Seraphina finds her parents staring at the walls, in a daze. Her home life in Para is becoming increasingly abnormal and questions her reality and sanity. She struggles to hold on to her life and have a want for something better. After series of events forces her to venture deeper in the forest of Dise. The forest was a place she often seeks refuge as a child, and she views it as a safe haven. However, during this trip into Dise, her surroundings morph into a strange area. She meets an unfamiliar creature; feels threaten until another being emerge. To defend herself, Seraphina runs and acts out of character, because she’s unsure about who to trust. Although she is a foreigner, the being still offers an escape and a method to seek for what she truly wants. The only catch is to participate in a trial. She accepts the challenge, and disregards the risks and warnings. Seraphina is guided through a series of tests with the assistance from another forest being. Along her quest she meets a couple of creatures, and they build a friendship. The more she progresses the more she sees and hears unexplainable situations, which leads her to believe the trial is glitching. She travels through different worlds and dimensions, and she’s slowly losing all sense of reality. Yet, she pushes through, thinking all that she endured is part of the large master plan. Her progress was interrupted by being and eventually another creature. She was offered an opportunity, but is it worth the unknown risks? Or should she continue with the trials that was already planned? Unfortunately, her time is running out and Seraphina faces a life altering choice. Which path will she choose?

Janis Joplin was the skyrocket chick of the sixties, the woman who broke into the boys' club of rock and out of the stifling good-girl femininity of postwar America. With her incredible wall-of-sound vocals, Joplin was the voice of a generation, and when she OD'd on heroin in October 1970, a generation's dreams crashed and burned with her. Alice Echols pushes past the legary Joplin-the red-hot mama of her own invention-as well as the familiar portrait of the screwed-up star victimized by the era she symbolized, to examine the roots of Joplin's muscianship and explore a generation's experiment with high-risk living and the terrible price it exacted. A deeply affecting biography of one of America's most brilliant and tormented stars, Scars of Sweet Paradise is also a vivid and incisive cultural history of an era that changed the world for us all.

Without seeking to lecture readers, she attempts to show not only the interrelation between politics and economics, religion often playing a significant part in both, but in terms of the paradisiacal bliss - material abundance for the West and rapture expected in the hereafter by Islam - to demonstrate such interconnection between the two cultures. These are the genre of the book. Its contents consist of two parts. While Part I treats of Islam as such, both from the historical and contemporary point of view, the theme of Part II is the present-day economy dominated by aggressive capitalism and the impact they have each had on the global scale. Although often critical in cases she deems deserving criticism she nevertheless aims to show that there is most of the time nothing purely black or exclusively white. Indeed, being impartial as well as objective (if that is humanly possible) is a standard she goes by. Dealing with due seriousness as she does with a score of subtopics directly or indirectly related to the mentioned two themes, she also so as to lighten the narrative interjects here and there humor into it. In the final part, the Epilog, she expresses hope that mankind may in the end find a solution to its sky-high problems.

Since Adam and Eve left Eden, humanity has endured through long millennia of hardships and sufferings, especially death. But the hearts of their children and great-grandchildren have never given up the hope that, someday, they could return to the place of happiness that once had been their inheritance. It is a legitimate and dignified dream. In fact, since the day Adam and Eve left, paradise has remained on earth, waiting for every single human child to return. Mertons paradise, in the last analysis, is on earth, but it is not a spacious place. It is rather an attitude of heart, a state of consciousness, in a spiritual journey. The recovery of paradise occurs when the ego in us becomes empty like a desert. The more the noisy ego diminishes, the more the paradise appears in all its beauty. In fact, this paradise is the face of God, not just an imaginary picture but the true God Himself. The more the face of our ego fades out, the more the face of God shines in his glory, might, and goodness. The desert path is more a journey within our consciousness than through geographical space and time. That is why it belongs to all people and is not just reserved for desert hermits. According to Thomas Merton, you need not be a bishop, a priest, a monk, a nun, a religious person, or a hermit to enter the spiritual journey. You may be a lay person, a normal churchgoer very busy with your daily duties, but you certainly could be a real paradise man.

The natural resources of New Guinea and nearby islands have attracted outsiders for at least 5000 years: spices, aromatic woods and barks, resins, plumes, sea slugs, shells and pearls all brought traders from distant markets. Among the most sought-after was the bird of paradise. Their magnificent plumes bedecked the hats of fashion-conscious women in Europe and America, provided regalia for the Kings of Nepal, and decorated the headdresses of Janissaries of the Ottoman Empire. Plumes from Paradise tells the story of this interaction, and of the economic, political, social and cultural consequence for the island's inhabitants. It traces 400 years of economic and political history, culminating in the 'plume boom' of the early part of the 20th century, when an unprecedented number of outsiders flocked to the island's coasts and hinterlands. The story teems with the variety of people involved: New Guineans, Indonesians, Chinese, Europeans, hunters, traders, natural historians and their collectors, officials, missionaries, planters, miners, adventurers of every kind. In the wings were the conservationists, whose efforts brought the slaughter of the plume boom to an end and ushered in an era of comparative isolation for the island that lasted until World War II.

A collection of highly readable critical essays (1977-2023) by a leader in the field of American social art history. Among the subjects Alan Wallach explores are the art of Thomas Cole, patronage of the Hudson River School, so-called “Luminism,” the rise of the American art museum, the historiography of American art, scholarship and the art market, as well as the work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Rockwell Kent, Grant Wood, Philip Evergood, and Norman Rockwell. Throughout, Wallach employs a materialist approach to argue against traditional scholarship that considered American art and art institutions in isolation from their social, historical, and ideological contexts.