The Impossible Has Happened

The Impossible Has Happened PDF Author: Lance Parkin
Publisher: Quarto Publishing Group USA
ISBN: 1781314829
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
A biographer goes in search of Gene Roddenberry, creator of the world’s most successful science fiction franchise. This book reveals how an undistinguished writer of cop shows set out to produce “Hornblower in space” —and ended up with Star Trek, an optimistic, almost utopian view of humanity’s future that has been watched and loved by hundreds of millions of people around the world. Along the way, Lance Parkin examines some of the great myths and turning points in the franchise’s history, and Roddenberry’s particular contribution to them. He looks at the view that the early Star Trek advanced a liberal, egalitarian, and multi-racial agenda; charts the various attempts to resuscitate the show during its wilderness years in the 1970s; explores Roddenberry’s initial early involvement in the movies and spin-off Star Trek: The Next Generation (as well as his later estrangement from both), and sheds light on the colorful personal life, self-mythologizing, and strange beliefs of a man who nonetheless gifted popular culture one if its most enduring narratives.

The Impossible Has Happened

The Impossible Has Happened PDF Author: Lance Parkin
Publisher: Quarto Publishing Group USA
ISBN: 1781314829
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
A biographer goes in search of Gene Roddenberry, creator of the world’s most successful science fiction franchise. This book reveals how an undistinguished writer of cop shows set out to produce “Hornblower in space” —and ended up with Star Trek, an optimistic, almost utopian view of humanity’s future that has been watched and loved by hundreds of millions of people around the world. Along the way, Lance Parkin examines some of the great myths and turning points in the franchise’s history, and Roddenberry’s particular contribution to them. He looks at the view that the early Star Trek advanced a liberal, egalitarian, and multi-racial agenda; charts the various attempts to resuscitate the show during its wilderness years in the 1970s; explores Roddenberry’s initial early involvement in the movies and spin-off Star Trek: The Next Generation (as well as his later estrangement from both), and sheds light on the colorful personal life, self-mythologizing, and strange beliefs of a man who nonetheless gifted popular culture one if its most enduring narratives.

Heaven is a Place on Earth

Heaven is a Place on Earth PDF Author: Adrian Shirk
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640093575
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
An exploration of American ideas of utopia through the lens of one millennial's quest to live a more communal life under late-stage capitalism Told in a series of essays that balance memoir with fieldwork, Heaven Is a Place on Earth is an idiosyncratic study of American utopian experiments—from the Shakers to the radical faerie communes of Short Mountain to the Bronx rebuilding movement—through the lens of one woman’s quest to create a more communal life in a time of unending economic and social precarity. When Adrian Shirk’s father-in-law has a stroke and loses his ability to speak and walk, she and her husband—both adjuncts in their midtwenties—become his primary caretakers. The stress of these new responsibilities, coupled with navigating America’s broken health-care system and ordinary twenty-first-century financial insecurity, propels Shirk into an odyssey through the history and present of American utopian experiments in the hope that they might offer a way forward. Along the way, Shirk seeks solace in her own community of friends, artists, and theologians. They try to imagine a different kind of life, examining what might be replicable within the histories of utopia-making, and what might be doomed. Rather than “no place,” Shirk reframes utopia as something that, according to the laws of capital and conquest, shouldn’t be able to exist—but does anyway, if only for a moment.

The Eight Curious Cases of Inspector Zhang

The Eight Curious Cases of Inspector Zhang PDF Author: Stephen Leather
Publisher: Monsoon Books
ISBN: 9814625019
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Crimes are rare in Singapore, but when there's a crime that has the police baffled, it is Inspector Zhang that they turn to. From locked-room mysteries to murders disguised as suicide, Inspector Zhang is able to draw on his experience as a detective along with tricks he has learned from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. See if you can solve the crimes before the inspector the clues are there!

The Fountains of Paradise

The Fountains of Paradise PDF Author: Arthur C. Clarke
Publisher: Aspect
ISBN: 0759525617
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
This Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel is reissued in this trade paperback edition. Vannemar Morgan's dream of linking Earth with the stars requires a 24,000-mile-high space elevator. But first he must solve a million technical, political, and economic problems while allaying the wrath of God. Includes a new introduction by the author.

