In May and June each year, famous and important people are invited to address high school and college graduations. As I was reading about school graduations, I wondered what I would say if I were ask to speak at a gradation program. Being a minister, I decided to devote my Sunday morning sermons to subjects I thought might be appropriate. Each chapter of the book came from those Sunday morning sermons. Graduation is the finishing of one part of life and the beginning of a new phase of life. Success in new ventures is determined by following key principles. The aim of this book is to provide students and graduates with stepping stones for success in life.
Set in the suburban shadows of New York City as the 1980s crash into the '90s, The punk and the professor brings us into the troubled world of a young introvert. Jack Tortis is an underdog branded as a punk in a place where sameness is celebrated. Destined to be a dropout laborer like his estranged father, he clings to hope and fights against a tide of dysfunction as obstacles spring up around him. In a battle for survival, Jack is faced with three options--fall into the street life, join the world of service labor, or fight his way through school"--Page 4 of cover.
Revisits the work of Rick Turner, a South African political theorist, and addresses contemporary debates Rick Turner was a South African academic and anti-apartheid activist who rebelled against the apartheid state at the height of its power. For this he was assassinated in 1978, at just 32 years of age, but his life and work are testimony to the power of philosophical thinking for humans everywhere. Turner chose to live freely in an unfree time and argued for a non-racial, socialist future in a context where this seemed unimaginable. This book takes seriously Rick Turner’s challenge that political theorising requires thinking in a utopian way. Turner’s seminal book The Eye of the Need: Towards a Participatory Democracy laid out some of his most potent ideas on a radically different political and economic system. His demand was that we work to escape the limiting ideas of the present, carefully design a just future based on shared human values, and act to make it a reality, both politically and in our daily lives. The contributors to this volume engage critically with Turner’s work on race relations, his relationship with Steve Biko, his views on religion, education and gender oppression, his participatory model of democracy, and his critique of enduring forms of poverty and economic inequality. They show how, in his life and work, Turner modeled how we can dare to be free and how hope can return, as the future always remains open to human construction. This book makes an important contribution to contemporary thinking and activism where the need for South Africans to define their understanding of their greater common good is of crucial importance.
Bruce Weber in the New York Times called Billy Collins “the most popular poet in America.” He is the author of many books of poetry, including, most recently, The Rain in Portugal: Poems. In 1988 the University of Arkansas Press published Billy Collins’s The Apple That Astonished Paris, his “first real book of poems,” as he describes it in a new, delightful preface written expressly for this new printing to help celebrate both the Press’s twenty-fifth anniversary and this book, one of the Press’s all-time best sellers. In his usual witty and dry style, Collins writes, “I gathered together what I considered my best poems and threw them in the mail.” After “what seemed like a very long time” Press director Miller Williams, a poet as well, returned the poems to him in the “familiar self-addressed, stamped envelope.” He told Collins that there was good work here but that there was work to be done before he’d have a real collection he and the Press could be proud of: “Williams’s words were more encouragement than I had ever gotten before and more than enough to inspire me to begin taking my writing more seriously than I had before.” This collection includes some of Collins’s most anthologized poems, including “Introduction to Poetry,” “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House,” and “Advice to Writers.” Its success over the years is testament to Collins’s talent as one of our best poets, and as he writes in the preface, “this new edition . . . is a credit to the sustained vibrancy of the University of Arkansas Press and, I suspect, to the abiding spirit of its former director, my first editorial father.”
A Billy Collins poem is instantly recognizable His everyman approach to writing resonates with readers everywhere and generates fans who would otherwise never give a poem a second glance. Now, in this stunning new collection, Collins touches on a greater array of subjects - love, death, solitude, youth, and aging - delving deeper than ever before. Ballistics comes at the reader full force with moving and playful takes on life. As Collins strives to find truth in the smallest detail, readers are given a fascinating, intimate glimpse into the heart and soul of a brilliantly thoughtful man and exemplary poet.--BOOK JACKET.
Billy Collins is one of America's best loved poets. From a poem about the relentless barking of next door's dog - "Another Reason Why I don't Keep a Gun in the House" - to an elegy to "The Best Cigarette".
A collection of poems from the US Poet Laureate. While Billy Collins' poems often begin in the everyday and domestic, they might end anywhere - and readers might lift their heads from the book to a world startlingly different from the one they had left moments before.
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