Vivid and lyrical, the poems make use of various voices, speakers, and landscapes to explore the surreptitious aspects of fear and indifference, tenderness and fragility.
With The North End Poems, Michael Knox has honed his lucid, accessible poetics to razor sharpness. This book is both gritty and tender - it's also the kind of rare and vivid lyric sequence that creates a desperate but sustained and surprising narrative." "Channeling the beliefs, passions, fears, friends and fights of Nick Macfarlane, a young steeltown warehouse worker, Knox creates the kind of hardscrabble, blue-collar world that exists everywhere. Benders and punchups, beaters and punchclocks, give The North End Poems the means to explore notions of masculinity in both familial and social environs. Because this is a world largely without the presence of women, Nick's perspective takes a significant turn when he meets someone from the other side of the tracks - a university student named Carla who challenges him to think about a life beyond the north end and outside of what he thought possible."--Résumé de l'éditeur.
I have often wondered for what good end the sensations of Grief could be intended." -- Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson suffered during his life from periodic bouts of dejection and despair, shadowed intervals during which he was full of "gloomy forebodings" about what lay ahead. Not long before he composed the Declaration of Independence, the young Jefferson lay for six weeks in idleness and ill health at Monticello, paralyzed by a mysterious "malady." Similar lapses were to recur during anxious periods in his life, often accompanied by violent headaches. In Jefferson's Demons, Michael Knox Beran illuminates an optimistic man's darker side -- Jefferson as we have rarely seen him before. The worst of these moments came after his wife died in 1782. But two years later, after being dispatched to Europe, Jefferson recovered nerve and spirit in the salons of Paris, where he fell in love with a beautiful young artist, Maria Cosway. When their affair ended, Jefferson's health again broke down. He set out for the palms and temples of southern Europe, and though he did not know where the therapeutic journey would take him or where it would end, his encounter with the old civilizations of the Mediterranean was transformative. The Greeks and Romans taught him that a man could make productive use of his demons. Jefferson's immersion in the mystic truths of the Old World gave him insights into mysteries of life and art that Enlightenment philosophy had failed to supply. Beran skillfully shows how Jefferson drew on the esoteric lore he encountered to transform anxiety into action. On his return to America, Jefferson entered the most productive period of his life: He created a new political party, was elected president, and doubled the size of the country. His private labors were no less momentous...among them, the artistry of Monticello and the University of Virginia. Jefferson's Demons is an elegantly composed account of the strangeness and originality of one Founder's genius. Michael Knox Beran uncovers the maps Jefferson used to find his way out of dejection and to forge a new democratic culture for America. Here is a Jefferson who, with all his failings, remains one of his country's greatest teachers and prophets.
Overview In this provocative reassessment of one of the most controversial figures of twentieth-century American politics, Michael Knox Beran shows how Bobby Kennedy was shaped by values of the aristocratic class to which he had been brought up to belong. He was one of them - until he realized that the welfare state they had helped to create at home and the empire they had helped to found abroad were undermining some of America's most cherished traditions. In denouncing the welfare system as a "second-rate set of social services" and "hand-outs," and in questioning the imperial commitments that the patricians made in places like Vietnam, Bobby Kennedy was a prophet who accurately foresaw the changing direction of American politics. Challenging the work of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Jack Newfield, and others, Beran demonstrates that Bobby was neither a pious liberal martyr nor a would-be revolutionary. He was a man who drew on the wisdom of Emerson, the ancient Greeks, and his own father's ideas about the transformative power of free markets - and used them to create a compelling vision of a better America.
This work was originally published prior to the conclusion of the O.J. Simpson murder trial. At that time, California state law made it a crime for jurors and ex-jurors to be paid for writing about their service until 90 days after a trial had ended. That law was found to violate Michael Knox's First Amendment rights, clearing the way for his story to be made public before the trial had ended. Here, Knox reveals that while racial divisions existed on the panel, they were grossly exaggerated. He describes the oppressive, bizarre, and demeaning life of sequestration, where alcohol is prohibited and privacy is nonexistent...even during conjugal visits, jurors worried about having their conversation taped. Knox also explains why he was leaning towards a guilty verdict just prior to his dismissal as a juror.
