Apparently, this freaky phenomenon of stepping into someone else’s life—and their body!—has a name: Temp Lifer. Thanks to my dead grandmother, it’s happened again. So now I’m hungover and gazing in the mirror at ... my boyfriend’s sister. Grammy, help!

Challenging conventional understandings of time and memory, Christopher T. Nelson examines how contemporary Okinawans have contested, appropriated, and transformed the burdens and possibilities of the past. Nelson explores the work of a circle of Okinawan storytellers, ethnographers, musicians, and dancers deeply engaged with the legacies of a brutal Japanese colonial era, the almost unimaginable devastation of the Pacific War, and a long American military occupation that still casts its shadow over the islands. The ethnographic research that Nelson conducted in Okinawa in the late 1990s—and his broader effort to understand Okinawans’ critical and creative struggles—was inspired by his first visit to the islands in 1985 as a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps. Nelson analyzes the practices of specific performers, showing how memories are recalled, bodies remade, and actions rethought as Okinawans work through fragments of the past in order to reconstruct the fabric of everyday life. Artists such as the popular Okinawan actor and storyteller Fujiki Hayato weave together genres including Japanese stand-up comedy, Okinawan celebratory rituals, and ethnographic studies of war memory, encouraging their audiences to imagine other ways to live in the modern world. Nelson looks at the efforts of performers and activists to wrest the Okinawan past from romantic representations of idyllic rural life in the Japanese media and reactionary appropriations of traditional values by conservative politicians. In his consideration of eisā, the traditional dance for the dead, Nelson finds a practice that reaches beyond the expected boundaries of mourning and commemoration, as the living and the dead come together to create a moment in which a new world might be built from the ruins of the old.

Turn off your lights, get ready for frights! When the clock strikes midnight and the moon's full and bright, it's time for dread and fear. For Mr. Midnight is here with two stories, double the danger and twice the terror! STORY ONE: The world's most feared ghost, The Ballerina, haunts Sherilyn Sum's ballet school and casts an evil spell on her. Can Sherilyn escape and save her soul while THE DEAD ARE DANCING? STORY TWO: Computer wiz Yue Jie and his friends call themselves the Brave Devils. But when they journey to the United States in search of the OLD GHOSTS OF NEW YORK, their courage is tested as they battle horrors beyond their wildest imagination.

This acclaimed graphic memoir that Kirkus calls “cathartic and uplifting” is the tale of losing a parent and what it feels like to grieve and to move forward. “I can’t recommend this kind, funny, and poignant memoir enough. It’s an intimate, life-affirming story of resilience that feels like a good friend.” —Mari Andrew, author of Am I There Yet? Tyler Feder had just white-knuckled her way through her first year of college when her super cool mom was diagnosed with late-stage cancer. Now, with a decade of grief and nervous laughter under her belt, Tyler shares the story of that gut-wrenching, heart-pounding, extremely awkward time in her life—from her mom’s first oncology appointment to her funeral through the beginning of facing reality as a motherless daughter. She shares the sting of loss that never goes away, the uncomfortable post-death firsts, and the deep-down, hard-to-talk-about feelings of the grieving process. Dancing at the Pity Party is a frank and refreshingly funny look at what it’s like to grieve—for anyone struggling with loss who just wants someone to get it.

"Dancing at the Dead Sea is a powerful narrative on the critically important topic of the world's environmental hotspots. This is not a pessimistic tirade, but instead a factual commentary that will convince many, written by a gifted writer with an independent mind. I recommend this book without reservation." Richard Leakey Alanna Mitchell, winner of the Global Reuters IUCN media award for excellence in environmental reporting, embarks on an incredible worldwide cultural and environmental odyssey, zeroing in on environmental hotspots and examines how we can live, even flourish, without destroying the planet. One hundred and fifty years after the publication of The Origin of Species, Mitchell retraces the development of evolutionary theory, grappling with Richard Leakey's contention that the extinction of the human species is well under way. How and why are we human beings shortening our time on Earth? Travelling to the last living Eden, Madagascar, Mitchell is witness to the destruction of all but 10 percent of the original forest, not due to industrial activity but woodcutting by a primitive society still dependent on fire as its main energy resource. She then moves on to the badlands of Alberta, where she draws on the theory of world-famous paleontologist Philip Currie and the extinction of dinosaurs to gain insight on humanitys own impending suicide. Travel to the Azraq Oasis in Jordan, the meeting place of Africa, Asia and Europe, the mythical Galapagos Islands, seemingly unspoiled, but not immune to degradation, the far north and the Arctic desert of Banks Island, one of the first places on Earth where climate change with global impact is visible. Like the work of Wade Davis or books such as Krakatoa by Simon Winchester and Four Wings and a Prayer by Sue Halpern, Dancing at the Dead Sea intertwines scientific theory with travel adventure and history, creating a dramatic, fresh narrative voice examining not the origin, but the ultimate fate of the human species. (April 2004)