The Haunting of Alma Fielding

The Haunting of Alma Fielding PDF Author: Kate Summerscale
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 052555792X
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR • The Sunday Times • The New Statesman • The Times • The Spectator • The Telegraph Shortlisted for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * A New York Times Book Review Paperback Row Selection “Prepare not to see much broad daylight, literal or metaphorical, for days if you read this.... The atmosphere evoked is something I will never forget.”—The Times (London) London, 1938. In the suburbs of the city, a young housewife has become the eye in a storm of chaos. In Alma Fielding’s modest home, china flies off the shelves and eggs fly through the air; stolen jewelry appears on her fingers, white mice crawl out of her handbag, beetles appear from under her gloves; in the middle of a car journey, a turtle materializes on her lap. The culprit is incorporeal. As Alma cannot call the police, she calls the papers instead. After the sensational story headlines the news, Nandor Fodor, a Hungarian ghost hunter for the International Institute for Psychical Research, arrives to investigate the poltergeist. But when he embarks on his scrupulous investigation, he discovers that the case is even stranger than it seems. By unravelling Alma’s peculiar history, Fodor finds a different and darker type of haunting, a tale of trauma, alienation, loss and revenge. He comes to believe that Alma’s past has bled into her present, her mind into her body. There are no words for processing her experience, so it comes to possess her. As the threat of a world war looms, and as Fodor’s obsession with the case deepens, Alma becomes ever more disturbed. With characteristic rigor and insight, Kate Summerscale brilliantly captures the rich atmosphere of a haunting that transforms into a very modern battle between the supernatural and the subconscious.

The Reanimation of Malcom

The Reanimation of Malcom PDF Author: Patrick Lawrence O’Malley
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
ISBN: 1662946260
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
The Reanimation of Malcom: The Little Book of Modern Times , a true story of spiritual phenomena and modern-day prophecy, will build and restore faith in God and Jesus’s name. Beginning in the 1980s, the events chronicled by author and true believer, Patrick Lawrence O’Malley, are well-documented acts of faith the likes of which have not been seen for hundreds of years. Taking place in England and the United States (California, Indiana, and Arizona), as well as other locations, phenomena include the author’s meticulously predicted lightning strike prophecy in 2002. In combination with other events, the courts and community wrongly attributed the author’s demonstrated faith, strength, and power in righteousness to special powers. The Reanimation of Malcom validates the scripture in the Book of Revelation: “For the testimony of Jesus Christ is the spirit of prophecy.”

The Rising Sun

The Rising Sun PDF Author: John Toland
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0804180954
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 977

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Book Description
“[The Rising Sun] is quite possibly the most readable, yet informative account of the Pacific war.”—Chicago Sun-Times This Pulitzer Prize–winning history of World War II chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese empire, from the invasion of Manchuria and China to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Told from the Japanese perspective, The Rising Sun is, in the author’s words, “a factual saga of people caught up in the flood of the most overwhelming war of mankind, told as it happened—muddled, ennobling, disgraceful, frustrating, full of paradox.” In weaving together the historical facts and human drama leading up to and culminating in the war in the Pacific, Toland crafts a riveting and unbiased narrative history. In his Foreword, Toland says that if we are to draw any conclusion from The Rising Sun, it is “that there are no simple lessons in history, that it is human nature that repeats itself, not history.” “Unbelievably rich . . . readable and exciting . . .The best parts of [Toland’s] book are not the battle scenes but the intimate view he gives of the highest reaches of Tokyo politics.”—Newsweek

Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov PDF Author: Brian Boyd
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691024707
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 652

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Book Description
Cited as one of the best books of 1990 by The New York Times and Time magazine, this major biography describes Nabokov's escape from Russia, his education at Cambridge, and his impoverished years in Germany and France, until the coming of Hitler forced him to flee to the United States with his wife and son. 56 halftones.

Ridiculous Thoughts From A Preacher and A Few Friends

Ridiculous Thoughts From A Preacher and A Few Friends PDF Author: Fred H. Alexander, Jr.
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1449020860
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
This book is an opinionated “I-made-you-think” without “how-do-you-see-it.” It is a mixture of surprising profundity and foolishness. Many categories, sayings, and scriptures are interchangeable. This book has a religious spin but is intended to help everyone focus on humble and persevering thoughts in life.

The Haunt of Home

The Haunt of Home PDF Author: Zachary Michael Jack
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501751816
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
What does it mean to deeply love a home place that haunts us still? From Mark Twain to Grant Wood to Garrison Keillor, regionalists from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age have explored the American Gothic and the homegrown fatalism that flourish in many of the nation's most far-flung and forgotten places. The Haunt of Home introduces us to a cast of real-life Midwestern characters grappling with the Gothic in their own lives, from promising young professionals debating the perennial "Should I stay or should I go" dilemma, to recent émigrés and entrepreneurs seeking personal reinvention, to faithful boosters determined to keep their communities alive despite the odds. In The Haunt of Home Zachary Michael Jack considers the many ways a region's abiding spirit shapes the ethos of a land and its people, offering portraits of others who, like himself, are determined to live out the unique promise and predicament of the Gothic.