Provides an analysis of the powerful role played by folk culture in 3 major African American novels of the early 20th century: "The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man", "Jonah's Gourd Vine", and "Black Thunder". This book explains how the survival of cultural traditions originating in Africa and in slavery became a means of historical reflection.

In this New York Times bestselling “imperative how-to for creativity” (Nick Offerman), Adam Savage—star of Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters—shares his golden rules of creativity, from finding inspiration to following through and successfully making your idea a reality. Every Tool’s a Hammer is a chronicle of my life as a maker. It’s an exploration of making, but it’s also a permission slip of sorts from me to you. Permission to grab hold of the things you’re interested in, that fascinate you, and to dive deeper into them to see where they lead you. Through stories from forty-plus years of making and molding, building and break­ing, along with the lessons I learned along the way, this book is meant to be a toolbox of problem solving, complete with a shop’s worth of notes on the tools, techniques, and materials that I use most often. Things like: In Every Tool There Is a Hammer—don’t wait until everything is perfect to begin a project, and if you don’t have the exact right tool for a task, just use whatever’s handy; Increase Your Loose Tolerance—making is messy and filled with screwups, but that’s okay, as creativity is a path with twists and turns and not a straight line to be found; Use More Cooling Fluid—it prolongs the life of blades and bits, and it prevents tool failure, but beyond that it’s a reminder to slow down and reduce the fric­tion in your work and relationships; Screw Before You Glue—mechanical fasteners allow you to change and modify a project while glue is forever but sometimes you just need the right glue, so I dig into which ones will do the job with the least harm and best effects. This toolbox also includes lessons from many other incredible makers and creators, including: Jamie Hyneman, Nick Offerman, Pixar director Andrew Stanton, Oscar-winner Guillermo del Toro, artist Tom Sachs, and chef Traci Des Jardins. And if everything goes well, we will hopefully save you a few mistakes (and maybe fingers) as well as help you turn your curiosities into creations. I hope this book serves as “creative rocket fuel” (Ed Helms) to build, make, invent, explore, and—most of all—enjoy the thrills of being a creator.

Beloved picture book creator David Shannon introduces a new character in a satisfyingly silly and subversive take on a familiar parable. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Meet Mr. Nogginbody. Armed with his new hammer he fixes his floor then the wall and the picture on the wall and the shower and the stop sign at the end of the street. . . What else will Mr. Nogginbody “fix”? Celebrated author David Shannon’s comically misguided new character gets carried away by success, and kids will laugh out loud at the consequences.

How the ordering of the sensible world continues to suggest a reality that no notes or letters can fully transcribe. An ancient tradition holds that Pythagoras discovered the secrets of harmony within a forge when he came across five men hammering with five hammers, producing a wondrous sound. Four of the five hammers stood in a marvelous set of proportions, harmonizing; but there was also a fifth hammer. Pythagoras saw and heard it, but he could not measure it; nor could he understand its discordant sound. Pythagoras therefore discarded it. What was this hammer, such that Pythagoras chose so decidedly to reject it? Since antiquity, "harmony" has been a name for more than a theory of musical sounds; it has offered a paradigm for the scientific understanding of the natural world. Nature, through harmony, has been transcribed in the ideal signs of mathematics. But, time and again, the transcription has run up against one fundamental limit: something in nature resists being written down, transcribed in a stable set of ideal elements. A fifth hammer, obstinately, continues to sound. In eight chapters, linked together as are the tones of a single scale, The Fifth Hammer explores the sounds and echoes of that troubling percussion as they make themselves felt on the most varied of attempts to understand and represent the natural world. From music to metaphysics, aesthetics to astronomy, and from Plato and Boethius to Kepler, Leibniz, and Kant, this book explores the ways in which the ordering of the sensible world has continued to suggest a reality that no notes or letters can fully transcribe.

A groundbreaking contribution to the history of the "long Civil Rights movement," Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality. The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals. After discussing the book's origins and impact in a new preface written for this twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Kelley reflects on what a militantly antiracist, radical movement in the heart of Dixie might teach contemporary social movements confronting rampant inequality, police violence, mass incarceration, and neoliberalism.

Beginning readers will explore how hammers pound in and pull out nails. A back matter spread explains how hammers are one kind of simple machine: a lever.

“The first satisfying end-of-the-world novel in years . . . an ultimate one . . . massively entertaining.”—Cleveland Plain-Dealer The gigantic comet had slammed into Earth, forging earthquakes a thousand times too powerful to measure on the Richter scale, tidal waves thousands of feet high. Cities were turned into oceans; oceans turned into steam. It was the beginning of a new Ice Age and the end of civilization. But for the terrified men and women chance had saved, it was also the dawn of a new struggle for survival—a struggle more dangerous and challenging than any they had ever known. . . . “Take your earthquakes, waterlogged condominiums, swarms of bugs, colliding airplanes and flaming what-nots, wrap them up and they wouldn’t match one page of Lucifer’s Hammer for sweaty-palmed suspense.”—Chicago Daily News

Sepher Yetzira is a second or third century Hebrew book that is considered to be the seminal work of Kabbalah because it is a mystical interpretation of the Old Testament's creation story, and Kabbalists delve beneath the surface of the Bible to understand the unspoken mysteries of how the world came to be. Ancient Secrets of Creation is a new translation and reinterpretation of Sepher Yetzira that provides the answers to questions about how God created the world, especially how the expression, "And God said" is used. Because of Sepher Yetzira's succinctness and the passage of time, its implicit meanings have been lost. However, this work provides a fresh understanding of Sepher Yetzira by rediscovering and clearly explaining those mathematical, scientific, philosophical, and theological foundations on which it rests. These include pertinent pre-Socratic Greek philosophies; the ideas of Plato, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Neopythagoreanism, and Neoplatonism; as well as the works of Philo of Alexandria, the Old Testament, and rabbinic understandings at the time that Sepher Yetzira was written. This translation and explication unlock the secrets hidden within the Hebrew-language text of Sepher Yetzira, the book that started Kabbalah.

Once they were heroes, but the age of heroes has long since passed. Banished from existence by a multiversal crisis, the old champions of Spiral City--Abraham Slam, Golden Gail, Colonel Weird, Madame Dragonfly, and Barbalien--now lead simple lives in an idyllic, timeless farming village from which there is no escape! But as they employ all of their super abilities to free themselves from this strange purgatory, a mysterious stranger works to bring them back into action for one last adventure! Collects Black Hammer #1-#6. The first chapter in Jeff Lemire (The Underwater Welder, The Complete Essex County, Animal Man) and Dean Ormston's (Lucifer) acclaimed series! “I don’t read many comics these days, and I can’t remember the last time I read a superhero comic, but I’m loving Black Hammer.” – Mike Mignola “Black Hammer is easily one of Lemire’s best creations.” – Scott Snyder “Amazing. Just flat-out amazing.” – Patton Oswalt

Readers learn basic addition with a catchy version of this traditional song. Colorful, contemporary illustrations support the basic lyrics, and kids can sing and read along as Johnny adds hammers and workers to accomplish a big project! Johnny Works with One Hammer is aligned with Early Learning Math Standards. This hardcover book comes with CD and online music access.