In The Miniaturists Barbara Browning explores her attraction to tininess and the stories of those who share it. Interweaving autobiography with research on unexpected topics and letting her voracious curiosity guide her, Browning offers a series of charming short essays that plumb what it means to ponder the minuscule. She is as entranced by early twentieth-century entomologist William Morton Wheeler, who imagined corresponding with termites, as she is by Frances Glessner Lee, the...

Barbara Browning follows the trail of "infectious rhythm" from the ecstatic percussion of a Brazilian carnival group to the eerily silent video image of the LAPD beating a man like a drum. Throughout, she identifies the metaphoric strain of contagion which both celebrates the diasporic spread of African culture, and serves as the justification for its brutal repression.The essays in this book examine both the vital and violent ways in which recent associations have been made betwee...

A sometimes funny, sometimes catastrophically sad story of performance art, ukuleles, dance, and our attempts and failures to make contact.In the midst of Occupy, Barbara Andersen begins spamming people indiscriminately with ukulele covers of sentimental songs. A series of inappropriate intimacies ensues, including an erotically charged correspondence and then collaboration with an extraordinarily gifted and troubled musician living in Germany.

What makes a song sound foreign? What makes it sound “American,” or Brazilian? Caetano Veloso's 2004 American songbook album, A Foreign Sound, is a meditation on these questions-but in truth, they were questions he'd been asking throughout his career. Properly heard, the album throws a wrench into received ideas regarding the global hegemony of US popular music, and also what constitutes the Brazilian sound. This book takes listeners back through some of Veloso's earlier considera...

"World music" emerged as a commercial and musical category in the 1980s, but in some sense music has always been global. Through the metaphor of encounters, Music and Globalization explores the dynamics that enable or hinder cross-cultural communication through music. In the stories told by the contributors, we meet well-known players such as David Byrne, Peter Gabriel, Sting, Ry Cooder, Fela Kuti, and Gilberto Gil, but also lesser-known characters such as the Senegalese Afro-Cuban singer ...

I like things to be accurate.I adored my husband, and we had a great marriage.After his death, I found a sixty-seven-year-old term paper that turned my world upside down as I learned things were quite different from what I had always believed. I had to find out more!

Clearly organized and simply presented, The Low Vision Handbook for Eyecare Professionals, Second Edition offers an introduction to all aspects of low vision, including a short history of low vision and the basic optics of magnifiers.Updated and revised this second edition of The Low Vision Handbook for Eyecare Professionals provides practical material on assessing low vision patients, the psychology of visual loss, and ways to al...

An Alaska family celebrates Hanukkah with a stubborn moose in their backyard and the Northern Lights as the best-ever menorah.Hanukkah in Alaska is unlike anywhere else.Snow piles up over the windows. Daylight is only five hours long. And one girl finds a moose camped out in her backyard, right near her favorite blue swing. She tries everything to lure it away: apples, carrots, even cookies. But it just keeps eating more tree! It's not until the last night ...

Jim Logan and his wife, Bernie, move into their dream house in Long Beach, California. Although the house needs work, Jim is a construction superintendent and is happy to live there and take on the responsibility. When hes not fixing up his house, he works two hours away in San Diego, where he hires Diana to be his office manager for the current project.Diana is beautiful, intelligent, and young. She seems innocent enough, but her arrival comes with unexpected consequences. Jim and...

Far and long away from here is where we meet Captain CrickCaptain Crick was the one and only, the greatest and mightiest pirate of all time who traveled the seven seas and rivers everywhere with his mighty crew. They continue to fulfill their task of helping everyone, whenever and wherever they can.Aboard the SS Goody, the Captain gathers his men and tells them the details of their new mission and voyage: to catch as much fish, shrimp, lobster, and crab the ship can carry a...

In the New York Times bestseller An Altar in the World, acclaimed author Barbara Brown Taylor continues her thoughtful spiritual journey by building upon where she left off in Leaving Church. With the honesty of Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) and the spiritual depth of Anne Lamott (Grace, Eventually), Taylor shares how she learned to find God beyond the church walls in this guide to everyday spirituality, embracing the sacred as a natural part of everyday life. In An Alta...

In Speaking of Sin, Barbara Brown Taylor brings her fresh perspective to a cluster of words that often cause us discomfort and have widely fallen into neglect: sin, damnation, repentance, penance, and salvation. She asks, “Why, then, should we speak of sin anymore? The only reason I can think of is because we believe that God means to redeem the world through us.“Abandoning the language of sin will not make sin go away. Human beings will continue to experience alienation, deformati...