In the early nineteenth century, a series of murders took place in and around London which shocked the whole of England. The appalling nature of the crimes—a brutal slaying in the gambling netherworld, the slaughter of two entire households, and the first of the modern lust-murders—was magnified not only by the lurid atmosphere of an age in which candlelight gave way to gaslight, but also by the efforts of some of the keenest minds of the period to uncover the gruesomest details of the killings.These slayings took place against the backdrop of a London in which the splendor of the fashionable world was haunted by the squalor of the slums. Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Carlyle, and Percy Bysshe Shelley and others were fascinated by the blood and deviltry of the macabre. In their contemplations of the most notorious murders of their time, they discerned in the act of killing itself a depth of hideousness that we have lost sight of, now living in an age in which murder has been reduced to a problem of social science and skillful detective work. Interweaving these cultural vignettes alongside criminal history, acclaimed author Michael Beran paints a vivid picture of a time when homicide was thought of as the intrusion of the diabolic into ordinary life.
An examination of WASP culture through the lives of some of its most prominent figures. Envied and lampooned, misunderstood and yet distinctly American, WASPs are as much a culture, socioeconomic and ethnic designation, and state of mind. Charming, witty, and vigorously researced, WASPS traces the rise and fall of this distinctly American phenomenon through the lives of prominent icons from Henry Adams and Theodore Roosevelt to George Santayana and John Jay Chapman. Throughout this dynamic story, Beran chronicles the efforts of WASPs to better the world around them as well as the struggles of these WASPs to break free from their restrictive culture. The death of George H. W. Bush brought about reflections on the end of patrician WASP culture, where privilege reigned, but so did a genuine desire to use that privilege for public service. In the time of Trump—who is the antithesis of true WASP culture—people look at the John Kerry, Bobby Kennedy, and Philip and Kay Grahams of the world with wistfulness. And even though we are a more diverse and pluralistic nation now than ever before, there is something about WASP culture that remains enduringly aspirational and fascinating. Beginning at the turn of the 20th century, Beran’s saga dramatizes the evolving American aristocracy that forever changed a nation—and what we can still glean from WASP culture as we enter a new era.
In the space of a single decade, three leaders liberated tens of millions of souls, remade their own vast countries, and altered forever the forms of national power: Abraham Lincoln freed a subjugated race and transformed the American Republic. Tsar Alexander II broke the chains of the serfs and brought the rule of law to Russia. Otto von Bismarck threw over the petty Teutonic princes, defeated the House of Austria and the last of the imperial Napoleons, and united the German nation. The three statesmen forged the empires that would dominate the twentieth century through two world wars, the Cold War, and beyond. Each of the three was a revolutionary, yet each consolidated a nation that differed profoundly from the others in its conceptions of liberty, power, and human destiny. Michael Knox Beran's Forge of Empires brilliantly entwines the stories of the three epochal transformations and their fateful legacies. Telling the stories from the point of view of those who participated in the momentous events -- among them Walt Whitman and Friedrich Nietzsche, Mary Chesnut and Leo Tolstoy, Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie -- Beran weaves a rich tapestry of high drama and human pathos. Great events often turned on the decisions of a few lone souls, and each of the three statesmen faced moments of painful doubt or denial as well as significant decisions that would redefine their nations. With its vivid narrative and memorable portraiture, Forge of Empires sheds new light on a question of perennial importance: How are free states made, and how are they unmade? In the same decade that saw freedom's victories, one of the trinity of liberators revealed himself as an enemy to the free state, and another lost heart. What Lincoln called the "germ" of freedom, which was "to grow and expand into the universal liberty of mankind," came close to being annihilated in a world crisis that pitted the free state against new philosophies of terror and coercion. Forge of Empires is a masterly story of one of history's most significant decades.
Knox County was created in 1799, and the town of Barbourville sprang up on the banks of the Cumberland River, at the mouth of Richland Creek. The site of one of the first small battles of the Civil War, Barbourville grew from a sleepy little community into a center of trade and travel in Kentucky. Both the town and the county are celebrated and explored in this unique collection, one that showcases the pioneering spirit and achievements of the areas earliest settlers. History was made in Knox County even before the county was formed, as Daniel Boone blazed the trails known as the Wilderness Road; his legacy left an indelible mark on the community, present today in its most popular tourist attractions and annual festivals. Just as Boone altered the course of the countys history, so too did the advent of coal mining, the discovery of gas, the coming of the railroad, the devastation of floods, and the development of schools. These and many other fascinating elements of Knox Countys heritage are brought to life in photographs culled from the collections of the Cumberland Gap Historical Park, The Knox County Historical Museum, The Filson Club, The Kentucky Historical Society, and numerous private collections.
