We all tell stories about who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. These personal myths in turn shape who we become and what we believe—as individuals, families, and nations. This book offers readers the tools to detect the story line in their own lives and to write and tell it to others, opening up a hidden world of self-discovery and meaning. The numerous accessible exercises are followed by examples of personal stories and inspiring quotes to stimulate the journey to the center of one's purpose. "By the art of fantasy and imagination, story and image, these authors map the ways personal stories deepen into transpersonal mythic journeys." —David Miller, Ph.D., Watson-Ledden Professor of Religion, Syracuse University

If you want to understand your data using data visualization and don't know where to start, then this is the book for you. Whether you are a beginner or have years of experience, this book will help you to quickly acquire the skills and techniques used to discover, analyze, and communicate data visually. Some familiarity with databases and data structures is helpful, but not required.

Cuba: A Personal Journey 1989-2015 explores Cuba's land, people, and complex relationship with the USA from 1989 to 2015.

“A richly observant memoir of a coast-to-coast journey along the US-Canada border . . . An armchair traveler’s delight” (Kirkus Reviews). “Part travelogue, part memoir, part meditation, part exploration,” North Country is an account of a trip along the northern border of the United States in search of the country’s last unspoiled frontiers (The Boston Sunday Globe). In this vast, sparsely settled territory, Howard Frank Mosher found both a harsh and beautiful landscape and some of the continent’s most independent men and women. Here, he brings this remote area to vivid life in a book “bright with anecdote and history and lore and most importantly with affection for his human subjects” (Richard Ford, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Independence Day). “A classic road book. You could, with confidence, place this book on the shelf next to such American classics as John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley and Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory.” —Detroit Free Press “What Mosher’s northern journey is really about is our society’s loss of Eden, the garden we were promised when we came here. The garden we’ve turned into pulp fiction and rocket ranges. The very fact that this brave book can stir up so many thoughts about the predicaments of civilization is surely an indication that it is well worth reading.” —Ottawa Citizen

Originally published in 1994, Jewish Views of the Afterlife is a classic study of ideas of afterlife and postmortem survival in Jewish tradition and mysticism. As both a scholar and pastoral counselor, Raphael guides the reader through 4,000 years of Jewish thought on the afterlife by investigating pertinent sacred texts produced in each era. Through a compilation of ideas found in the Bible, Apocrypha, rabbinic literature, medieval philosophy, medieval Midrash, Kabbalah, Hasidism and Yiddish literature, the reader learns how Judaism conceived of the fate of the individual after death throughout Jewish history. In addition, this book explores the implications of Jewish afterlife beliefs for a renewed understanding of traditional rituals of funeral, burial, shiva, kaddish and more. This newly released twenty-fifth anniversary edition presents new material on little-known Jewish mystical teachings on reincarnation, a chapter on “Spirits, Ghosts and Dybbuks in Yiddish Literature”, and a foreword by the renowned scholar of Jewish mysticism, Rabbi Arthur Green. Both historical and contemporary, this book provides a rich resource for scholars and laypeople and for teachers and students and makes an important Jewish contribution to the growing contemporary psychology of death and dying.

The travel experience filled with personal trauma; the pilgrimage through a war-torn place; the journey with those suffering: these represent the darker sides of travel. What is their allure and how are they represented? This volume takes an ethnographic and interdisciplinary approach to explore the writings and texts of dark journeys and travels. In traveling over the dead, amongst the dying, and alongside the suffering, the authors give us a tour of humanity’s violence and misery. And yet, from this dark side, there comes great beauty and poignancy in the characterization of plight; creativity in the comic, graphic, and graffiti sketches and comments on life; and the sense of profound and spiritual journeys being undertaken, recorded, and memorialized.

This account of American films is balanced between subjective enthusiasm and objective analysis. Scorsese starts from his own childhood love affair with the cinema, when he discovered King Vidor's Dual in the Sun as a boy.