The Rochesterian

Download or read book The Rochesterian written by Joseph O'Connor and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book You Can't Die written by John C. Wolfe and published by Wolfe Books. This book was released on 2017-12-06 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A DAY OF CLARITY,” by John C. Wolfe, is a detailed account of one man’s attempt to master alcohol. By the time he’s twenty years old, he is convinced that alcohol improves his character and abilities in all facets of life. At first, it’s hard to dispute his thinking. He rises quickly in his career as a writer. As Chief Speechwriter to the Governor of New York, he writes over a thousand speeches while drunk. He drinks in restrooms, courtrooms, even in the delivery room where his son was born. He even manages to sneak drinks into a three-way meeting with the Governor and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. He finds a way to drink in every situation, except once, on September 11, 2001, when he finds himself in withdrawal among the rubble of the World Trade Center. Finally, after ten years, he is coaxed into treatment by family and friends. He emerges from rehab twenty-eight days later. One night in the church of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, while sober but disoriented, he inexplicably swallows a lethal dose of a narcotic medication meant to assist his recovery. His heart stops twice and he is placed on life support. He is thought to be suicidal, banished from the State Capitol and mandated to a psychiatric center for a month of observation. While there, he becomes convinced that the strain of sobriety caused his overdose. He comes to believe that he is suffering from a mental illness that only alcohol can control, and he vows to never stop drinking again. Soon after his release from the psychiatric center, he returns to his daily routine of heavy drinking. There are countless hospital and rehab stays and severe alcohol withdrawals in detox units. His family turns to the last best hope for a recovery at the prestigious Caron Foundation in Pennsylvania. Twenty days into his treatment there, he claims the walls are closing in around him and runs from the facility. That night, he gets drunk in Reading, PA, returns to Caron the next day, then runs back to his lake house in the Adirondacks. Within two weeks, he is physically unable to go fifteen minutes without a drink without suffering dangerous withdrawal symptoms and risking a seizure. He knows he is going to die and accepts it. Opting to spend his final summer at his beloved lake house, he stays inside so no one is able to see his condition. There was little left for his family and friends to do. It was just a matter of what killed him first, alcohol or suicide. Just three months after leaving treatment in Pennsylvania, relatives find him gravely ill on the floor of the lake home and bring him to an emergency room. Doctors weren’t sure if he would live. He is heavily medicated through the withdrawal process, then sent to the detox unit. A month later, he walks out of the hospital completely sober for the first time in twenty-five years. Doctors predicted a long and difficult recovery. They warned that his alcohol abuse had stunted his emotional growth by more than twenty years. They said that all the years of intoxication may have been masking a mental illness. They said he could be agitated, confused and even paranoid for as long as two years. More than anything else, “A Day of Clarity” is the story of a man’s distrust of himself. He uses alcohol as an elixir to control all facets of his life – his mood, his decisions, even his health. He drinks to temper his anger, regulate his physical comfort and stifle what he feared were psychotic impulses. He drinks to prevent another inexplicable near death experience. At the age of forty-seven, he must begin what he believes is an impossible task: Starting all over again, right where he left off 25 years earlier, disavowing everything he believed was true when he first learned it, and relearning it all over again, while anxiously waiting for a day of clarity.

Download or read book From Chivalry to Terrorism written by Leo Braudy and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-12-08 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Manliness has always been linked to physical prowess and to war; indeed the warrior has been the archetypal man across countless cultures throughout time. In this magisterial excursion through literature, history, warfare, and sociology, one of our most prominent scholars tracks the complex relationship between the changing methods and goals of warfare and shifting models of manhood. This journey takes us from the citizen soldiers of ancient Greece to the medieval knights to the misogynistic terrorists of Al Qaeda. As he chronicles these transformations, Leo Braudy weighs the significance of everything from weapon technology to the hairstyles favored during different eras. He offers fresh insights on codes of war and codes of racial purity, and on cultural and historical figures from Socrates to Don Quixote to Napoleon to Custer to Rambo. Epic in scope and free of academic jargon, From Chivalry to Terrorism is a masterwork of scholarship that is both accessible and breathtakingly ambitious.

