Song of the Spirits

Author: Sarah Lark
Publisher: AmazonCrossing
ISBN: 9781477807675
Category : Canterbury (N.Z. : Provincial District)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
"Lark recounts...the sometimes peaceful, sometimes uneasy relationship between the Maori natives and the pakeha--the colonists. And the land, which can be rocky and formidable and also breathtakingly beautiful, is as much a character as anyone else." --Historical Novel Society New Zealand, 1893: William Martyn is better educated and more cultivated than the other men breaking their backs searching for gold near Queenstown. William is the son of landed Irish nobility, and he comes to town ready to invest in the best equipment. On his search for supplies, he encounters spirited and beautiful young Elaine O'Keefe, who promptly falls in love with him. He is captivated by her charms until Kura, Elaine's half-Maori cousin, comes to visit. William succumbs at once to Kura's exotic beauty and free-spiritedness, and tension develops not only between the two cousins but also between the colonial settlers and their Maori neighbors.

In the Land of the Long White Cloud

Author: Sarah Lark
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
ISBN: 9781612184265
Category : Female friendship
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Helen Davenport, governess for a wealthy London household, spots an advertisement seeking young women to marry New Zealand's honorable bachelors and begins correspondence with a gentleman farmer. When her church offers to pay her travels under an unusual arrangement, she jumps at the opportunity. On the ship, she meets Gwyneira Silkham, traveling to meet a New Zealand baron who won her in a game of blackjack. When their new husbands turn out to be very different than expected, the women must help one another find the life they'd hoped for.

Songs for the Spirits

Author: Barley Norton
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252092007
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Book Description
Songs for the Spirits examines the Vietnamese practice of communing with spirits through music and performance. During rituals dedicated to a pantheon of indigenous spirits, musicians perform an elaborate sequence of songs--a "songscape"--for possessed mediums who carry out ritual actions, distribute blessed gifts to disciples, and dance to the music's infectious rhythms. Condemned by French authorities in the colonial period and prohibited by the Vietnamese Communist Party in the late 1950s, mediumship practices have undergone a strong resurgence since the early 1990s, and they are now being drawn upon to promote national identity and cultural heritage through folklorized performances of rituals on the national and international stage. By tracing the historical trajectory of traditional music and religion since the early twentieth century, this groundbreaking study offers an intriguing account of the political transformation and modernization of cultural practices over a period of dramatic and often turbulent transition. An accompanying DVD contains numerous video and music extracts that illustrate the fascinating ways in which music evokes the embodied presence of spirits and their gender and ethnic identities.

Spirit's Song

Author: Madeline Baker
Publisher: Leisure Books
ISBN: 9780843944761
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 406

Book Description
A runaway wife and a half-breed bounty hunter out to collect a $10,000 rewardfind romance in the Black Hills in this historical romance from the author of"Under a Prairie Moon, Chase the Wind" and "Angel and the Outlaw".

A Song of Three Spirits

Author: J. Zachary Pike
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780990859673
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Book Description
When life gave Fenrir Goldson a second chance, he asked for a gift receipt.Mr. Goldson is filthy rich. He's also callous and cruel and hasn't got a festive bone in his ancient body. Naturally, he's due for a holiday haunting. When his business partner, Bolbi Baggs, announces that they're to be visited by three spirits, Mr. Goldson braces himself for a whirlwind tour of his past, present, and future.Typically, a trio of time-traveling ghosts heralds a heartwarming tale of hope and redemption for the human race. Mr. Goldson, however, isn't a member of the human race. He's a Dwarf, and Mr. Baggs is a Halfling, and the adventure that's about to take them across the enchanted world of Arth is anything but typical. Holiday magic and economic realities collide in A Song of Three Spirits. It's A Christmas Carol for the 21st century, with a dash of high fantasy. Read this hilarious satire of Charles Dickens's classic today!

