Meditations on life and death from the shores of Lake Superior to the North Sea. The Desk on the Sea begins four years after American poet Jonathan Johnson spread his mother's ashes in her beloved Lake Superior and moved with his wife and young daughter into a seventeenth-century cottage on Scotland's North Sea. On an idyllic, desolate coast and in the wild Highlands, Johnson began his search for a way to live through ongoing grief and to take in the wonder of each new day. Through years of extraordinary suffering by way of multiple ailments, Johnson's mother, Sheila, endured an astounding number of amputations—a toe, the end of a finger, a foot, whole fingers, the other foot. What she lost in her physical being, she gained in her kindness and generosity. By the time she was told that the only way she could survive a little longer was the amputation of both hands, she was capable of giving those who loved her and herself a beautiful death instead. Inspired by her example of grace and awareness, Johnson and his family gave themselves one year on the coast of Scotland to live by Shelia's great, guiding principle: We don't get the days back. They wandered trails along windswept shores and past the stone ruins left by people who'd come and gone before. They played as characters from Harry Potter on deserted beaches. From their cottage, they watched an island lighthouse, counting the seconds between flashes to know exactly when to say "goodnight" so the lighthouse would answer with a wink. The Desk on the Sea is a chronicle of progress toward one man's new life goal—to be a father, husband, and poet worthy of his mother's legacy. Sustained by an unwavering belief that words can help us fully occupy our lives, and that imagination and empathy can transform suffering into what John Keats called "soul-making," Johnson offers readers a raw look at love and loss.

In Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean and African Women’s Cultural Critiques of Nation, Andrea Davis imagines new reciprocal relationships beyond the competitive forms of belonging suggested by the nation-state. The book employs the tropes of horizon, sea, and sound as a critique of nation-state discourses and formations, including multicultural citizenship, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and the hierarchical nuclear family. Drawing on Tina Campt’s discussion of Black feminist futurity, Davis offers the concept future now, which is both central to Black freedom and a joint social justice project that rejects existing structures of white supremacy. Calling for new affiliations of community among Black, Indigenous, and other racialized women, and offering new reflections on the relationship between the Caribbean and Canada, she articulates a diaspora poetics that privileges our shared humanity. In advancing these claims, Davis turns to the expressive cultures (novels, poetry, theater, and music) of Caribbean and African women artists in Canada, including work by Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, Esi Edugyan, Ramabai Espinet, Nalo Hopkinson, Amai Kuda, and Djanet Sears. Davis considers the ways in which the diasporic characters these artists create redraw the boundaries of their horizons, invoke the fluid histories of the Caribbean Sea to overcome the brutalization of plantation histories, use sound to enter and reenter archives, and shapeshift to survive in the face of conquest. The book will interest readers of literary and cultural studies, critical race theories, and Black diasporic studies.

A small canoe carved by an Indian boy makes a journey from Lake Superior all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.

The Sea in the Middle presents an original and revisionist narrative of the development of the medieval west from late antiquity to the dawn of modernity. This textbook is uniquely centered on the Mediterranean and emphasizes the role played by peoples and cultures of Africa, Asia, and Europe in an age when Christians, Muslims, and Jews of various denominations engaged with each other in both conflict and collaboration. Key features: Fifteen-chapter structure to aid classroom use Sections in each chapter that feature key artifacts relevant to chapter themes Dynamic visuals, including 190 photos and 20 maps The Sea in the Middle and its sourcebook companion, Texts from the Middle, pair together to provide a framework and materials that guide students through this complex but essential history—one that will appeal to the diverse student bodies of today.

From the creator of Home Alone comes this delightful celebration of a day spent by the sea, complete with salty air, run-ins with sea life, and making forever friends. From the author of Home Alone comes a hilarious story that will delight young readers and dog owners alike. Our plucky canine friend Frido is back, and this time he’s on a beach vacation. While his owner takes a nap in the shade, Frido sets off to explore. There are sandcastles to dig, waves to surf, beach games to disrupt, and ice-cream to sample. But can Frido find his way back to the sun umbrella before his owner wakes up?

“There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea,” wrote Joseph Conrad. And there is certainly nothing more integral to the development of the modern world. In The Sea: A Cultural History, John Mack considers those great expanses that both unite and divide us, and the ways in which human beings interact because of the sea, from navigation to colonization to trade. Much of the world’s population lives on or near the cost, and as Mack explains, in a variety of ways, people actually inhabit the sea. The Sea looks at the characteristics of different seas and oceans and investigates how the sea is conceptualized in various cultures. Mack explores the diversity of maritime technologies, especially the practice of navigation and the creation of a society of the sea, which in many cultures is all-male, often cosmopolitan, and always hierarchical. He describes the cultures and the social and technical practices characteristic of seafarers, as well as their distinctive language and customs. As he shows, the separation of sea and land is evident in the use of different vocabularies on land and on sea for the same things, the change in a mariner’s behavior when on land, and in the liminal status of points uniting the two realms, like beaches and ports. Mack also explains how ships are deployed in symbolic contexts on land in ecclesiastical and public architecture. Yet despite their differences, the two realms are always in dialogue in symbolic and economic terms. Casting a wide net, The Sea uses histories, maritime archaeology, biography, art history, and literature to provide an innovative and experiential account of the waters that define our worldly existence.

The Red Sea has, from time immemorial, been one of the world’s most navigated spaces, in the pursuit of trade, pilgrimage and conquest. Yet this multidimensional history remains largely unrevealed by its successive protagonists. Intrigued by the absence of a holistic portrayal of this body of water and inspired by Fernand Braudel’s famous work on the Mediterranean, this book brings alive a dynamic Red Sea world across time, revealing the particular features of a unique historical actor. In capturing this heretofore lost space, it also presents a critical, conceptual history of the sea, leading the reader into the heart of Eurocentrism. The Sea, it is shown, is a vital element of the modern philosophy of history. Alexis Wick is not satisfied with this inclusion of the Red Sea into history and attendant critique of Eurocentrism. Contrapuntally, he explores how the world and the sea were imagined differently before imperial European hegemony. Searching for the lost space of Ottoman visions of the sea, The Red Sea makes a deeper argument about the discipline of history and the historian’s craft.