On the Threshold of Beauty' is an exciting and detailed reconstruction of the emergence of electronic music in the Netherlands. Author Kees Tazelaar, composer and head of the Institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, grippingly relates its turbulent history from the earliest beginnings. This history begins around 1930 with the studio of the Philips Physics Laboratory and the plans for the Philips pavilion at Expo 58 in Brussels. The goal was a lightand- sound demonstration for the general public, but the involvement of Le Corbusier, Iannis Xenakis and Edgard Varèse gave this project a highly avant-garde turn. The result, Poème électronique, was considered by many to be much more experimental than the music of the research laboratory. In 1960 Philips divested itself of the studio. It was absorbed into a new studio at Utrecht University, where Gottfried Michael Koenig became artistic director in 1964. Tazelaar also looks in detail at the influence wielded by the Contact Organization for Electronic Music during this period. -- Publisher.

Travel. Inspiration. Motherhood... and Depression. 264 million people worldwide suffer from depression. For anyone struggling with depression, anxiety, finding joy in life, living with purpose, or even just bad days, Beauty Beyond the Threshold, How International Volunteering Saved My Life is a story of hitting rock bottom; one woman's journey to recovery and self-discovery. Readers will go on adventures through heartache, loss, and despair as well as find themselves repairing homes in Puerto Rico and North Carolina, building schools in remote villages in Nepal, laughing with generous people, crying tears of joy, and reflecting on their own lives. Beauty Beyond the Threshold brings hope to those who are feeling sad, depressed, and anxious. There is so much beauty beyond the threshold and the path to discover it is by taking that first step outside of your comfort zone.

The capital city of a nation founded on the premise of liberty, nineteenth-century Washington, D.C., was both an entrepot of urban slavery and the target of abolitionist ferment. The growing slave trade and the enactment of Black codes placed the city's Black women within the rigid confines of a social hierarchy ordered by race and gender. At the Threshold of Liberty reveals how these women--enslaved, fugitive, and free--imagined new identities and lives beyond the oppressive restrictions intended to prevent them from ever experiencing liberty, self-respect, and power. Consulting newspapers, government documents, letters, abolitionist records, legislation, and memoirs, Tamika Y. Nunley traces how Black women navigated social and legal proscriptions to develop their own ideas about liberty as they escaped from slavery, initiated freedom suits, created entrepreneurial economies, pursued education, and participated in political work. In telling these stories, Nunley places Black women at the vanguard of the history of Washington, D.C., and the momentous transformations of nineteenth-century America.

This book gathers a set of reflections on the gift of beauty and the passion of being. There is something surprising about beauty that we receive and that moves the passion of being in us. The book takes issue with an ambiguous attitude to beauty among some who proclaim their advanced aesthetic authenticity. Beauty seems bland and lacks the more visceral thrill of the ugly, indeed the excremental. We crave what disrupts and provokes us, not what gives delight or even consoles. By contrast, attention is given to how beauty arouses enigmatic joy in us, and we enjoy an elemental rapport with it as other. Surprised by beauty, our breath is taken away, but we are more truly there with the beautiful when we are taken outside of ourselves. We are first receivers of the gift of surprise and only then perceivers and conceivers. My attention to the passion of being stresses a patience, a receptivity to what is other. What happens is not first our construction. There is something given, something awakening, something delighting, something energizing, something of invitation to transcendence. The theme is amplified in diverse reflections: on life and its transient beauty; on soul music and its relation to self; on the shine on things given in creation; on beauty and Schopenhauer's dark origin; on creativity and the dynamis in Paul Weiss's creative ventures; on redemption in Romanticism in the thought of Stanley Cavell; on theater as a between or metaxu; on redeeming laughter and its connection with the passion of being.

From the author of the bestselling Anam Cara comes a beautiful collection of blessings to help readers through both the everyday and the extraordinary events of their lives. John O’Donohue, Irish teacher and poet, has been widely praised for his gift of drawing on Celtic spiritual traditions to create words of inspiration and wisdom for today. In To Bless the Space Between Us, his compelling blend of elegant, poetic language and spiritual insight offers readers comfort and encouragement on their journeys through life. O’Donohue looks at life’s thresholds—getting married, having children, starting a new job—and offers invaluable guidelines for making the transition from a known, familiar world into a new, unmapped territory. Most profoundly, however, O’Donohue explains “blessing” as a way of life, as a lens through which the whole world is transformed. O’Donohue awakens readers to timeless truths and shows the power they have to answer contemporary dilemmas and ease us through periods of change.

Based in the riches of Christian worship and tradition, this brief, eloquently written introduction to Christian thinking and worldview helps readers put back together again faith and reason, truth and beauty, and the fragmented academic disciplines. By reclaiming the classic liberal arts and viewing disciplines such as science and mathematics through a poetic lens, the author explains that unity is present within diversity. Now repackaged with a new foreword by Ken Myers, this book will continue to benefit parents, homeschoolers, lifelong learners, Christian students, and readers interested in the history of ideas.

This book tells the story of how Suzanne, a young Waldorf teacher, struggles with the changes her class is going through. The problems she and parents must deal with are familiar to all parents--drug use, smoking, lack of responsiveness, rebelliousness, and moodiness. In this compassionate and wise guidebook, we accompany Suzanne in her sincere efforts to help her students as she talks to other faculty menmers and to parents, gradually adapting her teaching to the students' changing needs. She learns from an older mentor, whose guidance is based on the educational methods and spiritual insights presented by Rudolf Steiner, whose perspective gives adolescence a new, more meaningful face. Understanding adolescent changes as part of our human destiny and our development toward individuality helps us guide young people as they take their first steps on the road to independence.

'A wild, sleazy, drug-filled odyssey ... Doyle's maverick novel deserves the accolades coming its way' Independent 'The best work to date from a writer who gets better and better with each release' Irish Indepdendent 'A masterclass in what not to do' New Statesman 'His best book so far: riddling, irreverent, fearless' TLS Rob has spent most of his confusing adult life wandering, writing, and imbibing literature and narcotics in equally vast doses. Now, stranded between reckless youth and middle age, between exaltation and despair, his travels have acquired a de facto purpose: the immemorial quest for transcendent meaning. On a lurid pilgrimage for cheap thrills and universal truth, Doyle's narrator takes us from the menacing peripheries of Paris to the drug-fuelled clubland of Berlin, from art festivals to sun-kissed islands, through metaphysical awakenings in Asia and the brink of destruction in Europe, into the shattering revelations brought on by the psychedelic DMT. A dazzling, intimate, and profound celebration of art and ageing, sex and desire, the limits of thought and the extremes of sensation, Threshold confirms Doyle as one of the most original writers in contemporary literature.

Presents the findings of the Carnegie Foundation study on adolescence, an interdisciplinary synthesis of research into the biological, social, and psychological changes occurring during this key stage in the life span. Focuses on the contexts of adolescent life-- social and ethnic, family and school, leisure and work.