Where We Lived: Essays on Places PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Where We Lived: Essays on Places PDF full book. Access full book title Where We Lived: Essays on Places by Henry Allen. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Henry Allen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781942134442
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 170
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Henry Allen is the truest chronicler of our American dream. By taking us into the homes of his history, he reveals our own lives in shafts of sunlit prose streaming through the windows of time and place."--James Grady, author of Six Days of the Condor "I loved the book."--Ann Beattie, author of Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life and The State We're In: Maine Stories "Henry Allen, one of the best deadline essayists in the business."--Christopher Buckley, author of Thank You for Smoking Pulitzer Prize-winner Henry Allen brings alive nearly five centuries of family by describing places where they lived--from plantations in South Carolina and Guadeloupe to a boarding house in Queens; a sadly grand old house in Orange, New Jersey; farmhouses, mansions, apartments, ships, tents, and dormitories; towns in Rhode Island and Connecticut. He vividly describes his family's historical journey through Indian wars, a witchcraft trial, privateering, wagon trains, a split over slave trading, the friendship of presidents, the dwindling of the old Anglo-Saxon hegemony, and the heartless mysteries of money, alcohol, and gentility. I feared my children and their children would never know about the lost worlds of our family--love, moral stands, disappointment, Christmas dinners, the ancient and ordinary sunlight that transported us like aliens from galaxies of the past. These galaxies not only existed but persisted despite the apathy of their inheritors. Consider this book a last will and testament, an attempt to stave off the probate of oblivion. Intense, mercurial, and bearded, Henry Allen is a Marine veteran of Vietnam and was a feature writer and art critic at The Washington Post from 1970 to 2009. His books include Going Too Far Enough: American Culture at Century's End, What It Felt Like: Living in the American Century, Fool's Mercy, and The Museum of Light Air.
Author: Henry Allen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781942134442
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 170
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Henry Allen is the truest chronicler of our American dream. By taking us into the homes of his history, he reveals our own lives in shafts of sunlit prose streaming through the windows of time and place."--James Grady, author of Six Days of the Condor "I loved the book."--Ann Beattie, author of Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life and The State We're In: Maine Stories "Henry Allen, one of the best deadline essayists in the business."--Christopher Buckley, author of Thank You for Smoking Pulitzer Prize-winner Henry Allen brings alive nearly five centuries of family by describing places where they lived--from plantations in South Carolina and Guadeloupe to a boarding house in Queens; a sadly grand old house in Orange, New Jersey; farmhouses, mansions, apartments, ships, tents, and dormitories; towns in Rhode Island and Connecticut. He vividly describes his family's historical journey through Indian wars, a witchcraft trial, privateering, wagon trains, a split over slave trading, the friendship of presidents, the dwindling of the old Anglo-Saxon hegemony, and the heartless mysteries of money, alcohol, and gentility. I feared my children and their children would never know about the lost worlds of our family--love, moral stands, disappointment, Christmas dinners, the ancient and ordinary sunlight that transported us like aliens from galaxies of the past. These galaxies not only existed but persisted despite the apathy of their inheritors. Consider this book a last will and testament, an attempt to stave off the probate of oblivion. Intense, mercurial, and bearded, Henry Allen is a Marine veteran of Vietnam and was a feature writer and art critic at The Washington Post from 1970 to 2009. His books include Going Too Far Enough: American Culture at Century's End, What It Felt Like: Living in the American Century, Fool's Mercy, and The Museum of Light Air.
Author: William Vitek
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300069617
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book is dedicated to the notion that human lives are enriched by participation in a social community that is integrated into the natural landscape of a particular place. The writers explore the loss of community, the philosophical foundations of communities, Amish communities, and the current renewal of community life.
Author: Wilfred M. McClay
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 1594037183
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 314
Get Book Here
Book Description
Contemporary American society, with its emphasis on mobility and economic progress, all too often loses sight of the importance of a sense of “place” and community. Appreciating place is essential for building the strong local communities that cultivate civic engagement, public leadership, and many of the other goods that contribute to a flourishing human life. Do we, in losing our places, lose the crucial basis for healthy and resilient individual identity, and for the cultivation of public virtues? For one can’t be a citizen without being a citizen of some place in particular; one isn’t a citizen of a motel. And if these dangers are real and present ones, are there ways that intelligent public policy can begin to address them constructively, by means of reasonable and democratic innovations that are likely to attract wide public support? Why Place Matters takes these concerns seriously, and its contributors seek to discover how, given the American people as they are, and American economic and social life as it now exists—and not as those things can be imagined to be in some utopian scheme—we can find means of fostering a richer and more sustaining way of life. The book is an anthology of essays exploring the contemporary problems of place and placelessness in American society. The book includes contributions from distinguished scholars and writers such as poet Dana Gioia (former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts), geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, urbanist Witold Rybczynski, architect Philip Bess, essayists Christine Rosen and Ari Schulman, philosopher Roger Scruton, transportation planner Gary Toth, and historians Russell Jacoby and Joseph Amato.
