Most memoirs, it seems, are written by the rich or the famous. The author of Moments can make no claim to either. He simply sees himself as a common man for whom life has been an uncommon adventure. He grew up in a working class family where a high school education had been the highest attainment and went on to earn two masters degrees. He became a minister when he was nineteen years old and continued in the ministry for six decades. Over those years he has given several thousand sermons and presided at hundreds of weddings, funerals, and memorial services. Over the course of his ministry, furthermore, he progressed from Christianity to agnosticism. He also married at nineteen and has been married to the same woman for sixty years. Together they raised five children, lived in thirteen different homes, been residents of seven different states. In addition, the author has been fortunate in that he has been able to travel to some interesting and exotic places around the globe. All of this might suggest that he has some interesting stories, which he refers to as moments to share with the world.
No event is as traumatic as the death of a child. Dr. Knapp has interviewed over 155 families who experienced such a loss to determine how they coped or failed to cope. This book presents the results of his research, shedding light on constructive measures for responding to the tragedy, and calling attention to the special needs of surviving family members. Dr. Knapp examines three types of death: death occurring after a long illness, sudden or unexpected death, and death by murder.
Bridges, the least known and understood of China's many wonders, are one of its most striking and resilient feats of architectural prowess. Chinese Bridges brings together a thorough look at the marvels of Chinese bridge design from one of the world's leading experts on Chinese culture and historical geography, Ronald G. Knapp. While many consider bridges to be merely utilitarian civil engineering, the bridges of China move beyond that stereotype, as many are undeniably dramatic, even majestic and daring. Chinese Bridges illustrates in detail 20 well-preserved ancient bridges along with descriptions and essays on the distinctive architectural elements shared by the various designs. For the first time in an English-language book, Chinese Bridges records scores of newly discovered bridges across China's vast landscape, illustrated with over 400 color photographs, as well as woodblock prints, historic images, paintings and line drawings.
As many as 15,000 covered bridges were built in North America over the past 200 years. Fewer than 1,000 remain. In America's Covered Bridges, authors Terry E. Miller and Ronald G. Knapp tell the fascinating story of these bridges, how they were built, the technological breakthroughs required to construct them and above all the dedication and skill of their builders. Each wooden bridge, whether still standing or long gone, has a story to tell about the nature of America at the time--not only about its transportational needs, but the availability of materials and the technological prowess of the people who built it. Illustrated with some 550 historical and contemporary photos, paintings, and technical drawings of nearly 400 different covered bridges, America's Covered Bridges offers five readable chapters on the history, design and fate of America's covered bridges, plus related bridges in Canada. Most of the contemporary photography is by master photographer A. Chester Ong of Hong Kong. 55 photo essays on the most iconic bridges including: Cornish-Windsor Bridge between Vermont and New Hampshire Porter-Parsonsfield Bridge, Maine East Paden and West Paden (Twin Bridges), Pennsylvania Philippi Bridge, West Virginia Hortons Mill Bridge, Alabama Medora Bridge, Indiana Rock Mill Bridge, Ohio Knight's Ferry Bridge, California Perrault Bridge, Quebec, Canada Hartland Bridge, New Brunswick, Canada Over time, wooden bridges eventually gave way to ones made of iron, steel and concrete. An American icon, many covered bridges became obsolete and were replaced—others simply decayed and collapsed. Many more were swept away by natural disasters and fires. America's Covered Bridges is absolutely packed with fascinating stories and information passionately told by two leading experts on this subject. The book will be of tremendous interest to anyone interested in American history, carpentry and technological change.
China's art objects and traditionally manufactured products have long been sought by collectors--from porcelains and silk fabrics to furniture and even the lacquered chopsticks that are a distant relation to ones found in most Chinese restaurants. Things Chinese presents sixty distinctive items that are typical of Chinese culture and together open a special window onto the people, history, and society of the world's largest nation. Many of the objects are collectibles, and each has a story to tell. The objects relate to six major areas of cultural life: the home, the personal, arts & crafts, eating & drinking, entertainment, and religious practice. They include items both familiar and unfamiliar--from snuff bottles and calligraphy scrolls to moon cake molds and Mao memorabilia. Ronald Knapp's evocative text describes the history, cultural significance, and customs relating to each object, while Michael Freeman's superb photographs illustrate them. Together, text and photographs offer a unique look at the material culture of China and the aesthetics that inform it.
When Mikhail Gorbachev, Secretary General of the Soviet Union, came to address the UN in 1988, Ronald Knapp, aka Gorby 2, took to the streets of New York and fooled thousands, including Donald Trump, with his uncanny resemblance. This was just the beginning of the outrageous adventures he shares in this book.
It has been said that for the Chinese "a house is a living symbol," one endowed with meaning and the result of conscious action. China's Living Houses is the first book in any language to explore comprehensively the extraordinarily complex links among folk beliefs and household ornamentation across time, space, and social class. Well-written and copiously illustrated, it reveals dwellings as dynamic entities that express the vitality of Chinese families as each journeys through life.
China's Old Dwellings is the most comprehensive critical examination of China's folk architectural forms in any language. It and its companion volume, China's Living Houses: Folk Beliefs, Symbols, and Household Ornamentation (UH Press, 1999), together form a landmark study of the environmental, historical, and social factors that influence housing forms for nearly a quarter of the world's population. Both books draw on the author's thirty years of fieldwork and extensive travel in China as well as published and unpublished material in many languages. China's Old Dwellings begins by tracing the interest in Chinese vernacular buildings in the twentieth century. Early chapters detail common and distinctive spatial components, including the interior and exterior modular spaces that are axiomatic components of most Chinese dwellings as well as conventional structural components and building materials common in Chinese construction. Later chapters examine representative housing types in the three broad cultural realms--northern, southern, and western--into which China has been divided. Knapp completes his survey with an exploration of China's old dwellings in the context of the rapid economic and social changes that are destroying so many of them.
