The Speaking Stone: Stories Cemeteries Tell is a literary love letter to the joys of wandering graveyards and the discoveries such wanderings can yield. Here, Michael Griffith roams Spring Grove (founded 1844), the nation's third-largest cemetery, following curiosity and accident wherever they lead. The result is this fascinating collection, which narrates the lives of those he encountered on the way. Griffith lingers amidst the traces left behind--these are stories of race, feminism, art, and death, uncovered through obituaries, archival documents, and family legacies. Some essays focus on well-known figures like the feminist icon and freethinker Fanny Wright, but most chronicle the lives of lesser-known figures (a spiritual medium, a temperance advocate, the designers of caskets and hearses, the inventor of the glass-door oven) or of nearly unknown ones (a young heiress who died under mysterious circumstances, the daring sign-painters known as walldogs). The Speaking Stone examines what endures and what doesn't, reflecting on the vanity and poignancy of our attempts to leave monuments that last. Archival photos grace the pages of these thirteen essays that explore a larger, deeply tangled complex of ideas about place, history, self, and art.

The Israel you do not know has all the worth you cannot refrain from knowing. The State of Israel encompasses all the worth a beautiful and a vibrant civilization on Earth could be expected of. Blossoming with stupendous culture, the Holy Land of Israel is the birthplace of Jesus Christ. Life in its fullness, beauty on its climax, intrinsic virtues full of aesthetic fragrance – Israel is just incredible and inscrutable. The lands, the waters, the airs and the skies of Israel unceasingly sing the glory of a unique civilization on Earth. Every stone here narrates a unique history of the Jewish civilization. Every majestic monument in Israel speaks volumes about the great history of the Jewish land and culture. The winsome smile every child, every man and every woman wears reveals the great achievements the Jewish culture has generously added to our world. With exemplary agricultural systems, state-of-the-art environmental management, giant leaps in science and technology, baffling engineering structures and architecture and extraordinary socio-cultural organizations like the Kibbutzim, and with an intensive quest of peace and living a life of dignity, the Jews of Israel are all-prepared to reach the stars.

The romance and excitement of Dany's life as wife of legendary Austrian composer Stefan Barndt is suddenly threatened by her pregnancy and her growing sense of malevolent forces moving through the lonely hills above Brandt's desert-edge California home.

Twenty-seven tales of Native Americans from nine geographic regions of North America.

In the summers of the early 1970s, Morris Ardoin and his siblings helped run their family's roadside motel in a hot, buggy, bayou town in Cajun Louisiana. The stifling, sticky heat inspired them to find creative ways to stay cool and out of trouble. When they were not doing their chores—handling a colorful cast of customers, scrubbing motel-room toilets, plucking chicken bones and used condoms from under the beds—they played canasta, an old ladies’ game that provided them with a refuge from the sun and helped them avoid their violent, troubled father. Morris was successful at occupying his time with his siblings and the children of families staying in the motel’s kitchenette apartments but was not so successful at keeping clear of his father, a man unable to shake the horrors he had experienced as a child and, later, as a soldier. The preteen would learn as he matured that his father had reserved his most ferocious attacks for him because of an inability to accept a gay or, to his mind, broken, son. It became his dad’s mission to “fix” his son, and Morris’s mission to resist—and survive intact. He was aided in his struggle immeasurably by the love and encouragement of a selfless and generous grandmother, who provides his story with much of its warmth, wisdom, and humor. There’s also suspense, awkward romance, naughty French lessons, and an insider’s take on a truly remarkable, not-yet-homogenized pocket of American culture.

Children of the Stone is the unlikely story of Ramzi Hussein Aburedwan, a boy from a Palestinian refugee camp in Ramallah who confronts the occupying army, gets an education, masters an instrument, dreams of something much bigger than himself, and then inspires scores of others to work with him to make that dream a reality. That dream is of a music school in the midst of a refugee camp in Ramallah, a school that will transform the lives of thousands of children through music. Daniel Barenboim, the Israeli musician and music director of La Scala in Milan and the Berlin Opera, is among those who help Ramzi realize his dream. He has played with Ramzi frequently, at chamber music concerts in Al-Kamandjati, the school Ramzi worked so hard to build, and in the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra that Barenboim founded with the late Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said. Children of the Stone is a story about music, freedom and conflict; determination and vision. It's a vivid portrait of life amid checkpoints and military occupation, a growing movement of nonviolent resistance, the past and future of musical collaboration across the Israeli-Palestinian divide, and the potential of music to help children see new possibilities for their lives. Above all, Children of the Stone chronicles the journey of Ramzi Aburedwan, and how he worked against the odds to create something lasting and beautiful in a war-torn land.

The 10th-anniversary edition of the New York Times business bestseller-now updated with "Answers to Ten Questions People Ask" We attempt or avoid difficult conversations every day-whether dealing with an underperforming employee, disagreeing with a spouse, or negotiating with a client. From the Harvard Negotiation Project, the organization that brought you Getting to Yes, Difficult Conversations provides a step-by-step approach to having those tough conversations with less stress and more success. you'll learn how to: · Decipher the underlying structure of every difficult conversation · Start a conversation without defensiveness · Listen for the meaning of what is not said · Stay balanced in the face of attacks and accusations · Move from emotion to productive problem solving