A fascinating exploration of an ancient system of beliefs and its links to the evolution of dance. From Southern Greece to northern Russia, people living in agrarian communities have long believed in “dancing goddesses,” mystical female spirits who spend their nights and days dancing in the fields and forests. In The Dancing Goddesses, archaeologist, linguist, and lifelong folkdancer Elizabeth Wayland Barber follows the trail of these spirit maidens—long associated with fertility, marriage customs, and domestic pursuits—from their early appearance in traditional folktales and harvest rituals to their more recent incarnations in fairytales and present-day dance. Illustrated with photographs, maps, and line drawings, the result is a brilliantly original work that stands at the intersection of archaeology and folk traditions—at once a rich portrait of our rich agrarian ancestry and an enchanting reminder of the human need to dance.

". . . known as ‘The Poet Priestess of the Spirit of New Orleans’ Bloody Mary is a true spokeswoman of her hometown . . .” —Southern Women Magazine In 15 compelling chapters, Bloody Mary shares with readers her experiences with the ghosts and haunted happenings of New Orleans. Among the tales of the supernatural are: A visit to a haunted sanitarium A meeting with Julie the Ghost of Forbidden Love The story of Madame La Laurie, La Vampyra Meetings with Jean Lafitte, the Gentleman Pirate Encounters with the ghosts in New Orleans graveyards Each chapter ends with “Afterlife Lessons and Warnings” that help readers navigate the seen and the unseen worlds. What makes these stories particularly engaging is Bloody Mary herself. She is not only a psychic investigator, she is also a psychic healer offering healing and kindness to spirits that walk the earth and also helping readers find spiritual lessons in encounters with the spirit world.

The age of high tech is haunted by an image from the last century that developed in the three decades between the patenting of the cinematographe and its turn toward sound: the dancing machine, paradox of the ease of mechanization and its tortures, embodiment of the motor and the automaton, image of fusion and fragmentation. An excavation of this image, in the historical context of maximum productivity and mechanical reproducibility, reveals its development in European Modernism--Modernism drawn to dancers of American, African, and Asian origins, to Taylorism as well as to Primitivism, to cinema and to myth. This book traces the abstraction and anonymity of the bodies making machines dance, in the codes of modernisms graphic and choreographic, and in the streamlined gestures of industry, avant-garde art, and entertainment. What surfaces is dance’s centrality to machine aesthetics and to its alternatives, as well as to the early elaboration of the machine that would become the ultimate guarantor of modern dance’s de-mechanization, the motion picture camera.

DIVDIV /divDIVAn amateur ballroom dancer is targeted by a serial killer in this riveting mystery by veteran John Lutz/divDIV /divDIVMary Arlington only feels alive when she is dancing. The rest of her life, dominated by a violent boyfriend and a mother intent on drinking herself to death, isn’t worth being awake for, but when she dances the tango her troubles disappear. She’s gotten so good that her studio is taking her to the national competition in Ohio, where she will prove to the world and to herself that her hobby is more than a pastime. That is, if she can stay alive until the music starts to play./divDIV /divDIVAt dance competitions across the country, amateur dancers have been turning up with slit throats. Mary follows the killing spree in the newspapers, morbidly fascinated by the deaths of women so similar to her. When the killer comes for her, she will need more than rhythm to survive./divDIV /divThis ebook features an illustrated biography of John Lutz including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection. /div