreams PDF Author: Jack Kerouac
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 9780872863804
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
"In the Book of Dreams I just continue the same story but in the dreams I had of the real-life characters I always write about." Excerpt: WALKING THROUGH SLUM SUBURBS of Mexico City I'm stopped by smiling threesome of cats who've disengaged themselves from the general fairly crowded evening street of brown lights, coke stands, tortillas-Unmistakably going to steal my bag-I struggled a little, gave up-Begin communicating with them my distress and in fact do so well they end up just stealing parts of my stuff…. We walk off leaving the bag with someone-arm in arm like a gang to the downtown lights of Letran, across a field- Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was a principal actor in the Beat Generation, a companion of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady in that great adventure. His books include On the Roa, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, Lonesome Traveler, Scattered Poems, Visions of Cody, Pomes All Sizes, and Scripture of the Golden Eternity.

Savage Dreams

Savage Dreams PDF Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520282280
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
"In 1851, a war began in what would become Yosemite National Park, a war against the indigenous inhabitants that has yet to come to a real conclusion. A century later - 1951 - and about a hundred and fifty miles away, another war began when the U.S. government started setting off nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site. It was called a "nuclear testing program" but functioned as a war against the land and people of the Great Basin."--

Old Dreams of a New Reich

Old Dreams of a New Reich PDF Author: Jost Hermand
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Old Dreams of a New Reich, the translation of Jost Hermand's comprehensive study of prefascist and fascist utopias (Der alte Traum vom neuen Reich), examines tracts and futuristic novels crucial to the development and final radicalization of German national sentiments from the second part of the eighteenth century. Scholars and propagandists used the glorified virtues of ancient German tribes to create the cult of Germanic values. These works offer a vivid insight into the public imagination between 1871 and 1945, and into the highly successful media machinations employed by the Right as it used all literary genres - including avant-gardistic works as well as pulp novels and works of science fiction - to manipulate the general public.

The Patriot Game

The Patriot Game PDF Author: Peter Brimelow
Publisher: Stanford, Calif. : Hoover Institution Press
ISBN:
Category : Canada
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description


The Book of Dreams

The Book of Dreams PDF Author: Nina George
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0525572554
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Warm, wise, and magical—the latest novel by the bestselling author of THE LITTLE PARIS BOOKSHOP and THE LITTLE FRENCH BISTRO is an astonishing exploration of the thresholds between life and death Henri Skinner is a hardened ex-war reporter on the run from his past. On his way to see his son, Sam, for the first time in years, Henri steps into the road without looking and collides with oncoming traffic. He is rushed to a nearby hospital where he floats, comatose, between dreams, reliving the fairytales of his childhood and the secrets that made him run away in the first place. After the accident, Sam—a thirteen-year old synesthete with an IQ of 144 and an appetite for science fiction—waits by his father’s bedside every day. There he meets Eddie Tomlin, a woman forced to confront her love for Henri after all these years, and twelve-year old Madelyn Zeidler, a coma patient like Henri and the sole survivor of a traffic accident that killed her family. As these four very different individuals fight—for hope, for patience, for life—they are bound together inextricably, facing the ravages of loss and first love side by side. A revelatory, urgently human story that examines what we consider serious and painful alongside light and whimsy, THE BOOK OF DREAMS is a tender meditation on memory, liminality, and empathy, asking with grace and gravitas what we will truly find meaningful in our lives once we are gone.

Crow and Weasel

Crow and Weasel PDF Author: Barry Lopez
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374416133
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 85

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Book Description
"A brilliantly written and totally original New World adventure" (Jean Craighead George), about two young men of the Northern Plains "who undertake a journey through unexplored wilderness to the tundra and back" ("The New Yorker"). Full color.

Dreams from My Father

Dreams from My Father PDF Author: Barack Obama
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307394123
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF ESSENCE’S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS In this iconic memoir of his early days, Barack Obama “guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race” (The Washington Post Book World). “Quite extraordinary.”—Toni Morrison In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance. Praise for Dreams from My Father “Beautifully crafted . . . moving and candid . . . This book belongs on the shelf beside works like James McBride’s The Color of Water and Gregory Howard Williams’s Life on the Color Line as a tale of living astride America’s racial categories.”—Scott Turow “Provocative . . . Persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither.”—The New York Times Book Review “Obama’s writing is incisive yet forgiving. This is a book worth savoring.”—Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here “One of the most powerful books of self-discovery I’ve ever read, all the more so for its illuminating insights into the problems not only of race, class, and color, but of culture and ethnicity. It is also beautifully written, skillfully layered, and paced like a good novel.”—Charlayne Hunter-Gault, author of In My Place “Dreams from My Father is an exquisite, sensitive study of this wonderful young author’s journey into adulthood, his search for community and his place in it, his quest for an understanding of his roots, and his discovery of the poetry of human life. Perceptive and wise, this book will tell you something about yourself whether you are black or white.”—Marian Wright Edelman