Talking With The Past

Where numbers of different cultural groups come together, misunderstandings and tensions can arise, even where there is the greatest goodwill on both sides. Sometimes even those involved are unable to explain why. In this book the authors set out to explore the situations and contexts in which cross cultural misunderstandings can occur. Talking Past Each Other was first published in 1978 and has been read widely and reprinted regularly.

In this magically evocative novel, William Maxwell explores the enigmatic gravity of the past, which compels us to keep explaining it even as it makes liars out of us every time we try. On a winter morning in the 1920s, a shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois. A man named Lloyd Wilson has been killed. And the tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers—one privileged yet neglected, the other a troubled farm boy—has been shattered. Fifty years later, one of those boys—now a grown man—tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder. In doing so, he is inevitably drawn back to his lost friend Cletus, who has the misfortune of being the son of Wilson's killer and who in the months before witnessed things that Maxwell's narrator can only guess at. Out of memory and imagination, the surmises of children and the destructive passions of their parents, Maxwell creates a luminous American classic of youth and loss.

We Seldom Talk About the Past is John MacKenna's first selected collection of short stories, from a career spanning over three decades. The stories selected represent a culmination of MacKenna's work in a form of writing he has made uniquely his own. MacKenna's stories examine the quotidian truths of our lives, of the momentousness of small moments

With the candid quirkiness of Awkward Family Photos and the confessional intimacy of PostSecret, Ransom Riggs's Talking Pictures is a haunting collection of antique found photographs—with evocative inscriptions that bring these lost personal moments to life—from the author of the New York Times bestselling illustrated novel Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Each image in Talking Pictures reveals a singular, frozen moment in a person’s life, be it joyful, quiet, or steeped in sorrow. Yet the book’s unique depth comes from the writing accompanying each photo: as with the caption revealing how one seemingly random snapshot of a dancing couple captured the first dance of their 40-year marriage, each successive inscription shines like a flashbulb illuminating a photograph’s particular context and lighting up our connection to the past.

Review The Leaders book is quite unlike any before in that it makes available the soul perspective of those incarnates that we know as world leaders from the last century. I know that the information from the evolved spirits quoted in this book on the more general parts, is consistent with my quite independent research as a psychologist, past life pioneer and author of Healing the Eternal Soul and Exploring the Eternal Soul. To any potential readers of this book all I can say is that it will be an emotional experience. This may be shock, amazement, fascination, or when the words of the evolved spirits resonate with you, simply transform your thinking. Peter and Toni have put together an amazing although controversial book that will be debated for many years to come. I can totally recommend it. --Andy Tomlinson Product Description This is a challenging book filled with many surprises. The authors contact a group of master spirits on the Other Side, and through them interview 15 leaders, all born before 1900, who made their mark on the world. Each leader discusses issues from his or her famous past life. They all express their current thoughts and feelings with many marked changes of opinion. The leaders interviewed are: Pope John XXIII, Florence Nightingale, Albert Einstein, Margaret Sanger, Charles Darwin, Bertrand Russell, Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dwight Moody, William James, C.G. Jung, Winston Churchill, Oscar Wilde, and Andrew Carnegie. Controversy abounds from the broad theme of reincarnation to the sharp new opinions expressed by individual leaders. Pope John expresses concern about the future of the Catholic church and its teaching. Einstein takes us further down the path of describing energy and the divine. A reversal by Carl Jung sheds new light on his theory of synchronicity. Likewise the historic theory of evolution is no longer seen in the way that Darwin would now express it. The most dramatic interview in the book is the incredible double encounter by Peter Watson Jenkins with Adolf Hitler. In the first abrasive part, Hitler appears fully vested in his persona as the psychotic dictator. The second part was of very different tone as the soul who once was Hitler explains why and how he did what he did, and what has happened to him since his return Home. This book has new ideas to explore about the nature of the divine, heaven and hell, and the purpose of life. This is a book destined to spark a revolution in human spirituality.

