Bøger udgivet af Counterpoint

"A page turner . . . heart-stopping and enraging . . . focused, justified, and without a trace of self-pity. Shot through with poignancy." -The New York Times Book Review Over a decade after its first publication, Jesus Land remains deeply resonant with readers. This New York Times bestselling memoir is a gripping tale of rage and redemption, hope and humor, morality and malice-and most of all, the truth: that being a good person takes more than just going to church. Julia and her adopted brother, David, are sixteen years old. Julia is white. David is black. It is the mid-1980s and their family has just moved to rural Indiana, a landscape of cottonwood trees, trailer parks, and an all-encompassing racism. At home are a distant mother-more involved with her church's missionaries than her own children-and a violent father. In this riveting and heartrending memoir Julia Scheeres takes us from the Midwest to a place beyond imagining. Surrounded by natural beauty, Escuela Caribe-a religious reform school in the Dominican Republic-is characterized by a disciplinary regime that extracts repentance from its students by any means necessary. Julia and David strive to make it through these ordeals and their tale is relayed here with startling immediacy, extreme candor, and wry humor.

Winik arranges her arresting portraits of the dead chronologically, spanning Friends of My Youth, Mostly in New Jersey 1958-1978, The Austin Years, Including New Orleans 1977-2009, We Were Ten Years in Pennsylvania 1999-2009, and Love in the Time of Baltimore 2009-2018. Featuring 12 additional vignettes, The Big Book of the Dead continues Winik's work as an empathic chronicler of life.

Originally published in 1986, Ghost Dance is the first in a line of relentlessly experimental and highly esteemed works by Maso. In her elegy for a family broken apart and for a country wounded by injustice and corporate greed, Maso skillfully draws parallels between the personal tragedy and the larger tragedies unfolding in the country.

First published in A Continuous Harmony in 1972, "Think Little" is cultural critic and agrarian Berry at his best: prescient about the dire environmental consequences of people's mentality of greed and exploitation, yet hopeful that they will recognize war and oppression and pollution not as separate issues, but aspects of the same.

"e;The Art of Loading Brush is singular in Berry's corpus."e; -The Paris ReviewWendell Berry's profound critique of American culture has entered its sixth decade, and in this gathering he reaches with deep devotion toward a long view of agrarian philosophy. The Art of Loading Brush is an energetic mix of essays, stories, and a poem, which explore agrarian ideals as they present themselves historically and as they might apply to our work today. Filled with insights and new revelations from a mind thorough in its considerations and careful in its presentations, The Art of Loading Brush is a necessary and timely collection.

"e;Biespiel's supple memoir of becoming a poet will surely inspire other writers to embrace the bodily character of writing and feel the power and, sometimes, the emptiness of the act of writing poetry."e; -Publishers Weekly (starred review)The Education of a Young Poet is David Biespiel's moving account of his awakening to writing and the language that can shape a life. Exploring the original source of his creative impulse-a great-grandfather who traveled alone from Ukraine to America in 1910, eventually settling as a rag peddler in the tiny town of Elma, Iowa-through the generations that followed, Biespiel tracks his childhood in Texas and his university days in the northeast, led along by the "e;pattern and random bursts that make up a life."e;His book offers an intimate recollection of how one person forges a life as a writer during extraordinary times. From the Jewish quarter of Houston in the 1970s to bohemian Boston in the 1980s, from Russia's Pale of Settlement to a farming village in Vermont, Biespiel remains alert to the magic of possibilities-ancestral journeys, hash parties, political rallies, family connections, uncertain loves, the thrill of sex, and lasting friendships. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer's craft coupled with a classic coming-of-age tale that does for Boston in the 1980s what Hemingway's A Moveable Feast did for Paris in the 1920s and Broyard'sKafka Was the Rage did for Greenwich Village in the 1950s. Restless with curiosity and enthusiasm, The Education of a Young Poet is a singular and universal bildungsroman that movingly demonstrates, "e;in telling the story of one's coming into consciousness, all languages are more or less the same."e;

A Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the EssayYes, every inch of the globe has been seen, mapped, photographed, and measured, but is it known? Robert Leonard Reid doesn't think so. To draw a circle and calculate its diameter is not to know the circle. In this collection, Reid distinguishes himself from many science-based nature writers, using the natural world as a springboard for speculations and musings on the numinous and the sacred, injustice, homelessness, the treatment of Native Peoples in the United States, and what pushes mountaineers to climb. Ranging in their settings from eastern New Mexico to northern Alaska, Reid's essays illustrate his belief that the American West is worth celebrating and caring for.Taking its title from an affecting speech given by renowned author Barry Lopez, Because It Is So Beautiful is a response to desperate questions surrounding America's wildlands. Lopez's words resonated with the young mountaineer-musician-mathematician Robert Leonard Reid, who was struggling to understand his relationship to the world, to find his vision as a writer. What he learned on that long-ago evening is knit throughout the nineteen pieces in the collection, which include essays from Reid's previous books Arctic Circle, Mountains of the Great Blue Dream, and America, New Mexico; three essays that appear here in print for the first time; as well as revised and expanded versions of essays that appeared in Touchstone, The Progressive, and elsewhere.

This collection of Berry’s essays and poems—all written outdoors on the Sabbath—“[shines] with the gentle wisdom of a craftsman who has thought deeply about the paradoxical strangeness and wonder of life” (The Christian Science Monitor) More than thirty–five years ago, Wendell Berry began spending his sabbaths outdoors, when the weather allowed, walking and wandering around familiar territory, seeking a deep intimacy only time could provide. These walks sometimes yielded poems. Each year since, he has completed a series of these poems dated by the year of its composition. This new sequence provides a virtual syllabus for all of Berry’s cultural and agricultural work in concentrated form. Many of these poems—including a sequence at mid–year of 2014—were written on a small porch in the woods, a place of stillness and reflection, a vantage point “of the one / life of the forest composed / of uncountable lives in countless / years, each life coherent itself within / the coherence, the great composure, of all.” Recently Berry has been reflecting on more than a half century of reading, to discover and to delight in the poetical, spiritual, and cultural roots of his work. In The Presence of Nature in the Natural World, Berry’s survey begins with Alan of Lille’s twelfth–century work, The Plaint of Nature. From the Bible through Chaucer, from Milton to Pope, from Wordsworth to the moderns, Berry’s close reading is exhilarating. Moving from the canon of poetry to the sayings and texts found in agriculture and science, closely presented, we gain new appreciation for the complexity of the issues faced in the twenty–first century by the struggling community of humans on earth. With this long essay appended to these new Sabbath Poems, the result is an unusual book of depth and engagement. A new collection of Wendell Berry poems is always an occasion for celebration, and this eccentric gathering is especially so.

Our planet is approaching a critical environmental juncture. Across the globe we continue to deplete the five pools of carbon soil, wood, coal, oil, and natural gas at an unsustainable rate. Weve burned up half the planets known reserves of oil one trillion barrels in less than a century. When these sources of energy-rich carbon go into severe decline, as they surely will, society will follow.Former archeologist and Sierra Club activist Courtney White calls this moment the Age of Consequencesa time when the worrying consequences of our environmental actions or inaction have begun to raise unavoidable and difficult questions. How should we respond? What are effective (and realistic) solutions?In exploring these questions, White draws on his formidable experience as an environmentalist and activist as well as his experience as a father to two children living through this vital moment in time. As a result, The Age of Consequences is a book of ideas and action, but it is also a chronicle of personal experience. Readers follow White as he travels the country --- from Kansas to Los Angeles, New York City, Italy, France, Yellowstone, and New England.