Author: Natalia Ginzburg
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609800303
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Get Book Here
Book Description
Arguably one of Italy’s greatest contemporary writers, Natalia Ginzburg has been best known in America as a writer’s writer, quiet beloved of her fellow wordsmiths. This collection of personal essays chosen by the eminent American writer Lynne Sharon Schwartz from four of Ginzburg’s books written over the course of Ginzburg’s lifetime was a many-years long project for Schwartz. These essays are deeply felt, but also disarmingly accessible. Full of self-doubt and searing insight, Ginzburg is merciless in her attempts to describe herself and her world—and yet paradoxically, her self-deprecating remarks reveal her deeper confidence in her own eye and writing ability, as well as the weight and nuance of her exploration of the conflict between humane values and bureaucratic rigidity.
Author: John Haines
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 206
Get Book Here
Book Description
Reflections on how landscape, the imagination, and the "real world" color the creative process
Author: Binyavanga Wainaina
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555970346
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 276
Get Book Here
Book Description
*A New York Times Notable Book* *A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice* *A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year* Binyavanga Wainaina tumbled through his middle-class Kenyan childhood out of kilter with the world around him. This world came to him as a chaos of loud and colorful sounds: the hair dryers at his mother's beauty parlor, black mamba bicycle bells, mechanics in Nairobi, the music of Michael Jackson—all punctuated by the infectious laughter of his brother and sister, Jimmy and Ciru. He could fall in with their patterns, but it would take him a while to carve out his own. In this vivid and compelling debut memoir, Wainaina takes us through his school days, his mother's religious period, his failed attempt to study in South Africa as a computer programmer, a moving family reunion in Uganda, and his travels around Kenya. The landscape in front of him always claims his main attention, but he also evokes the shifting political scene that unsettles his views on family, tribe, and nationhood. Throughout, reading is his refuge and his solace. And when, in 2002, a writing prize comes through, the door is opened for him to pursue the career that perhaps had been beckoning all along. A series of fascinating international reporting assignments follow. Finally he circles back to a Kenya in the throes of postelection violence and finds he is not the only one questioning the old certainties. Resolutely avoiding stereotype and cliché, Wainaina paints every scene in One Day I Will Write About This Place with a highly distinctive and hugely memorable brush.
Author: Nathan Connolly
Publisher: Dead Ink
ISBN: 9781911585367
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
"In 21st century Britain, what does it mean to be working class? This book asks 24 working class writers to examine the issue as it relates to them. Examining representation, literature, sexuality, gender, art, employment, poverty, childhood, culture and politics, this book is a broad and firsthand account of what it means to be drawn from the bottom of Britain's archaic, but persistent, class structure."--Provided by publisher.
Author: Lisa Knopp
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803278141
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Get Book Here
Book Description
For Lisa Knopp, homesickness is a literal sickness. During a lengthy sojourn away from the Nebraska prairie, she fell ill, and only when she decided to return home didøshe recover. Homesickness is the triggering event for this collection of essays concerned with nothing less than what it means to feel at home. Knopp writes masterfully about ecology, place, and the values and beliefs that sustain the individual within an impersonal world. She is passionate about her subject whether it be an endangered beetle in the salt marshes near Lincoln, Nebraska, a forgotten Nebraska inventor, a museum muralist, a paleontologist, or Arbor Day as the misguided attempt of Eastern settlers to ?correct? a perceived deficiency in the Great Plains landscape. Here is a writer who has read widely and judiciously and for whom everything resonates within the intricately structured definition of home.
Author: Robert Kimber
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780884482628
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 148
Get Book Here
Book Description
In a trio of wonderful, long essays, a nature writer, a poet, and an essayist/novelist let us sit in on their friendship and what draws them, inexorably, to the same small pond in Maine. A joyful, unforgettable book.
Author: Molly McCully Brown
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0892555386
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
In seventeen intimate essays, poet Molly McCully Brown explores living within and beyond the limits of a body—in her case, one shaped since birth by cerebral palsy, a permanent and often painful movement disorder. In spite of—indeed, in response to—physical constraints, Brown leads a peripatetic life: the essays comprise a vivid travelogue set throughout the United States and Europe, ranging from the rural American South of her childhood to the cobblestoned streets of Bologna, Italy. Moving between these locales and others, Brown constellates the subjects that define her inside and out: a disabled and conspicuous body, a religious conversion, a missing twin, a life in poetry. As she does, she depicts vividly for us not only her own life but a striking array of sites and topics, among them Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the world’s oldest anatomical theater, the American Eugenics movement, and Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. Throughout, Brown offers us the gift of her exquisite sentences, woven together in consideration, always, of what it means to be human—flawed, potent, feeling.