An experienced, multi-faceted historian shows how revisionist history is at the heart of creating historical knowledge "A rallying cry in favor of historians who, revisiting past subjects, change their minds. . . . Rewarding reading."—Kirkus Reviews History is not, and has never been, inert, certain, merely factual, and beyond reinterpretation. Taking readers from Thucydides to the origin of the French Revolution to the Civil War and beyond, James M. Banner, Jr. explores what historians do and why they do it. Banner shows why historical knowledge is unlikely ever to be unchanging, why history as a branch of knowledge is always a search for meaning and a constant source of argument, and why history is so essential to individuals’ awareness of their location in the world and to every group and nation’s sense of identity and destiny. He explains why all historians are revisionists while they seek to more fully understand the past, and how they always bring their distinct minds, dispositions, perspectives, and purposes to bear on the subjects they study.

The 21st century U.S. military seldom operates alone. Except for initial entry and organizational training, it works almost always with and through foreign partners. Yet over the past decade, anecdotal evidence suggests that U.S. military organizations and personnel have trouble understanding, influencing, and cooperating with international partners. This evidence includes high-profile incidents from Iraq and Afghanistan: civilian deaths, Koran burnings, blue-on-blue or green-on-blue lethal attacks. It also includes more numerous, lower profile bits of friction that follow U.S. service members around the globe in the form of protests, lawsuits, criminal cases, and difficult military-to-military relations from Iraq and Afghanistan to Turkey and Pakistan. In some instances, the U.S. military may be entirely without fault, suffering friction driven by problematic local attitudes or political dynamics. On the other hand, it is possible that certain characteristics of thought or behavior within the U.S. military culture increase the likelihood of severe friction. Against this backdrop, the gap between the U.S. military's self-image and its image in the eyes of an international military audience is examined. When considering U.S. power, do response patterns indicate great difference between how U.S. military officers view themselves, and how they are viewed by their international peers? If so, is there anything that the United States can do about it, or does a fundamental and pathological anti-Americanism predetermine outcomes? Based on a survey administered at the National Defense University, this study offers observations and recommendations about the increasingly central question of how U.S. forces can form better and stronger ties with partners.

This lesson introduces two common constructions that allow you to ask how long someone has done something, and how long something has been going on. Following this, add a range of vocabulary related to leisure activities, household chores, and romantic relationships. Also explore strategies to improve your speaking in Spanish.

This edited book draws from work that focuses on the act of telling family stories, as well as their content and structure. The process of telling family stories is linked to central aspects of development, including language acquisition, affect regulation, and family interaction patterns. This book extends across traditional developmental psychology, personality theory, and family studies. Drawing broadly on the epigenetic framework for individual development articulated by Erik Erikson, as well as on conceptions of the family life cycle, the editors bring together contemporary examples of psychological research on family stories and their implications for development and change at different points in the life course. The book is divided into sections that focus on family stories at different points in the life cycle, from early childhood and the beginnings of narrative skill, through adolescence, young adulthood, midlife, and then mature adulthood and its intergenerational meaning. During each of these periods of the life cycle, research focusing on individual development within an Eriksonian framework of ego strengths and virtues is highlighted. The dynamic role of family stories is also featured here, with work exploring the links between family process, intergenerational attachment, and storytelling. Sociocultural theories that emphasize how such development is situated in the wider cultural context are also featured in several chapters. This broad lifespan developmental focus serves to integrate the exciting diversity of this work and foster further questions and research in the emerging field of family narrative. The book is intended primarily for researchers and advanced-level students in the fields of developmental and personality psychology, as well as those in family studies and in gerontology. It may also be of interest to those in the helping professions who are concerned with family therapy and family issues, and may--due to its content and illustrative material--have appeal to a wider market of the lay public. The chapters are written in a readily accessible style and the analyses are presented in a fairly non-technical way. Because family stories are charted across the lifespan, it would be a suitable companion book to a more traditional lifespan textbook in certain courses.