A Potent Spell

A Potent Spell
Author: Janna Malamud Smith
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2004-06-08
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 9780618446735

Every parent has felt that certain dread: your toddler gets lost in the mall; your teenager isn't home by curfew; your third-grader walks to school alone. The psychotherapist Janna Malamud Smith rigorously argues that fear of child loss has the keenest effect on mothers and has proven to be a powerfuly underrated motivation for them throughout history. Bearing the brunt of responsibility for keeping children safe and healthy, mothers constantly accommodate to the need to be vigilant. Their fears make them vulnerable in many ways, affecting their daily lives in the workplace, at home, and within the social hierarchy. Smith takes the long view of this phenomenon, uncovering a buried message to mothers in advice books from the days of the Puritans to the present, in medicine and psychology, in art and literature. It is a history brimming with mothers' stories from ancient times to today. Like Arlie Hochschild's The Second Shift and Ann Crittenden's The Price of Motherhood, A Potent Spell confirms women's real experience of motherhood in America.

Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company

Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company
Author: John Wyver
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2019-06-27
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1350006599

No theatre company has been involved in such a broad range of adaptations for television and cinema as the Royal Shakespeare Company. Starting with Richard III filmed in the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre before World War One, the RSC's accomplishments continue today with highly successful live cinema broadcasts. The Wars of the Roses (BBC, 1965), Peter Brook's film of King Lear (1971), Channel 4's epic version of Nicholas Nickleby (1982) and Hamlet with David Tennant (BBC, 2009) are among their most iconic adaptations. Many other RSC productions live on as extracts in documentaries, as archival recordings, in trailers and in other fragmentary forms. Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company explores this remarkable history of collaborations between stage and screen and considers key questions about adaptation that concern all those involved in theatre, film and television. John Wyver is a broadcasting historian and the producer of RSC Live from Stratford-upon-Avon, and is uniquely well-placed to provide a vivid account of the company's television and film productions. He contributes an award-winning practitioner's insight into screen adaptation's numerous challenges and rich potential.

The Actor and His Body

The Actor and His Body
Author: Litz Pisk
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 123
Release: 2017-11-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1474269753

'Once you start working with someone like Litz you don't ever want to stop if you can help it' - Vanessa Redgrave Litz Pisk was widely regarded as the most influential teacher of modern theatre movement of the 20th Century. She innovated and advocated a physical training that sought to combine awareness, emotion and imagination specifically for the actor's craft. Her seminal book, The Actor and His Body, is the direct result of her unique dual career as a professional movement director and as an actor movement teacher working in leading British conservatoires. Pisk's quest was to find expression for the inner impulse that motivated actors to move. Her teachings, as outlined in this book, offer insight on the specific craft of the actor, and the relationship between movement, imagination and the 'need' to move. The Actor and His Body is also a practical manual for keeping the actor's body physically and expressively responsive. In addition, there are a range of movement exercises, illuminated by her exquisite line drawings, and a complete weekly programme which concentrates on movement practice within different timescales. This fourth edition features the original foreword by Michael Elliot as well as a new introduction by Ayse Tashkiran, contemporary movement director and Senior Lecturer at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, which contextualises Pisk's work.

The Virgin in Song

The Virgin in Song
Author: Thomas Arentzen
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2017-05-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0812249070

In The Virgin in Song, Thomas Arentzen explores the characterization of Mary in the songs of Romanos the Melodist, one of the greatest liturgical poets of Byzantium. Romanos's hymns shaped a figure, Arentzen argues, who related intimately to her flock in a formative period of Christian orthodoxy.

Affect and Emotion in Multi-Religious Secular Societies

Affect and Emotion in Multi-Religious Secular Societies
Author: Christian von Scheve
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2019-09-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 135113325X

Emotions have moved center stage in many contemporary debates over religious diversity and multicultural recognition. As in other contested fields, emotions are often one-sidedly discussed as quintessentially subjective and individual phenomena, neglecting their social and cultural constitution. Moreover, emotionality in these debates is frequently attributed to the religious subject alone, disregarding the affective anatomy of the secular. This volume addresses these shortcomings, bringing into conversation a variety of disciplinary perspectives on religious and secular affect and emotion. The volume emphasizes two analytical perspectives: on the one hand, chapters take an immanent perspective, focusing on subjective feelings and emotions in relation to the religious and the secular. On the other hand, chapters take a relational perspective, looking at the role of affect and emotion in how the religious and the secular constitute one another. These perspectives cut across the three main parts of the volume: the first one addressing historical intertwinements of religion and emotion, the second part emphasizing affects, emotions, and religiosity, and the third part looking at specific sensibilities of the secular. The thirteen chapters provide a well-balanced composition of theoretical, methodological, and empirical approaches to these areas of inquiry, discussing both historical and contemporary cases.

