The subject of this modern classic is not a man. "It is an event," says Jules Romains, who is considered "the French Dos Passos." The event starts with the death of Jacques Godard, a man of no importance. It unfolds through his brief survival in the minds of others - the porter of his tenement in Paris, his fellow lodgers, a few acquaintances, his old father, who comes up from the country for the funeral, a young stranger who feels that the dead pass into "a great soul that cannot die." The event expresses Romains's belief in "collective beings," the famous theory of "Unanimism." In dramatizing his theory, Romains developed an advanced motion-picture technique when films were in their infancy, a technique of group portraits and sudden shifts from scene to scene that keeps this work far ahead of conventional novels. Here, Romains explores the ideas and the devices used in his twenty-seven-volume masterpiece, Men of Good Will, which André Maurois calls "the boldest attempt to describe completely his own time that any French novelist has made since Balzac."

Rogerson's Book of Numbers tells the stories behind our iconic numbers. It is based on a numerical array of virtues, spiritual attributes, gods, devils, sacred cities, powers, calendars, heroes, saints, icons and cultural symbols. It provides a dazzling mass of information for those intrigued by the many roles numbers play in folklore and popular culture, in music and poetry, and in the many religions, cultures and belief systems of our world. The stories unfold from millions to zero: from the number of the beast (666) to the seven deadly sins, the twelve signs of the zodiac to the four suits of a pack of cards. Along the way you will discover why Genghis Khan built a city of 108 towers, how Dante forged his Divine Comedy on the number eleven, and why thirteen is so unlucky in the west while fourteen is the number to avoid in China. Now available as a paperback, this is your pocket-book guide to the numerical mysteries of the universe.

A compassionate, shame-free guide for your darkest days “A one-of-a-kind book . . . to read for yourself or give to a struggling friend or loved one without the fear that depression and suicidal thoughts will be minimized, medicalized or over-spiritualized.”—Kay Warren, cofounder of Saddleback Church What happens when loving Jesus doesn’t cure you of depression, anxiety, or suicidal thoughts? You might be crushed by shame over your mental illness, only to be told by well-meaning Christians to “choose joy” and “pray more.” So you beg God to take away the pain, but nothing eases the ache inside. As darkness lingers and color drains from your world, you’re left wondering if God has abandoned you. You just want a way out. But there’s hope. In I Love Jesus, But I Want to Die, Sarah J. Robinson offers a healthy, practical, and shame-free guide for Christians struggling with mental illness. With unflinching honesty, Sarah shares her story of battling depression and fighting to stay alive despite toxic theology that made her afraid to seek help outside the church. Pairing her own story with scriptural insights, mental health research, and simple practices, Sarah helps you reconnect with the God who is present in our deepest anguish and discover that you are worth everything it takes to get better. Beautifully written and full of hard-won wisdom, I Love Jesus, But I Want to Die offers a path toward a rich, hope-filled life in Christ, even when healing doesn’t look like what you expect.

Sunday dinners, basement kitchens, and backyard gardens are everyday cultural entities long associated with Italian Americans, yet the general perception of them remains superficial and stereotypical at best. For many people, these scenarios trigger ingrained assumptions about individuals' beliefs, politics, aesthetics, values, and behaviors that leave little room for nuance and elaboration. This collection of essays explores local knowledge and aesthetic practices, often marked as "folklore," as sources for creativity and meaning in Italian-American lives. As the contributors demonstrate, folklore provides contemporary scholars with occasions for observing and interpreting behaviors and objects as part of lived experiences. Its study provides new ways of understanding how individuals and groups reproduce and contest identities and ideologies through expressive means. Italian Folk offers an opportunity to reexamine and rethink what we know about Italian Americans. The contributors to this unique book discuss historic and contemporary cultural expressions and religious practices from various parts of the United States and Canada to examine how they operate at local, national, and transnational levels. The essays attest to people's ability and willingness to create and reproduce certain cultural modes that connect them to social entities such as the family, the neighborhood, and the amorphous and fleeting communities that emerge in large-scale festivals and now on the Internet. Italian Americans abandon, reproduce, and/or revive various cultural elements in relationship to ever-shifting political, economic, and social conditions. The results are dynamic, hybrid cultural forms such as valtaro accordion music, Sicilian oral poetry, a Columbus Day parade, and witchcraft (stregheria). By taking a closer look and an ethnographic approach to expressive behavior, we see that Italian-American identity is far from being a linear path of assimilation from Italian immigrant to American of Italian descent but is instead fraught with conflict, negotiation, and creative solutions. Together, these essays illustrate how folklore is evoked in the continual process of identity revaluation and reformation.

“A perceptive and gripping biography” of the enigmatic British explorer, photographer, and author of Arabian Sands (Daily Mail, UK). Wilfred Thesiger, the last of the great gentlemen explorer-adventurers, journeyed for sixty years to some of the remotest, most dangerous places on earth, from the mountains of western Asia to the marshes of Iraq. The author of Arabian Sands, The Marsh Arabs and The Life of my Choice, he was a legend in his own lifetime. Yet his character and motivations have remained an intriguing enigma. In this authorized biography—written with Thesiger’s support before he died in 2003 and with unique access to the rich Thesiger archive—Alexander Maitland investigates this fascinating figure’s family influences, his wartime experiences, his philosophy as a hunter and conservationist, his writing and photography, his friendships with Arabs and Africans amongst whom he lived, and his now-acknowledged homosexuality.

As a writer, Carlo Levi has had the misfortune to be known as the author of one book, Christ Stopped at Eboli, the account of his years of internal banishment by the Fascist authorities to a remote village in the south of Italy. That book was recognised as a masterpiece of anti-Fascist literature and as a sensitive investigation of the way of life of a people at the margins of European civilisation. It enjoyed enormous success in the post-war period not only in Italy but also in Britain and the USA, and has been continuously in print since its first publication. However, Levi was also a painter of some repute, a novelist, a journalist, a critic of art and society, a political commentator, and above all, a wholly idiosyncratic travel writer whose reports on the countries and regions he visited, including Sicily, Sardinia, Germany, the USSR and India, were also reflections on Italy. This book attempts to assess the totality of Levi's achievement. Come scrittore, Carlo Levi ha avuto la sfortuna di essere celebrato come autore di un libro solo, Cristo si è fermato ad Eboli, la narrativa dei suoi anni di confino nel Mezzogiorno sotto il regime fascista. Sin dal momento della sua pubblicazione nel primo dopoguerra, questo libro è stato riconosciuto come capolavoro della letteratura anti-fascista e come indagine penetrante della cultura di un popolo ai margini della civiltà europea. Comunque, Levi fu anche pittore di grande talento, romanziere, critico d'arte, critico della società, commentatore politico e viaggiatore-scrittore di libri di viaggi sui generis. I suoi articoli, che poi divennero libri, sui paesi e sulle regioni che visitò - la Sicilia, la Sardegna, la Germania e l'India - si rivelarono anche riflessioni sulla condizione dell'Italia. Questa raccolta di saggi è una rivalutazione della totalità delle opere di Carlo Levi.