Featured on LitHub. An extraordinary memoir of a woman’s unconventional childhood growing up in the Alaskan wilderness, on the grounds where the burned remains of a cannery once stood. In the 1980s the Neilson family moved out on a floathouse to the remote site of a former cannery in Southeast Alaska that had burned to the ground before statehood. They were miles away from any neighbors, surrounded on all sides by wolves, bears and other wildlife, entering the world of subsistence living in an uninviting land of dangerous weather and storms; yet the Neilsons were able to make themselves a home where few others would have found possible. Led by a jack-of-all-trades handyman for a father and a mother who was afraid of everything in the wilderness, Tara and her four siblings cleared the rough terrain to build atop the blackened, rusty ruins a new way of life that was completely their own. From a young age, Tara learned that anything was possible, so long as one can imagine it and then make it happen. When given her mother’s impractical design of a six-bedroom house, her father picked up his tools and crafted it into a reality. To reach the closest community, they built a wooden boat sixteen feet long for the perilous journey on the water. The Alaska wilds required independence and self-sufficiency from the family, and in return it provided a natural landscape that inspired romantic passion and unlimited dreams. With endless forest on one side and the wide ocean on the other, Tara embraced the lonesomeness of the burned cannery ruins that she called home, and often wondered what it once was with its people inside, their stories, where they went, and what happened to them. Beautifully poignant and completely original, Raised in Ruins escapes into the wilderness to discover a piece of Alaskan history wrapped in an incredible family adventure fueled by love, strength, hard work, endurance, and boundless imagination.

Following Henry VIII's break with Rome, in just five short years his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, masterminded the Dissolution of the Monasteries. It was one of the most dramatic and fast-paced upheavals of the social and architectural fabric in the history of this country. Monks and nuns were expelled, and orders went out for the deserted ......

Across the West, hard-right leaders are surging to power on platforms of ethno-economic nationalism, Christianity, and traditional family values. Is this phenomenon the end of neoliberalism or its monstrous offspring? In the Ruins of Neoliberalism casts the hard-right turn as animated by socioeconomically aggrieved white working- and middle-class populations but contoured by neoliberalism’s multipronged assault on democratic values. From its inception, neoliberalism flirted with authoritarian liberalism as it warred against robust democracy. It repelled social-justice claims through appeals to market freedom and morality. It sought to de-democratize the state, economy, and society and re-secure the patriarchal family. In key works of the founding neoliberal intellectuals, Wendy Brown traces the ambition to replace democratic orders with ones disciplined by markets and traditional morality and democratic states with technocratic ones. Yet plutocracy, white supremacy, politicized mass affect, indifference to truth, and extreme social disinhibition were no part of the neoliberal vision. Brown theorizes their unintentional spurring by neoliberal reason, from its attack on the value of society and its fetish of individual freedom to its legitimation of inequality. Above all, she argues, neoliberalism’s intensification of nihilism coupled with its accidental wounding of white male supremacy generates an apocalyptic populism willing to destroy the world rather than endure a future in which this supremacy disappears.

The neoclassic tendency to write about the ruins of Rome was both an attempt to recapture the grandeur of the “golden age” of man and a lament for the passing of a great civilization. John Dyer, who wrote The Ruins of Rome in 1740, was largely responsible for the eighteenth-century revival of a unique subgenre of landscape poetry dealing with ruins of the ancient world. Few poems about the ruins had been written since Antiquités de Rome in 1558 by Joachim Du Bellay. Dyer was one of first neoclassic poets to return to the decaying stones of a past society as a source of poetic inspiration and imagination. He views the relics as monuments of grandeur and greatness, but also of impending death and destruction. While following most of the rules and standards of neoclassicism—that of imitating nature and giving pleasure to a reader—Dyer also includes his personal reactions and emotions in The Ruins of Rome. The work is composed from the position of a poet who serves as interpreter and translator of the subject, a primary characteristic of “prospect” poetry in the eighteenth century. Numerous other writers quickly followed Dyer’s example, including George Keate, William Whitehead and William Parsons. The tendency by these poets to write about the ruins of Rome from a subjective point of view was one of the strongest themes in what Northrop Frye has called the “Age of Sensibility.” Although the renewed interest in Roman ruins lasted well into the nineteenth century, influencing Romantic poets from Lord Byron to William Wordsworth, the evolution of this type of verse was a gradual process: it originated with Du Bellay’s poem, continued through seventeenth-century paintings by Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa (along with the later art of Piranesi and Pannini), and reached maturity with the poetic interest in the imagination in the eighteenth century. All of these factors, especially the tendency of poets to record their subjective feelings and insights concerning the ruins, are elements that proved to be instrumental in the eventual development of Romanticism.

