The Waters Of Our Time

Download or read book The Waters of Our Time written by Giancarlo T. Roma and published by powerHouse Books. This book was released on 2014-04-22 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second collaboration between father and son Thomas Roma and Giancarlo T. Roma, The Waters of Our Time is a book that could only be done in the latter part of this renowned photographer's career and with the unique contemplation of his watchful son. A retrospective of sorts, the book contains 142 of Roma's photographs spanning most of his career, beginning on the cover with a picture taken from his first roll of film shot in 1972, and a fictional text by Giancarlo T. Roma, written as a first-person narrative recollection in the voice of an older woman who has spent her life in Brooklyn. The written story begins on the book's cover and is interwoven with the photographs, lending a reflective quality to the interplay between them. In this way, the project is a true collaboration, resembling the making of a movie in reverse, where the pictures function as the script and the text acts as the moving images, coming in response. The title comes from the song "Follow" (written by Jerry Merrick and famously sung by Richie Havens, also a Brooklyn native), whose lyrics are reproduced throughout the book, and serves as kind of a sound track to the story, adding to the cinematic quality. The Waters of Our Time was conceived as an homage to Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes' book The Sweet Flypaper of Life published in 1955, a cherished part of the elder Roma's library. The book remains true to Flypaper in terms of design (size, layout, font), but differs greatly in process. Whereas Hughes selected and sequenced DeCarava's photographs before writing the text for Flypaper, Roma selected and sequenced his own photographs first, leaving Giancarlo to write the text in the white space between pictures for The Waters.

Download or read book High As the Waters Rise written by Anja Kampmann and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This "gorgeously written" National Book Award finalist is a dazzling, heart-rending story of an oil rig worker whose closest friend goes missing, plunging him into isolation and forcing him to confront his past (NPR, One of the Best Books of the Year). One night aboard an oil drilling platform in the Atlantic, Waclaw returns to his cabin to find that his bunkmate and companion, Mátyás, has gone missing. A search of the rig confirms his fear that Mátyás has fallen into the sea. Grief-stricken, he embarks on an epic emotional and physical journey that takes him to Morocco, to Budapest and Mátyás's hometown in Hungary, to Malta, Italy, and finally to the mining town of his childhood in Germany. Waclaw's encounters along the way with other lost and yearning souls—Mátyás's angry, grieving half-sister; lonely rig workers on shore leave; a truck driver who watches the world change from his driver's seat—bring us closer to his origins while also revealing the problems of a globalized economy dependent on waning natural resources. High as the Waters Rise is a stirring exploration of male intimacy, the nature of memory and grief, and the cost of freedom—the story of a man who stands at the margins of a society from which he has profited little, though its functioning depends on his labor.

Download or read book Role Models written by John Waters and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-05-25 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Role Models is a personal invitation into one of the most unique, perverse, and hilarious artistic minds of our time. From the incomparable John Waters, a paean to the power of subversive inspiration that will delight, amuse, enrich—and happily horrify readers everywhere. Role Models is, in fact, a self-portrait told through intimate profiles of favorite personalities—some famous, some unknown, some criminal, some surprisingly middle-of-the-road. From Esther Martin, owner of the scariest bar in Baltimore, to the playwright Tennessee Williams; from the atheist leader Madalyn Murray O'Hair to the insane martyr Saint Catherine of Siena; from the English novelist Denton Welch to the timelessly appealing singer Johnny Mathis—these are the extreme figures who helped the author form his own brand of neurotic happiness.

Download or read book Smithsonian Ocean written by Deborah Cramer and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2008-10-07 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nobel Prize winner Al Gore wrote of Deborah Cramer's previous book Great Waters, "I urge everyone to read this book, to act on its message, and to pass on its teachings." Now Cramer offers a groundbreaking book for an even more urgent time. Our lives depend on the sea. As gifted science writer Deborah Cramer makes clear in this extraordinary volume, the ocean has been earth's lifeline for more than three and a half billion years. Life began in the scalding inferno of deep-sea hot springs. The first cell, the first plant, and the first animal were all born in the sea. Climate changes wrought by the sea created evolutionary pathways for mammals and gave rise to our human ancestors some 200,000 years ago. The one, interconnected sea still sustains us. Invisible plants in the ocean's sunlit surface give us air to breathe. Rushing currents supply water to the atmosphere's protective greenhouse and rain to dry land. But as Cramer reveals in this sweeping look at earth's biography, the vital partnership between earth and the life it nourishes has recently been disrupted. Today, a single terrestrial species, man, has begun to alter the health of the sea itself. The mark of humans on the seas is now everywhere—from the fertile waters of continental shelves to the icy reaches of the poles, from the dazzling diversity of coral reefs to the porous edge of estuaries. Even the open ocean bears clear traces of our harmful ways. Scientists believe human impact may have already sparked a catastrophic event that could change the sea and the earth irrevocably: the sixth mass planetary extinction on a scale unseen since the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But unlike the forces that caused previous extinctions, humankind can make a choice. We can choose the mark we wish to make and the legacy we leave behind. Written in the passionate tradition of Rachel Carson, Smithsonian Ocean is at once a book for our time and for the ages. Carson wrote: "One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself: What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?" Cramer's powerful and inspiring message is equally a wake-up call: "We hold earth's life-giving waters—and our future—in our hands." Our lives depend on the sea.

