During his terms in the U.S. Senate, Bill Bradley won a national reputation for thoughtfulness, decency, and a willingness to take controversial positions on issues ranging from tax reform to the rights of Native Americans. All these qualities inform this best-selling memoir, in which Bradley assesses his political career and the experiences that shaped his convictions, and looks beyond them to consider the state of the American union on the eve of the 21st century. Time Present, Time Past offers an intimate portrait of the day-to-day working of the Senate: how legislation gets passed and sometimes thwarted; how money is raised and at what cost. But Bradley also writes about deeper questions: What does it means to be an American in an ago of dwindling opportunities and increasing inequality? How much can we expect from our public servants? What do we owe our fellow citizens? The result is a genuinely revelatory book, informed by intelligence, compassion, and unprecedented candor. "Strikingly reflects the realities of modern politics, what it looks like, feels like, from the inside."--New York Times Book Review

In this landmark work, internationally beloved teacher of meditation and “one of the great spiritual teachers of our time” (Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple) Jack Kornfield reveals that you can be instantly happy with the keys to inner freedom. Through his signature warmhearted, poignant, often funny stories, with their a-ha moments and O. Henry-like outcomes, Jack Kornfield shows how we can free ourselves, wherever we are and whatever our circumstances. Renowned for his mindfulness practices and meditations, Jack provides keys for opening gateways to immediate shifts in perspective and clarity of vision, allowing us to “grapple with difficult emotions” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) and know how to change course, take action, or—when we shouldn’t act—just relax and trust. Each chapter presents a path to a different kind of freedom—freedom from fear, freedom to start over, to love, to be yourself, and to be happy—and guides you into an active process that engages your mind and heart, awakens your spirit, and brings real joy, over and over again. Drawing from his own life as a son, brother, father, and partner, and on his forty years of face-to-face teaching of thousands of people across the country, Jack presents “a consommé of goodness, heart, laughter, tears, and breath, nourishing and delicious” (Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird). His keys to life will help us find hope, clarity, relief from past disappointments and guilt, and the courage to go forward.

In this intriguing book G.J. Whitrow traces the evolution of our general awareness of time and its significance from the dawn of history to the present day. His absorbing study ranges from Ancient Egypt and Persia, Greece, and Israel, to the Islamic world, India and China, and Europe andAmerica, showing the different ways time has been perceived by various civilizations.

The critical condition and historical motivation behind Time Studies The concept of time in the post-millennial age is undergoing a radical rethinking within the humanities. Time: A Vocabulary of the Present newly theorizes our experiences of time in relation to developments in post-1945 cultural theory and arts practices. Wide ranging and theoretically provocative, the volume introduces readers to cutting-edge temporal conceptualizations and investigates what exactly constitutes the scope of time studies. Featuring twenty essays that reveal what we talk about when we talk about time today, especially in the areas of history, measurement, and culture, each essay pairs two keywords to explore the tension and nuances between them, from “past/future” and “anticipation/unexpected” to “extinction/adaptation” and “serial/simultaneous.” Moving beyond the truisms of postmodernism, the collection newly theorizes the meanings of temporality in relationship to aesthetic, cultural, technological, and economic developments in the postwar period. This book thus assumes that time—not space, as the postmoderns had it—is central to the contemporary period, and that through it we can come to terms with what contemporaneity can be for human beings caught up in the historical present. In the end, Time reveals that the present is a cultural matrix in which overlapping temporalities condition and compete for our attention. Thus each pair of terms presents two temporalities, yielding a generative account of the time, or times, in which we live.

Fintan Buckley is a pleasant, rather conventional and unimaginative man, who works as a legal adviser in an import/export firm in Dublin. He lives in Howth and is married to Colette. They have two sons who are at university, and a small daughter. As he goes about his life, working and spending time with his family, Fintan begins to experience states of altered consciousness and auditory hallucinations, which seem to take him out of a linear experience of time. He becomes interested in how we remember or imagine the past, an interest trigged by becoming aware of early photography, particularly early colour photography. He also finds himself thinking more about his own past, including time spent holidaying in the north of Ireland as a child with his father's family. Over the years he has become distanced from them, and in the course of the novel this link is re-established and helps to bring him understanding and peace, although in a most unexpected way. Time Present and Time Past, Deirdre Madden's eighth novel for adults, is about time: about how not just daily life and one's own, or one's family's past, intersect with each other.

In this inventive book, Peter Fritzsche explores how Europeans and Americans saw themselves in the drama of history, how they took possession of a past thought to be slipping away, and how they generated countless stories about the sorrowful, eventful paths they chose to follow. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, contemporaries saw themselves as occupants of an utterly new period. Increasingly disconnected from an irretrievable past, worried about an unknown and dangerous future, they described themselves as indisputably modern. To be cast in the new time of the nineteenth century was to recognize the weird shapes of historical change, to see landscapes scattered with ruins, and to mourn the remains of a bygone era. Tracing the scars of history, writers and painters, revolutionaries and exiles, soldiers and widows, and ordinary home dwellers took a passionate, even flamboyant, interest in the past. They argued politics, wrote diaries, devoured memoirs, and collected antiques, all the time charting their private paths against the tremors of public life. These nostalgic histories take place on battlefields trampled by Napoleon, along bucolic English hedges, against the fairytale silhouettes of the Grimms’ beloved Germany, and in the newly constructed parlors of America’s western territories. This eloquent book takes a surprising, completely original look at the modern age: our possessions, our heritage, and our newly considered selves.

Nadine Gordimer is one of our most telling contemporary writers. With each new work, she attacks - with a clear-eyed lack of sentimentality, and an understanding of the darkest depths of the human soul - the inextricable link between personal life and political, communal history. The revelation of this theme in each new work, not only in her homeland South Africa, but the twenty-first century world, is evidence of her literary genius: in the sharpness of her psychological insights, the stark beauty of her language, the complexity of her characters and the difficult choices with which they are faced.In No Time Like the Present, Gordimer brings the reader into the lives of Steven Reed and Jabulile Gumede, a 'mixed' couple, both of whom have been combatants in the struggle for freedom against apartheid. Once clandestine lovers under racist law forbidding sexual relations between white and black, they are now in the new South Africa. The place and time where freedom - the 'better life for all' that was fought for and promised - is being created but also challenged by political and racial tensions, while the hangover of moral ambiguities and the vast and growing gap between affluence and mass poverty, continue to haunt the present. No freedom from personal involvement in these or in the personal intimacy of love.The subject is contemporary, but Gordimer's treatment is timeless. In No Time Like the Present, she shows herself once again a master novelist, at the height of her prodigious powers.