Sharks in the Time of Saviours

Author: Kawai Strong Washburn
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 1786896508
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
'As vivid as it is splendid' New York Times 'Beautifully written and completely absorbing' Sarah Moss, Guardian A BARACK OBAMA BOOK OF THE YEAR, 2020 A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR in the NEW YORK TIMES, GUARDIAN, IRISH TIMES, OPRAH MAGAZINE and BBC CULTURE At seven years old, Nainoa falls into the sea and a shark takes him in its jaws – only to return him, unharmed, to his parents. For the next thirty years Noa and his siblings struggle with life in the shadow of this miracle. Sharks in the Time of Saviours is a brilliantly original and inventive novel, the sweeping story of a family living in poverty among the remnants of Hawai‘i’s mythic past and the wreckage of the American dream.

Spirit Song

Author: Marc Gidal
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199368236
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
In Spirit Song: Afro-Brazilian Religious Music and Boundaries, Marc Gidal investigates how and why a multi-faith community in southern Brazil utilizes music to combine and segregate three Afro-Brazilian religions: Umbanda, Quimbanda, and Batuque. Combining ethnomusicology and symbolic boundary studies, Gidal advances a theory of musical boundary-work: the ways music reinforces, bridges, or blurs boundaries, whether for personal, social, spiritual, or political purposes. Gidal focuses on spirit-mediumship rituals and their musical accompaniment, exploring how the Afro-gaucho religious community employs music and rituals to variously promote innovation and egalitarianism in Umbanda and Quimbanda, while it reinforces musical preservation and hierarchies in Batuque. Religious and musical leaders carefully restrict the cosmologies, ceremonial sequences, and sung prayers of one religion from affecting the others so as to safeguard Batuque's African heritage. Members of disenfranchised populations view the religions as vehicles for empowerment, whether based on race-ethnicity, gender, or religious belief; and innovations in ritual music reflect this activism. These rituals come to life through illustrative video and audio examples on the book's companion website. The first book in English to focus on music in Afro-Brazilian religions, Spirit Song is a landmark study that will be of interest to ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and religious studies scholars.

The Spirit of Music

Author: Victor L. Wooten
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0593081676
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Book Description
Grammy Award winner Victor Wooten's inspiring parable of the importance of music and the threats that it faces in today's world. We may not realize it as we listen to the soundtrack of our lives through tiny earbuds, but music and all that it encompasses is disappearing all around us. In this fable-like story three musicians from around the world are mysteriously summoned to Nashville, the Music City, to join together with Victor to do battle against the "Phasers," whose blinking "music-cancelling" headphones silence and destroy all musical sound. Only by coming together, connecting, and making the joyful sounds of immediate, "live" music can the world be restored to the power and spirit of music. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL

Inch by Inch

Author: David Mallett
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0064434818
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 32

Book Description
‘Inch by Inch, Row by Row, Gonna Make This Garden Grow!' This picture book version of a favorite popular song charts the faithful progress of a young boy who overcomes every obstacle'rock and weeds and a hungry old crow'and makes his garden overflow with bounty. Included are the song lyrics set to music for guitar and piano. An Alternate Selection of Children's Book-of-the-Month Club

Great Spirits: Portraits of LifeChanging World Music Artists

Author:
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781604733419
Category : Musicians
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
What do such artists as Bob Marley, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Nina Simone, and Sun Ra have in common? All created uniquely powerful musical art that had a profound effect on their audiences. Through their music and their lives they became forces for liberation, challenging the established order and inspiring people around the world to look at life in new ways. So great was their originality that to a large extent they created their own musical genres, and listeners claim the music leads them to a higher state of being. Great Spirits: Portraits of Life-Changing World Music Artists presents personal encounters with some of the most interesting and important musical artists of the past fifty years--Bob Marley, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Nina Simone, Sun Ra, Augustus Pablo, the Neville Brothers, Yabby You, and Nadia Gamal. Based on the author's meetings and interviews with these giants, the pieces reveal the unique essence of each musician as a person, as an artist, and as a force for social change. Spanning the realms of jazz, blues, reggae, gospel, African, and Middle Eastern music, these artists epitomize musical creation at its highest level.