Pure Silk

Pure Silk
Author: Susan Johnson
Publisher: Zebra Books
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2011-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1575668106

DESPERATE1868, Northern Japan. When her father's forces fall to the imperial army, Tama has no choice but to escape before her enemies find her. Disguised as a peasant boy, she makes her way to the city's pleasure quarter--where anything and anyone is for sale and no request is forbidden. There she finds the one man who can protect her, and she's willing to pay him handsomely, in whatever currency he desires . . .INTRIGUEDTaking on a daimyo's beautiful daughter seemed a fine idea at the time, but now, dodging assassins, spies, and police, Hugh has second thoughts. But once Tama is in his bed, the captain is overcome by his desire to protect her--and ravage her--in equal measure . . .UNCONTROLLEDIn a country teeming with danger, the line between royalty and commoner will melt under passion's heat. Strangers will become lovers, and uninhibited pleasure will offer love's only refuge . . .

Cactus of Mystery

Cactus of Mystery
Author: Ross Heaven
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2012-11-16
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1594775133

The history of San Pedro and its uses for healing, creativity, and conscious evolution • Includes interviews with practicing San Pedro shamans on their rituals, cactus preparations, and teachings on how San Pedro heals the mind and body • Contains accounts from people who have been healed by San Pedro • Includes chapters by Eve Bruce, M.D., and David Luke, Ph.D., on San Pedro’s effects on psychic abilities and its similarities to and differences from ayahuasca San Pedro, the legendary cactus of vision, has been used by the shamans of Peru for at least 3,500 years. Referring to St. Peter, who holds the keys to Heaven, its name is suggestive of the plant’s visionary power to open the gates between the visible and invisible worlds, allowing passage to an ecstatic realm where miraculous physical and spiritual healings occur, love and enthusiasm for life are rekindled, the future divined, and the soul’s purpose revealed. Exploring the history and shamanic uses of the San Pedro cactus, Ross Heaven interviews practicing San Pedro shamans about ancient and modern rituals, preparation of the visionary brew, experiences with the healing spirit of San Pedro, and their teachings on how the cactus works on the mind, body, and illness. He investigates the conditions treated by San Pedro as well as how it can enhance creativity, providing case studies from those who have been healed by the cactus and accounts from those who have been artistically and musically inspired through its use. Psychedelic researchers Eve Bruce, M.D., David Luke, Ph.D., and journalist Morgan Maher contribute chapters delving into San Pedro’s effects on conscious evolution and psychic abilities as well as its similarities to and differences from ayahuasca. Exploring plant communication and the vital role of music in San Pedro ceremonies, Heaven explains how healing songs are communicated by the sacred plants to the shamans working with them, much in the same way that other gifts of San Pedro--from healing to inspiration to expanded consciousness--are passed to those who commune with this ancient plant teacher.

The Understory

The Understory
Author: Lore Ferguson Wilbert
Publisher: Baker Books
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2024-05-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1493446479

"Walk in the woods with me." That's the invitation award-winning author Lore Ferguson Wilbert extends to readers in The Understory. On this journey, Wilbert shares her story of alienation and disorientation after years of religious and political unrest in the evangelical church. In doing so, she looks to an unlikely place--the forest--to learn how to live and even thrive when everything seems to be falling apart. What can we learn from eroding soil, the decomposition process, the time it takes to grow lichen, the beauty of fiddlehead ferns, the regeneration of self-sowing seeds, and walking through the mud? Here, among the understory of the forest, Wilbert discovers rich metaphors for living a rooted and flourishing life within the complex ecosystems of our world. Her tenderness and honesty will help readers grieve, remember, hope, and press on with resilience.

Boasians at War

Boasians at War
Author: Anthony Q. Hazard, Jr.
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2020-04-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030408825

This volume seeks to recover a specific historical moment within the tradition of anthropologists trained in the United States under Franz Boas, arguably the father of modern American anthropology. Focusing on Boasians Ashley Montagu, Margaret Mead, Melville Herskovits, and Ruth Benedict, Anthony Hazard highlights the extent to which the Boasians offer historicized explanations of racism that move beyond a quest to reshape only the discipline: Boasian war work pointed to the histories of chattel slavery and colonialism to theorize not just race, but the emergence of racism as both systemic and interpersonal. The realities of race that continue to plague the United States have direct ties to the anthropological work of the figures examined here, particularly within the context of the 20th-century black freedom struggle. Ultimately, Boasians at War offers a detailed glimpse of the long troubled history of the concept of race, along with the real-life realities of racism, that have carried on despite the harnessing of scientific knowledge to combat both.