Author: Caryl Phillips
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525562818
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
From the British-West Indian novelist who is rapidly emerging as the bard of the African diaspora comes a haunting work about “the final passage”—the exodus of black West Indians from their impoverished islands to the uncertain opportunities of England. In her village of St. Patrick’s, Leila Preston has no prospects, a young son, and a husband, Michael, who seems to prefer the company of his mistress. So when her ailing mother travels to England for medical care, Leila decides to follow her. As Caryl Phillips follows the Prestons’ outward voyage—and their bewildered attempt to find a home in a country whose rooming houses post signs announcing “No vacancies for coloureds”—he produces a tragicomic portrait of hope and dislocation. The Final Passage is a novel rich in language, acute in its grasp of character, and unforgettable in its vision of the colonial legacy. “Like Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, Phillips writes of times so heady and chaotic and of characters so compelling that time moves as if guided by the moon and dreams.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
Author: Caryl Phillips
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0099468581
Category : England
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
As nineteen-year-old Leila surveys her island home from the ship that will carry her, her husband, and baby to England, she contemplates the Caribbean life of the 1950s that is chaotic, hand-to-mouth, and offers no way but out.
Author: Gregory E. O'Malley
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469615347
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411
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Book Description
Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807
Author: Connie Willis
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0307573729
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 800
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Book Description
One of those rare, unforgettable novels that are as chilling as they are insightful, as thought-provoking as they are terrifying, award-winning author Connie Willis's Passage is an astonishing blend of relentless suspense and cutting-edge science unlike anything you've ever read before. It is the electrifying story of a psychologist who has devoted her life to tracking death. But when she volunteers for a research project that simulates the near-death experience, she will either solve life's greatest mystery -- or fall victim to its greatest terror. At Mercy General Hospital, Dr. Joanna Lander will soon be paged -- not to save a life, but to interview a patient just back from the dead. A psychologist specializing in near-death experiences, Joanna has spent two years recording the experiences of those who have been declared clinically dead and lived to tell about it. It's research on the fringes of ordinary science, but Joanna is about to get a boost from an unexpected quarter. A new doctor has arrived at Mercy General, one with the power to give Joanna the chance to get as close to death as anyone can. A brilliant young neurologist, Dr. Richard Wright has come up with a way to manufacture the near-death experience using a psychoactive drug. Dr. Wright is convinced that the NDE is a survival mechanism and that if only doctors understood how it worked, they could someday delay the dying process, or maybe even reverse it. He can use the expertise of a psychologist of Joanna Lander's standing to lend credibility to his study. But he soon needs Joanna for more than just her reputation. When his key volunteer suddenly drops out of the study, Joanna finds herself offering to become Richard's next subject. After all, who better than she, a trained psychologist, to document the experience? Her first NDE is as fascinating as she imagined it would be -- so astounding that she knows she must go back, if only to find out why this place is so hauntingly familiar. But each time Joanna goes under, her sense of dread begins to grow, because part of her already knows why the experience is so familiar, and why she has every reason to be afraid.... And just when you think you know where she is going, Willis throws in the biggest surprise of all -- a shattering scenario that will keep you feverishly reading until the final climactic page is turned.
Author: Justin Cronin
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0804177643
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 917
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Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A thrilling finale to a trilogy that will stand as one of the great achievements in American fantasy fiction.”—Stephen King You followed The Passage. You faced The Twelve. Now enter The City of Mirrors for the final reckoning. As the bestselling epic races to its breathtaking finale, Justin Cronin’s band of hardened survivors await the second coming of unspeakable darkness. The world we knew is gone. What world will rise in its place? The Twelve have been destroyed and the terrifying hundred-year reign of darkness that descended upon the world has ended. The survivors are stepping outside their walls, determined to build society anew—and daring to dream of a hopeful future. But far from them, in a dead metropolis, he waits: Zero. The First. Father of the Twelve. The anguish that shattered his human life haunts him, and the hatred spawned by his transformation burns bright. His fury will be quenched only when he destroys Amy—humanity’s only hope, the Girl from Nowhere who grew up to rise against him. One last time light and dark will clash, and at last Amy and her friends will know their fate. Look for the entire Passage trilogy: THE PASSAGE | THE TWELVE | THE CITY OF MIRRORS Praise for The City of Mirrors “Compulsively readable.”—The New York Times Book Review “The City of Mirrors is poetry. Thrilling in every way it has to be, but poetry just the same . . . The writing is sumptuous, the language lovely, even when the action itself is dark and violent.”—The Huffington Post “This really is the big event you’ve been waiting for . . . A true last stand that builds and comes with a bloody, roaring payoff you won’t see coming, then builds again to the big face off you’ve been waiting for.”—NPR “A masterpiece . . . with The City of Mirrors, the third volume in The Passage trilogy, Justin Cronin puts paid to what may well be the finest post-apocalyptic epic in our dystopian-glutted times. A stunning achievement by virtually every measure.”—The National Post “Justin Cronin’s Passage trilogy is remarkable for the unremitting drive of its narrative, for the breathtaking sweep of its imagined future, and for the clear lucidity of its language.”—Stephen King
Author: Donald Heinz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198027605
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
Is death merely the cessation of life? Are our final years simply a wearing out of the body? Are hospitals and funeral homes--the bureaucratic machinery of death--capable of handling the profound spiritual dimension of dying? In The Last Passage, Donald Heinz offers wise answers to these questions in a book that urges us to "recover a death of our own" and to view our final years as a fulfillment, a "last career." Despite the recent spate of books on death and dying, death remains a fact our culture tries desperately to ignore. In other times and in other cultures, preparing for death was seen as an important spiritual task--perhaps the most important task of our lives. Heinz argues that we can reconceive of death, reinvest it with meaning, and save it from becoming a meaningless biological event. Seeking appropriate models for such a reconstruction, Heinz offers a fascinating overview of the many ways death has been envisioned and ritualized throughout human history, from the Tibetan Book of the Dead to 15th century Christian ars moriendi--manuals on the art of dying--and from Jean Paul Sartre to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. He also surveys the more recent contributions of psychologists, anthropologists, cultural critics, and death awareness advocates, whose efforts have largely failed to integrate death into a larger human story and the larger human community. Finally, Heinz shows us how we might create rituals through the use of music, visual arts, dance, drama, and language that would enable us to approach death with reverence, as the spiritual consummation of our lives.
