Playing Gods

Download or read book Playing God written by Andy Crouch and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2013-09-06 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Playing God, Andy Crouch opens the subject of power, elucidating its subtle activity in our relationships and institutions. He gives us much more than a warning against abuse, though. Turning the notion of "playing God" on its head, Crouch celebrates power as the gift by which we join in God's creative, redeeming work in the world.

Download or read book Playing to the Gods written by Peter Rader and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-08-21 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The riveting story of the rivalry between the two most renowned actresses of the nineteenth century: legendary Sarah Bernhardt, whose eccentricity on and off the stage made her the original diva, and mystical Eleonora Duse, who broke all the rules to popularize the natural style of acting we celebrate today. Audiences across Europe and the Americas clamored to see the divine Sarah Bernhardt swoon—and she gave them their money’s worth. The world’s first superstar, she traveled with a chimpanzee named Darwin and a pet alligator that drank champagne, shamelessly supplementing her income by endorsing everything from aperitifs to beef bouillon, and spreading rumors that she slept in a coffin to better understand the macabre heroines she played. Eleonora Duse shied away from the spotlight. Born to a penniless family of itinerant troubadours, she disappeared into the characters she portrayed—channeling their spirits, she claimed. Her new, empathetic style of acting revolutionized the theater—and earned her the ire of Sarah Bernhardt in what would become the most tumultuous theatrical showdown of the nineteenth century. Bernhardt and Duse seduced each other’s lovers, stole one another’s favorite playwrights, and took to the world’s stages to outperform their rival in her most iconic roles. A scandalous, enormously entertaining history full of high drama and low blows, Playing to the Gods is the perfect “book for all of us who binge-watched Feud” (Daniel de Visé, author of Andy & Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show).

Download or read book Playing Gods written by Andrew M Feldherr and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-16 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a novel interpretation of politics and identity in Ovid's epic poem of transformations, the Metamorphoses. Reexamining the emphatically fictional character of the poem, Playing Gods argues that Ovid uses the problem of fiction in the text to redefine the power of poetry in Augustan Rome. The book also provides the fullest account yet of how the poem relates to the range of cultural phenomena that defined and projected Augustan authority, including spectacle, theater, and the visual arts. Andrew Feldherr argues that a key to the political as well as literary power of the Metamorphoses is the way it manipulates its readers' awareness that its stories cannot possibly be true. By continually juxtaposing the imaginary and the real, Ovid shows how a poem made up of fictions can and cannot acquire the authority and presence of other discursive forms. One important way that the poem does this is through narratives that create a "double vision" by casting characters as both mythical figures and enduring presences in the physical landscapes of its readers. This narrative device creates the kind of tensions between identification and distance that Augustan Romans would have felt when experiencing imperial spectacle and other contemporary cultural forms. Full of original interpretations, Playing Gods constructs a model for political readings of fiction that will be useful not only to classicists but to literary theorists and cultural historians in other fields.

Download or read book Gods at Play written by Tom Callahan and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully observed narrative of American sport: character, grit, tragedy, unremarked heroism, and, always, the illuminating story behind the story. As a columnist for Time magazine, among many other publications, Tom Callahan witnessed an extraordinary number of defining moments in American sport across four decades. He takes us from Roberto Clemente clinching his 3,000th, and final, regular-season hit in Pittsburgh; to ringside for the Muhammad Ali–George Foreman fight in Zaire; and to Arthur Ashe announcing, at a news conference, that he’d tested positive for HIV. There are also little-known private moments: Joe Morgan whispering thank you to a virtually blind Jackie Robinson on the field at the 1972 World Series, or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar saying he was more interested in being a good man than in being the greatest basketball player. Brimming with colorful vignettes and enlivened by Callahan’s eye for detail, Gods at Play offers surprising portraits of the most celebrated names in sports. Roger Rosenblatt calls Callahan “the most complete sportswriter in America. He knows the most and writes the best."

Download or read book Gods of Play written by Kristiaan Aercke and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1994-08-04 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies the close connections between politics, culture, art, and philosophy in seventeenth-century Europe. As an emblem of this interrelationship, the author has chosen the phenomenon of the "splendid festive performance" of spectacular plays and operas given at absolutist courts in Rome, Madrid, Paris, Versailles, and Vienna between 1631 and 1668. Gods of Play fills voids in the scholarly literature on the seventeenth-century, on absolutism, on courtly theatricality, and on the philosophy of play. Aercke demonstrates that such splendid performances were not just frivolous entertainment for the courtly class but were serious activities with far-ranging political consequences.

Download or read book Playing God in Yellowstone written by Alston Chase and published by Harper Paperbacks. This book was released on 1987 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chase asserts that Yellowstone is being destroyed by the very people assigned to protect it: the National Park Service. Named as one of "ten books that mattered" in the 1980s by Outside magazine and a book of continuing crucial relevance. Index; map.

Download or read book Groo written by Sergio Aragonés and published by Dark Horse Comics. This book was released on 2018 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We had the Fray of the Gods. Now we have the Play of the Gods - a tale of lust for gold, lust for power, and lust for cheese dip. The Gods themselves watch this story from the above so it must be good enough for you. This handsome paperback volume collects all four issues of the series: in one package, you get a lot of Groo doing real stupid things and causing mass destruction. Just what you wanted!