From 2012 to 2019, Robert Woerheide not only achieved professional success, he also experienced heartbreaking challenges and tragic events. During this time he was, at various points, an honors graduate student, a full-time stay-at-home dad, and an award-winning high school English teacher. With these highs came extreme lows; the full rounding of the human experience. His life fell apart, he lost his children and his freedom, only to find a new kind of wisdom that has since helped him define a new kind of success. Shared in loose chronological order, this collection of poems leads readers through seven years of insight—found in great moments of joy, even during pitfalls of hardship. From weathering a divorce, to finding true love, experiencing the magic of classroom teaching, to the loss of a career and ostracization, these poems describe the hard-won realization that wisdom exists even in the places we might least expect. And always, it is within our reach. Providence in the Fall of a Sparrow is an insightful collection of poetry that illuminates the beauty we can find even in our darkest moments.

“There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” --William Shakespeare, Hamlet B fell twenty-five feet from his nest into the life of Chris Chester. The encounter was providential for both of them. B and Chester spent hours together playing games like bottle-cap fetch or hide-and-seek. They learned “words” in each other’s vocabularies. B developed a fetish for nostrils and a dislike of the color yellow. He grew anxious if Chester came home late from work. At bedtime he would rub his sleepy eyes on Chester’s thumb and settle to sleep in his palm. Chester ended up turning part of his house into an aviary and adjusting his social life to meet B’s demands. This was a small price to pay, though, for the trust and comfort of a twenty-five-gram friend who brought joy and wonder back into his life.

In his rich and dazzling new novel, the author of the bestselling "The Sixteen Pleasures" chronicles the journey of a man awakening from profound sorrow and rediscovering love in a most unexpected time and place.

With his thumbprint on the most ubiquitous films of childhood, Walt Disney is widely considered to be the most conventional of all major American moviemakers. The adjective "Disneyfied" has become shorthand for a creative work that has abandoned any controversial or substantial content to find commercial success. But does Disney deserve that reputation? Douglas Brode overturns the idea of Disney as a middlebrow filmmaker by detailing how Disney movies played a key role in transforming children of the Eisenhower era into the radical youth of the Age of Aquarius. Using close readings of Disney projects, Brode shows that Disney's films were frequently ahead of their time thematically. Long before the cultural tumult of the sixties, Disney films preached pacifism, introduced a generation to the notion of feminism, offered the screen's first drug-trip imagery, encouraged young people to become runaways, insisted on the need for integration, advanced the notion of a sexual revolution, created the concept of multiculturalism, called for a return to nature, nourished the cult of the righteous outlaw, justified violent radicalism in defense of individual rights, argued in favor of communal living, and encouraged antiauthoritarian attitudes. Brode argues that Disney, more than any other influence in popular culture, should be considered the primary creator of the sixties counterculture—a reality that couldn't be further from his "conventional" reputation.