Author: Barbara H. Whitfield
Publisher: HCI
ISBN: 9781558745407
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
When we enter this life, we are surrounded by caring and love. We deserve caring and love again when this life ends. In this groundbreaking book on the meaning of death, Barbara Harris Whitfield shares with you her near-death experiences and the stories of individuals who, assisted by her loving help, left this life with dignity. These accounts will inspire you, allow you to accept death more easily, and reveal the connection to the Spirit that embraces and guides us all as we die. Whitfield demonstrates how it is possible for terminal patients to be fully present—even in their deepest pain—so that they can spread kindness, compassion and forgiveness to their loved ones. Whether you fear death because it symbolizes the unknown, marvel at its awesome mystery, or grieve for a loved one it has claimed, this book will answer your questions about what happens when we die.
Author: Robert Kastenbaum
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520218809
Category : FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS
Languages : en
Pages : 461
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Book Description
A profound look at how death and dying is understood, negotiated, and experienced by different cultures.
Author: Jan-Philipp Sendker
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 159051842X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
The highly anticipated final book in the internationally bestselling The Art of Hearing Heartbeats trilogy, a moving story about love’s power to transcend distances and heal seemingly irreparable wounds. Twelve-year-old Ko Bo Bo lives with his uncle U Ba in Kalaw, a town in Burma. An unusually perceptive child, Bo Bo can read people’s emotions in their eyes. This acute sensitivity only makes his unconventional home life more difficult: His father comes to visit him once a year, and he can hardly remember his mother, who, for unclear reasons, keeps herself away from her son. Everything changes when Bo Bo discovers the story of his parents’ great love, which threatens to break down in the whirlwind of political events, and of his mother’s mysterious sickness. Convinced that he can heal her and reunite their family, Bo Bo decides to set out in search of his parents. A gripping, heartwarming tale that takes the reader from Burma to New York and back, The Heart Remembers is a worthy conclusion to Jan-Philipp Sendker’s beloved series.
Author: Justin Cronin
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345534891
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 826
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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The end of the world was only the beginning. In his internationally bestselling and critically acclaimed novel The Passage, Justin Cronin constructed an unforgettable world transformed by a government experiment gone horribly wrong. Now the scope widens and the intensity deepens as the epic story surges forward . . . In the present day, as the man-made apocalypse unfolds, three strangers navigate the chaos. Lila, a doctor and an expectant mother, is so shattered by the spread of violence and infection that she continues to plan for her child’s arrival even as society dissolves around her. Kittridge, known to the world as “Last Stand in Denver,” has been forced to flee his stronghold and is now on the road, dodging the infected, armed but alone and well aware that a tank of gas will get him only so far. April is a teenager fighting to guide her little brother safely through a landscape of death and ruin. These three will learn that they have not been fully abandoned—and that in connection lies hope, even on the darkest of nights. One hundred years in the future, Amy and the others fight on for humankind’s salvation . . . unaware that the rules have changed. The enemy has evolved, and a dark new order has arisen with a vision of the future infinitely more horrifying than man’s extinction. If the Twelve are to fall, one of those united to vanquish them will have to pay the ultimate price. A heart-stopping thriller rendered with masterful literary skill, The Twelve is a grand and gripping tale of sacrifice and survival. Look for the entire Passage trilogy: THE PASSAGE | THE TWELVE | THE CITY OF MIRRORS Praise for The Twelve “[A] literary superthriller.”—The New York Times Book Review “An undeniable and compelling epic . . . a complex narrative of flight and forgiveness, of great suffering and staggering loss, of terrible betrayals and incredible hope.”—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “The Twelve is even better than The Passage.”—The Plain Dealer “A compulsive read.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Gripping . . . Cronin [introduces] eerie new elements to his masterful mythology. . . . Enthralling, emotional and entertaining.”—The San Diego Union-Tribune “Fine storytelling.”—Associated Press “Cronin is one of those rare authors who works on two different levels, blending elegantly crafted literary fiction with cliff-hanging thrills.”—Fort Worth Star-Telegram