Download or read book Teaching Modern British and American Satire written by Evan R. Davis and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2019-05-01 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses the teaching of satire written in English over the past three hundred years. For instructors covering current satire, it suggests ways to enrich students' understanding of voice, irony, and rhetoric and to explore the questions of how to define satire and how to determine what its ultimate aims are. For instructors teaching older satire, it demonstrates ways to help students gain knowledge of historical context, medium, and audience, while addressing more specific literary questions of technique and form. Readers will discover ways to introduce students to authors such as Swift and Twain, to techniques such as parody and verbal irony, and to the difficult subject of satire's offensiveness and elitism. This volume also helps teachers of a wide variety of courses, from composition to gateway courses and surveys, think about how to use modern satire in conceiving and structuring them.

Download or read book The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society ... written by American-Irish Historical Society and published by . This book was released on 1909 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Making of the English Literary Canon written by Trevor Thornton Ross and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 1998 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is widely accepted among literary scholars that canon-formation began in the eighteenth century when scholarly editions and critical treatments of older works, designed to educate readers about the national literary heritage, appeared for the first time. In The Making of the English Literary Canon Trevor Ross challenges this assumption, arguing that canon-formation was going on well before the eighteenth century but was based on a very different set of literary and cultural values. Covering a period that extends from the Middle Ages to the institutionalisation of literature in the eighteenth century, Ross's comprehensive history traces the evolution of cultural attitudes toward literature in English society, highlighting the diverse interests and assumptions that defined and shaped the literary canon. An indigenous canon of letters, Ross argues, had been both the hope and aim of English authors since the Middle Ages. Early authors believed that promoting the idea of a national literature would help publicise their work and favour literary production in the vernacular. Ross places these early gestures toward canon-making in the context of the highly rhetorical habits of thought that dominated medieval and Renaissance culture, habits that were gradually displaced by an emergent rationalist understanding of literary value. He shows that, beginning in the late seventeenth century, canon-makers became less concerned with how English literature was produced than with how it was read and received. By showing that canon-formation has served different functions in the past, The Making of the English Literary Canon is relevant not only to current debates over the canon but also as an important corrective to prevailing views of early modern English literature and of how it was first evaluated, promoted, and preserved. It is widely accepted among literary scholars that canon-formation began in the eighteenth century when scholarly editions and critical treatments of older works, designed to educate readers about the national literary heritage, appeared for the first time. In The Making of the English Literary Canon Trevor Ross challenges this assumption, arguing that canon- formation was going on well before the eighteenth century but was based on a very different set of literary and cultural values. Covering a period that extends from the Middle Ages to the institutionalisation of literature in the eighteenth century, Ross's comprehensive history traces the evolution of cultural attitudes toward literature in English society, highlighting the diverse interests and assumptions that defined and shaped the literary canon. An indigenous canon of letters, Ross argues, had been both the hope and aim of English authors since the Middle Ages. Early authors believed that promoting the idea of a national literature would help publicise their work and favour literary production in the vernacular. Ross places these early gestures toward canon-making in the context of the highly rhetorical habits of thought that dominated medieval and Renaissance culture, habits that were gradually displaced by an emergent rationalist understanding of literary value. He shows that, beginning in the late seventeenth century, canon-makers became less concerned with how English literature was produced than with how it was read and received. By showing that canon-formation has served different functions in the past, The Making of the English Literary Canon is relevant not only to current debates over the canon but also as an important corrective to prevailing views of early modern English literature and of how it was first evaluated, promoted, and preserved.

Download or read book Swift and Others written by Claude Rawson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-19 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jonathan Swift's influence on the writings and politics of England and Ireland was reinforced by a combination of contradictory forces: an authoritarian attachment to tradition and rule, and a vivid responsiveness to the disorders of a modernity he resisted and yet helped to create. He was, perhaps even more than Pope, a dominant voice of his times. The rich variety of the literary culture to which he belonged shows the penetration of his ideas, personality and style. This is true of writers who were his friends and admirers (Pope), of adversaries (Mandeville, Johnson), of several who became great ironists in his shadow (Gibbon, Austen), and of some surprising examples of Swiftian afterlife (Chatterton). Claude Rawson, leading scholar of the works of Swift, brings together recent essays, as well as classic earlier work extensively revised, to offer fresh insights into an era when Swift's voice was a pervasive presence.