Download or read book Command of the Waters written by Daniel McCool and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much has been written about legal questions surrounding Indian water rights; this book now places them in the political framework that also includes water development. McCool analyzes the two conflicting doctrines relating to water use—one based on federal case law governing the rights of Indians on reservations, the other sanctioned by legislation and applied to non-Indians—based on the "iron triangles" of bureaucrats, legislators, and interest groups that dominate policy issues. He examines the way federal and BIA water development programs have reacted to conflict, competition, and opportunity from the turn of the century to the 1980s and updates the situation in an introduction written for this edition.

Download or read book The Book that Made Me written by Judith Ridge and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays by popular children's authors reveal the books that shaped their personal and literary lives, explaining how the stories they loved influenced them creatively, politically, and intellectually.

Download or read book Gathering of Waters written by Bernice L. McFadden and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Essence's Best Books of the Decade! A New York Times Notable Book of 2012! Gathering of Waters is a finalist for a Phillis Wheatley Fiction Book Award! Gathering of Waters was named a finalist for a 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award! Gathering of Waters has been selected as a Go On Girl! April 2013 Book Pick. "McFadden works a kind of miracle--not only do [her characters] retain their appealing humanity; their story eclipses the bonds of history to offer continuous surprises...Beautiful and evocative, Gathering of Waters brings three generations to life...The real power of the narrative lies in the richness and complexity of the characters. While they inhabit these pages they live, and they do so gloriously and messily and magically, so that we are at last sorry to see them go, and we sit with those small moments we had with them and worry over them, enchanted, until they become something like our own memories, dimmed by time, but alive with the ghosts of the past, and burning with spirits." --Jesmyn Ward, New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice "Read it aloud. Hire a chorus to chant it to you and anyone else interested in hearing about civil rights and uncivil desires, about the dark heat of hate, about the force of forgiveness." --Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered, NPR "McFadden combines events of Biblical proportions--from flooding to resurrection--with history to create a cautionary, redemptive tale that spans the early twentieth century to the start of Hurricane Katrina. She compellingly invites readers to consider the distinctions between 'truth or fantasy'...In McFadden's boldly spun yarn, consequences extend across time and place. This is an arresting historical portrait of Southern life with reimagined outcomes, suggesting that hope in the enduring power of memory can offer healing where justice does not suffice." --Publishers Weekly "The rich text is shaped by the African American storytelling tradition and layered with significant American histories. Recalling the woven spirituality of Toni Morrison's Beloved, this work will appeal to readers of mystic literature." --Library Journal "McFadden makes powerful use of imagery in this fantastical novel of ever-flowing waters and troubled spirits." --Booklist "In this fierce reimagining, the actual town of Money, MS narrates the story about the ghost of Emmett Till and his from-the-other-side reunification with the girl he loved as a child in Gathering of Waters by Bernice L. McFadden." --Ebony Magazine Gathering of Waters is a deeply engrossing tale narrated by the town of Money, Mississippi--a site both significant and infamous in our collective story as a nation. Money is personified in this haunting story, which chronicles its troubled history following the arrival of the Hilson and Bryant families. Tass Hilson and Emmett Till were young and in love when Emmett was brutally murdered in 1955. Anxious to escape the town, Tass marries Maximillian May and relocates to Detroit. Forty years later, after the death of her husband, Tass returns to Money and fantasy takes flesh when Emmett Till's spirit is finally released from the dank, dark waters of the Tallahatchie River. The two lovers are reunited, bringing the story to an enchanting and profound conclusion. Gathering of Waters mines the truth about Money, Mississippi, as well as the town's families, and threads their history over decades. The bare-bones realism--both disturbing and riveting--combined with a magical realm in which ghosts have the final say, is reminiscent of Toni Morrison's Beloved.