In this bracing collection of provocative essays, the author examines the false benevolence that characterizes the power classes in contemporary America. While they tragically conceive their desire for authority as a form of virtue, the elite classes have set about remaking schools, rewriting the U.S. Constitution, dehumanizing charity, and making war on tradition in the name of a crude form of Social Darwinism.
On the rainy Sunday evening of February 26, 2012, the lives of two individuals collided at the Retreat at Twin Lakes, a gated townhouse community in the Orlando suburb known as Sanford, Florida. George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old insurance underwriter and neighborhood watch volunteer, grew suspicious of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old high schooler who was temporarily staying at the home of his father's fiancee who lived in the small gated subdivision. Martin, unarmed and dressed in a dark-colored hooded sweatshirt, was walking home after going to a nearby 7-11 store to buy a can of Arizona Iced Tea and a bag of Skittles. Martin had committed no crime, but Zimmerman, concerned about recent burglaries and thefts in the neighborhood, called police to report "a real suspicious guy" who Zimmerman said was "up to no good . . . or [was] on drugs or something." Minutes later, Trayvon Martin lay dead from a single gunshot wound to the chest. After Sanford police and prosecutors, unable to refute Zimmerman's claim of self defense, declined to charge him with the killing, Florida's governor appointed a special prosecutor, Jacksonville State Attorney Angela Corey, to investigate the case in the wake of protests and racially-charged anger that spread from coast to coast. Bypassing a grand jury, Corey filed second-degree murder charges against the neighborhood watch volunteer in a case that had become arguably the most controversial event of the decade. Now, forensic expert and crime scene reconstructionist Michael A. Knox tells the story of the forensic evidence in the killing and explains what that evidence really says about the fateful events that February evening in Sanford, Florida. Can the prosecution truly prove beyond a reasonable doubt that George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin? Intermediate Range is a riveting account of the forensic evidence in the killing, much of which has been overlooked, misunderstood, or ignored by the public and the news media.
Knox County was created in 1799, and the town of Barbourville sprang up on the banks of the Cumberland River, at the mouth of Richland Creek. The site of one of the first small battles of the Civil War, Barbourville grew from a sleepy little community into a center of trade and travel in Kentucky. Both the town and the county are celebrated and explored in this unique collection, one that showcases the pioneering spirit and achievements of the area's earliest settlers. History was made in Knox County even before the county was formed, as Daniel Boone blazed the trails known as the Wilderness Road; his legacy left an indelible mark on the community, present today in its most popular tourist attractions and annual festivals. Just as Boone altered the course of the county's history, so too did the advent of coal mining, the discovery of gas, the coming of the railroad, the devastation of floods, and the development of schools. These and many other fascinating elements of Knox County's heritage are brought to life in photographs culled from the collections of the Cumberland Gap Historical Park, The Knox County Historical Museum, The Filson Club, The Kentucky Historical Society, and numerous private collections.
For every human on earth, the clock is ticking towards their inevitable death. Whether one lives to the oldest of ages (expiring quietly) or death comes suddenly with a slip on the ice (or in any other of the myriad of ways people die), the end of biological life is the outcome for everyone. For the Christian, however, there is the expectation of continuation beyond this fleeting life on earth. Naturalists have no such optimism and can only hope that their time on earth is a pleasant one. Because Christians have a divine assurance, they want to share that hope with others. Still, theological questions remain: Can near-death experiences help lead those far from Christ to him? Can they be added to the repertoire of apologetic arguments for Christianity? This book examines the truth surrounding near-death experiences: how they have been seen in human culture, what the scientific community is learning about those who have near-death experiences, and how near-death experiences can be used (or not used) in your evangelistic encounters.
For every human on earth, the clock is ticking towards their inevitable death. Whether one lives to the oldest of ages (expiring quietly) or death comes suddenly with a slip on the ice (or in any other of the myriad of ways people die), the end of biological life is the outcome for everyone. For the Christian, however, there is the expectation of continuation beyond this fleeting life on earth. Naturalists have no such optimism and can only hope that their time on earth is a pleasant one. Because Christians have a divine assurance, they want to share that hope with others. Still, theological questions remain: Can near-death experiences help lead those far from Christ to him? Can they be added to the repertoire of apologetic arguments for Christianity? This book examines the truth surrounding near-death experiences: how they have been seen in human culture, what the scientific community is learning about those who have near-death experiences, and how near-death experiences can be used (or not used) in your evangelistic encounters.
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