Herbert W. Armstrong was the world's leading televangelist and one of the most prominent religious leaders of the 20th century, watched, read and followed by millions worldwide. But his legacy of Bible-based humanitarianism came under attack after he died. The cabal of leaders who took control of the church he founded, after pledging to "follow in his footsteps," methodically destroyed all he had built. Those who would stop them were silenced or excommunicated. Had it happened in the corporate world, the CEOs and executives responsible for hijacking a corporation and robbing its investors would have been fired, if not prosecuted in a court of law. Never before has this shocking story been told in such riveting detail. Drawing upon official reports, internal memos, court depositions and personal interviews, Stephen Flurry exposes the depth of corruption and deceit that was "Tkachism" - the administration of Joseph Tkach, who succeeded Mr. Armstrong as pastor general of the Worldwide Church of God. In this book you will learn: *How Tkach's men altered doctrines under Mr. Armstrong's nose even before he died. *How the Tkach transformation was driven from the start by an agenda that even shocked most of the top ministers. *How early on, Tkachism brazenly denied its radical changes before the church members. *How Tkachism slashed media operations under the pretense of "wise stewardship"--while income soared at a record $1 billion in five years. *How Tkachism shamefully forced out the very members whose contributions had built the multi-million dollar empire. *How Tkach's men told church members the message of Mr. Armstrong's magnum opus, Mystery of the Ages, was still official, while they secretly trashed 120,000 copies of the book. *How Tkach Jr. considered it his "Christian duty" to stamp out Mr. Armstrong's writings. *How Tkach Jr. nearly achieved that goal in a six-year legal battle, but then, for fear of being exposed, surrendered. *How the marvelous wonder of Mr. Armstrong's work is being raised from the ruins. Worldwide Church of God leaders today present themselves to the mainstream evangelical world as a band of courageous truth-lovers who sacrificed everything to follow Jesus Christ. The stubborn facts of what they did, however, tell a far more sinister story - a story they have done their utmost to keep buried. This book exhumes those facts and exposes them to the furious light of day, as they should have been all along, for your scrutiny. This ebook is offered completely free of charge by the Philadelphia Church of God. However, please not that Google Play will need a verified Google Wallet account which requires your credit card information. In a small number of countries, a temporary authorization of $1 will be charged to your account but will be refunded. This refund can take up to 1 month to process.

This book is a photographic project the author has been working on since 2012 in Iraqi and Syrian Kurdistan, to bear witness to the consequences of war.

Since the mid-1970s, Lebanon has been at the center of the worldwide rise in sectarian extremism. Its cultural output has both mediated and resisted this rise. Standing by the Ruins reviews the role of culture in supporting sectarianism, yet argues for the emergence of a distinctive aesthetic of resistance to it. Focusing on contemporary Lebanese fiction, film, and popular culture, this book shows how artists reappropriated the twin legacies of commitment literature and the ancient topos of “standing by the ruins” to form a new “elegiac humanism” during the tumultuous period of 1975 to 2005. It redirects attention to the critical role of culture in conditioning attitudes throughout society and is therefore relevant to other societies facing sectarian extremism. Standing by the Ruins is also a strong intervention in the burgeoning field of World Literature. Elaborating on the great Arabist Hilary Kilpatrick’s crucial insight that ancient Arabic forms and topoi filter into modern literature, the author details how the “standing by the ruins” topos—and the structure of feeling it conditions—has migrated over time. Modern Arabic novels, feature films, and popular culture, far from being simply cultural imports, are hybrid forms deployed to respond to the challenges of contemporary Arab society. As such, they can take their place within a World Literature paradigm: they are cultural products that travel and intervene in the world.