Life Takes Place argues that, even in our mobile, hypermodern world, human life is impossible without place. Seamon asks the question: why does life take place? He draws on examples of specific places and place experiences to understand place more broadly. Advocating for a holistic way of understanding that he calls "synergistic relationality," Seamon defines places as spatial fields that gather, activate, sustain, identify, and interconnect things, human beings, experiences, meanings, and events. Throughout his phenomenological explication, Seamon recognizes that places are multivalent in their constitution and sophisticated in their dynamics. Drawing on British philosopher J. G. Bennett’s method of progressive approximation, he considers place and place experience in terms of their holistic, dialectical, and processual dimensions. Recognizing that places always change over time, Seamon examines their processual dimension by identifying six generative processes that he labels interaction, identity, release, realization, intensification, and creation. Drawing on practical examples from architecture, planning, and urban design, he argues that an understanding of these six place processes might contribute to a more rigorous place making that produces robust places and propels vibrant environmental experiences. This book is a significant contribution to the growing research literature in "place and place making studies."

A moving account by Auma Obama about her life in Africa and Europe, and her relationship with her brother, Barack Obama. While her younger brother Barack grew up in the U.S. and Indonesia, Auma Obama's childhood played out at the other end of the world in a remote village in Kenya, the birthplace of the siblings' shared father. Barack and Auma met for the first time in the 1980s, and they built a lasting relationship which lead to travels together in Kenya, research into their family history and finally Auma's support for her brother's political career and eventual bid for the U.S. presidency. Auma spent sixteen years studying and living in Germany, moved to England for love, and gave birth to a daughter there. The tension between her original and chosen worlds and cultures was a constant challenge, and eventually Auma returned to Africa and worked to support young men and women in shaping their futures. In And Then Life Happens, her candid and emotional memoir, Auma shares her own story as well as recollections of and experiences with her famous brother, who says about their first encounter: "I hugged her, we looked at each other, and laughed. I knew right then that I loved her."

Life. We all want to know how to make the best of it. We all want to know how to get the most out of it. We all want to have the best possible outcome with the least amount of opposition. The tools within these pages will help real people with real issues matriculate through real life, successfully. The riveting and thought provoking, material will help anyone, no matter what stage of life they are in, become better at handling LIFE when it happens.

This book offers an accessible presentation of phenomenological approaches to place that draws valuable connections between different disciplines that focus on and investigate questions of place.

From the 2005 Pulitzer Prize—winning columnist Connie Schultz comes fresh, clever, insightful commentary on life today: love, politics, social issues, family, and much, much more. In the tradition of Anna Quindlen, Molly Ivins, and Erma Bombeck, but with a distinctive voice and sensibility all her own, Connie Schultz comes out of the heartland of America to get you seeing, feeling, and thinking more deeply about the lives we lead today. “You might spot someone you know in the stories here,” writes Connie. “Maybe you’ll even find a glimpse of yourself. Yes, each of us is unique, but life happens in ways that bind us like Gorilla Glue.” In Life Happens, Connie shares sharp, passionate observations, winning our hearts with personal thoughts on a wide range of topics, from finding love in middle age to the meaning behind her father’s lunch pail, from single motherhood, to who really gets the tips you leave and why as the war in Iraq, race relations, gay marriage, and wwhy women don’t vote. In a more humorous vein, Connie shares her mother’s advice on men (“Don’t marry him until you see how he treats the waitress”) and warns men everywhere against using the dreaded f-word (it’s not the one you think). Along the way, Connie introduces us to the heroic people who populate our world and shows us how just one person can make a difference. Charming, provocative, funny, and perceptive, Life Happens gives us, for the first time, Connie Schultz’s celebrated commentary in one irresistible volume. Life Happens challenges us to be more open and alive to others and to the world around us.

President Barack Obama's half-sister writes a moving memoir of her life in a remote village in Kenya, her years in England and Germany, and her relationship with her brother.

In this heartbreaking, extremely personal memoir of a life touched by profound tragedy, author Ashta-deb invites readers into her world in the hopes that they might benefit from the discovered remedies that at last elevated her above it. Here is a soul who had suffered abuse at the hands of both parents, abandonment by her mother, and the tragic death of her thirteen-year-old sister by the time she was just nine years old. As she struggles to emerge from this devastation over the next long stretch of her life, her past is relentless in its haunting. It takes many years before doctors diagnose her with PTSD, and many more for her to find the right combination of Western medicine and Eastern wisdom to heal her. Her medication with cannabis, experimentation with Ayahuasca in Peru and finally a breakthrough healing with psilocybin offers a diverse look at mental healing. In the background of it all is her dedicated cultivation of yogic and psychic abilities. At last, Life Happens to Us endorses the importance of embracing unresolved childhood experiences. It is a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand their true potential as a human being.