A heartstopping, poignant, epic adventure story about a boy destined to live forever, who only wants to grow up. Without death, life is just existence. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live forever? Well, Alfie Monk can tell you. He may seem like an ordinary eleven-year-old boy, but he's actually more than a thousand years old--and remembers the last Viking invasion of England, not to mention the French Revolution and both World Wars. Way back in the tenth century, he and his mother were given the alchemical secret to eternal life. But when everything Alfie knows is destroyed in a fire, and the modern world intrudes, he must embark on a mission--along with friends Aidan and Roxy--to find a way to reverse the process and grow up like a regular boy. This astonishing new novel from the author of Time Traveling with a Hamster, told in alternating perspectives by Alfie and Aidan, is a tour de force--a sweeping epic that takes you on an unforgettable, breathtaking adventure and asks big questions about the meaning of life.

A history of the quest for human language origins is comprised of two intertwined narratives that respectively trace the development of language and the process through which scientists have explored the subject, in an account that also documents the contributions of such figures as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker.

"Originally published in paperback in the UK by HarperCollins Children's Books, London, in 2018."

In a snowstorm, a Lin Clan member named Dong Lang was born. He happened to encounter a random opportunity. Wild beasts massacred the village, and both his parents died. Perhaps it was fated, but by chance, he stepped into an unknown world. Along the way, he had acquired the fetters, the friendship, everything ....

The screen has never been merely a canvas for the images to be displayed but also – to quote Jean-Luc Godard – “a blank page”, a surface for inscriptions and a “stage” for all kinds of linguistic occurrences be their audible or visual. Word did not come into the world of cinema at the time of the talkies but has been a primordial medial “companion” that has shaped the cinematic experience from its very beginnings. This volume offers a collection of essays that question the role of words and images in the context of moving pictures covering a wide area of their interconnectedness. How can we analyse literary adaptations? What is the role of adaptations in the evolution of specific national cinemas? In what way are written texts used in films? Is the model of the word and image relations used in silent films still applicable today? What major paradigms can be discerned within the multiplicity of ways Jean-Luc Godard’s cinema plays with words and images? Are these models of modernist or postmodern cinema reflected in films of other directors like R. W. Fassbinder? How do avant-garde works deal with the word and image debate? What are the connections of animation or computer games with verbal text and narrative? What is the phenomenon of jet-setting and how does it connect to the ideological implications of the relations between the culture of books and films? What happens when Hamlet is completely rewritten reflecting the ideology of late capitalism? What happens from the point of view of literariness or rejection of literariness when films are made vehicles of national propaganda? How do words get mediated through images? These are some of the questions addressed in the present volume by in-depth case studies of cinematic intermediality or more general surveys regarding cinema’s long lasting liaisons with language or literature.

Every day, a pastor faces armies of despair, fatigue, exhaustion, and frustration. That blessed hope of a Spurgeon church has morphed into a Paul prison. Every time he looks up, there is another attack. First errors are found, then sin; doctrinal arguing leads to internal strife. The army of the nation’s culture surrounds for the kill. The pastor places his baptism handkerchief on a broom handle and crawls out to surrender. Just then, he looks to the horizon to see a glorious alliance of sixty-six armies. The enemy turns in fear—many ride away, while others engage, only to be routed. The preacher had forgotten that there are more with us than against us. No matter the mess, God is with us. He has given his Spirit to move among us, and he has given us his word to defeat every attack. Grab this handbook and be encouraged; you can preach your way out of every mess.

A study of the ways that southern Presbyterians in the wake of the Civil War contended with a host of cultural and theological questions Southern Presbyterian theologians enjoyed a prominent position in antebellum southern culture. Respected for both their erudition and elite constituency, these theologians identified the southern society as representing a divine, Biblically ordained order. Beginning in the 1840s, however, this facile identification became more difficult to maintain, colliding first with antislavery polemics, then with Confederate defeat and reconstruction, and later with women’s rights, philosophical empiricism, literary criticisms of the Bible, and that most salient symbol of modernity, natural science. As Monte Harrell Hampton shows in Storm of Words, modern science seemed most explicitly to express the rationalistic spirit of the age and threaten the Protestant conviction that science was the faithful “handmaid” of theology. Southern Presbyterians disposed of some of these threats with ease. Contemporary geology, however, posed thornier problems. Ambivalence over how to respond to geology led to the establishment in 1859 of the Perkins Professorship of Natural Science in Connexion with Revealed Religion at the seminary in Columbia, South Carolina. Installing scientist-theologian James Woodrow in this position, southern Presbyterians expected him to defend their positions. Within twenty-five years, however, their anointed expert held that evolution did not contradict scripture. Indeed, he declared that it was in fact God’s method of creating. The resulting debate was the first extended evolution controversy in American history. It drove a wedge between those tolerant of new exegetical and scientific developments and the majority who opposed such openness. Hampton argues that Woodrow believed he was shoring up the alliance between science and scripture—that a circumscribed form of evolution did no violence to scriptural infallibility. The traditionalists’ view, however, remained interwoven with their identity as defenders of the Lost Cause and guardians of southern culture. The ensuing debate triggered Woodrow’s dismissal. It also capped a modernity crisis experienced by an influential group of southern intellectuals who were grappling with the nature of knowledge, both scientific and religious, and its relationship to culture—a culture attempting to define itself in the shadow of the Civil War and Reconstruction.