Featuring over 350 beautiful photographs, Chinese Houses of Southeast Asia captures the architectural heritage of a vibrant community. The multiple Chinese migrations from southeastern China to Southeast Asia have had important implications for both regions. In Southeast Asia this influence can be seen in the architecturally eclectic homes these migrants and their descendants built as they became successful; homes that combined Chinese, European and local influences, especially during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chinese Houses of Southeast Asia strives not only to be an informative but also an authoritative book on the subject of hybrid architecture--filled with stunning color photographs and essays on nearly thirty well-preserved homes. An introductory essay portrays the historical circumstances that gave rise to Chinese houses overseas, and includes historic images, color photographs, paintings and line drawings. At the core of the book is a comprehensive set of stunning color photographs of nearly thirty well-preserved homes built by Chinese immigrants and their descendants in various countries of Southeast Asia. Images and drawings from southeastern China help clarify similarities and differences. For each home, extensive captions accompany the photographs and the essay supplies background information concerning the individual and family who built and resided in each house. The historical context, nature of the building, and the restoration history of the home is included. Extensive information about the symbolism implicit in the decorative elements that make up each of the homes is presented. This includes an examination of ornamental elements that are Chinese in origin as well as those decorative components that are Western. Chinese Houses of Southeast Asia has been written in a nontechnical style, accessible to lay readers who are interested in the extraordinary architectural heritage of China, much of which is only now beginning to be appreciated.
Winner of ForeWord Magazine's Architecture "Book of the Year" Award! Exquisite examples of traditional dwellings are scattered throughout modern-day China. Chinese Houses focuses on 20 well-preserved traditional Chinese homes, presenting examples from a range of rural and metropolitan areas throughout China. The photographs of each are accompanied by extensive background information and historical content. An introductory essay examines the different types of Chinese homes and provides an overview of the rich regional variety of Chinese dwelling forms. It also provides insights into little-known design concepts that emphasize the flexibility, adaptability, and versatility of traditional building forms and the work of traditional craftsmen. Richly illustrated with photographs, woodblock prints, historic images, and line drawings, Chinese Houses portrays an architectural tradition of amazing range and resilience.
Discover the rarified Peranakan (native-born Chinese of Southeast Asia) aesthetics that are today highly sought-after for their beauty: distinctive furniture and ceramics, textiles and jewelry, and many other art objects. Peranakan Chinese Home displays these extraordinary objects, visible markers of a highly developed culture. The broad range of beautiful objects which the Peranakan Chinese created and enjoyed in their daily lives is astounding. Each chapter in The Peranakan Chinese Home focuses on a different area and presents objects used or found in those spaces. Each piece is described in the context of their utility as household objects, as part of periodic celebrations to mark the Chinese New Year and other holidays, or in important life passage rituals relating to ancestor worship, birth, marriage, mourning and burial. The meaning of the rich symbolic and ornamental motifs found on the objects is discussed in detail and key differences are highlighted between Peranakan objects and similar ones found in China. A fascinating mix of Chinese, European and Southeast Asian influences, the distinctly Peranakan identity of a people and their culture is beautifully portrayed through objects and archival photographs in this lovely and exotic book.
REASON, RELIGION, AND THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY A major characteristic of much of religion in the modern world is that it lags behind emerging scientific understanding of the nature of existence and the nature of the universe. The great world religions, which have much of value to say to the modern world, are often locked into cosmologies that seemed true in past centuries, but seem out of sync with the twenty-first century. The author of this volume of sermons, who considers himself to be a naturalist, a rationalist and a humanist, has taken as a mantra for his sermons a sentence from John Locke: "One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant." The eighteen sermons in this volume cover a wide variety of topics, but each one of them is presented from the perspective that religious understanding in this century needs to honestly square with contemporary knowledge about the nature of the universe
The Shawangunk Mountains -- The Gunks -- are renowned for stunning landscapes on and off the ridge in a region that has remained a favorite destination for visitors since the middle of the nineteenth century. While the mountain elevations are not high -- nowhere exceeding 2,240 feet -- they present rugged topography with glistening grey-white escarpments, jumbled boulders at the base of cliffs, deep crevices, as well as precipitation-fed "sky lakes." Arnold Guyot, the first Professor of Geology and Geography at Princeton University, remarked in 1887 that "Few spots on our continent unite so much beauty of scenery, both grand and lovely, within so small a compass, to be enjoyed with so much ease," a sentiment echoed by many today. Framing the Gunks are the valleys of the Rondout Creek and the Wallkill River where one finds New Paltz, which lays claim to being "one of the oldest towns in America" because of the stone houses aligned along Huguenot Street, as well as quaint hamlets like Gardiner, Rosendale, Accord, High Falls, and Marbletown. For the most part, these are lively, even cosmopolitan places, a mixture of old families and newcomers, many of whom arrived as second-homers from new York City."--Back cover.
The title of this book involves a play on words. Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking both spent a lifetime working on what is called a "unified field theory," or in popular parlance, "a theory of everything." The author of Oneness attempts to come up with a "theology of everything." Throughout this process he defines theology not as "the study of God" but as "the study of ultimate reality." There are two scientific areas of study that provide the bedrock for his ideas: "biological evolution" and "cosmic evolution." He attempts to explore "Oneness" from four different angles, or four different perspectives: "the Oneness of life on planet Earth," "the Oneness of human being," "the Oneness of the universe," and "the Oneness of planet Earth.
Shares the experiences of parents whose infants or newborns have died, explains how they attempted to handle their grief, and describes how grief can affect a marriage
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