Essays on our spiritual role in the fate of the planet from “the most provocative figure among the new breed of eco–theologians” (Newsweek).Among the contemporary voices for the Earth, none resonates like that of cultural historian Thomas Berry. His teaching and writings have inspired a generation’s thinking about humankind’s place in the Earth community and the universe, engendering widespread critical acclaim and a documentary film on his life and work.This new collection of essays, from various years and occasions, expands and deepens ideas articulated in his earlier writings and also breaks new ground. Berry opens our eyes to the full dimensions of the ecological crisis, framing it as a crisis of spiritual vision. Applying his formidable erudition in cultural history, science, and comparative religions, he forges a compelling narrative of creation and communion that reconciles modern evolutionary thinking and traditional religious insights concerning our integral role in Earth’s society.While sounding an urgent alarm at our current dilemma, Berry inspires us to reclaim our role as the consciousness of the universe and thereby begin to create a true partnership with the Earth community. With Evening Thoughts, this wise elder has lit another beacon to lead us home.“Thomas Berry is an exemplar in a tradition that includes a diverse group of spiritually radiant individuals (Gandhi, the monk Thomas Merton, the Lakota elder Black Elk), visionaries (Jacques Ellul, Terry Tempest Williams, Rachel Carson), and writers (Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, Rebecca Solnit, Loren Eiseley).” —Barry Lopez, author of Arctic Dreams

"e;Tracks Along the Left Coast more than accomplishes its self-appointed task of celebrating de Angulo's legacy."e; -Rain TaxiCalifornia, with its scores of native languages, contains a wealth of old time storiesa bedrock literature of North America. Jaime de Angulos linguistic and ethnographic work, his writings, as well as the legends that cloak the Old Coyote himself, vividly reflect the particulars of the Pacific coast. Born in Paris of Spanish descent, he came to America to become a cowboy, and he didas well as a doctor, a linguist, ethnomusicologist, and writer. His poetry and prose uniquely represented the bohemian sensibility of the twenties, thirties and forties, and he was known for his reworkings of coyote tales and shamanic mysticism. So vivid was his writing that Ezra Pound called him the American Ovid, and William Carlos Williams claimed that de Angulo was one of the most outstanding writers I have ever encountered.Jamie de Angulo arrived in San Francisco on the eve of the 1906 earthquake, and soon after he began medical school, almost on a whim. But the practical application of medicine did not interest him, and he set off on a life long career as a non-conformist cowboy-academic and keen ethnographer of the hundreds of Native Californian tribes that still lived along the Pacific coast. De Angulo spent nearly three decades in a focused effort to understand the California languages that were rapidly disappearing, carrying on their lives beneath the overlay of Spanish and English. He visited Native Americans on their landsfrom sagebrush flats to redwood grovesand collected what could be salvaged of their languages, believing that to reach an understanding of a single ordinary sentence might disclose a whole method of knowing the world, a metaphysic different than an English speakers and equally subtle.De Angulo found the phonetic scripts used by linguists too esoteric, and the odd or specialized symbols meant that standard printing houses lacked the ability to reproduce them. His whole life he argued for a script that could be done on a regular typewriter, one that an ordinary publishing house could typeset. Using his fonetik script so much led him to cast a wry look at English too, with its obsolete spellings he considered pointless and burdensome. His letters to colleagues and friendsamong them Carl Jung, D.H. Lawrence, and Ezra Poundbegan to discard unpronounced letters in words: thoroly and wud.At the end of his life, broadcasting from Pacifica Radiothe worlds first listener-supported stationde Angulo brought together much of what he had gathered in his ethnographic travels and recorded roughly100 programs of Old Time Stories. He recited Native Californian stories, sang songs, and transmitted a way of looking at life that was based on medicine power and mythputting it all into a great, singular work. A work that is very hard to come by, and even hard to define.In each retelling, through each storyteller, stories are continually revivified, and that is precisely what Andrew Schelling has done in Tracks Along the Left Coast, weaving together the story of a life with the story of the land and the people, languages, and cultures with whom it is so closely tied.