The Flowering Wand

Author: Sophie Strand
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1644115972
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Book Description
A deep exploration of the regenerative and magical secrets of sacred masculinity hidden in familiar myths both ancient and modern • Reveals the restorative fungi archetype of Osiris, the Orphic mysteries as an underground mycelium linking forests and people, how Dionysus teaches us about invasive species and playful sexuality, and the ecology of Jesus as depicted in his nature-focused parables • Liberates Tristan, Merlin, and the Grail legends from the bounds of Campbell’s hero’s journey and invites the masculine into more nuanced, complex ways of dealing with trauma, growth, and self-knowledge Long before the sword-wielding heroes of legend readily cut down forests, slaughtered the old deities, and vanquished their enemies, there were playful gods, animal-headed kings, mischievous lovers, trickster harpists, and vegetal magicians with flowering wands. As eco-feminist scholar Sophie Strand discovered, these wilder, more magical modes of the masculine have always been hidden in plain sight. Sharing the culmination of eight years of research into myth, folklore, and the history of religion, Strand leads us back into the forgotten landscapes and hidden secrets of familiar myths, revealing the beautiful range of the divine masculine, including expressions of male friendship, male intimacy, and male creative collaboration. In discussing Dionysus and Osiris, Strand encourages us to think like an ecosystem instead of like an individual. She connects dying, vegetal gods to the virtuous cycle of composting and decay, highlighting the ways in which mushrooms can restore soil and heal polluted landscapes. Exploring esoteric Christianity, the author celebrates the Gnostic Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas, imagining the ecology that the Rabbi Yeshua would have actually been referencing in his nature-focused parables. Strand frees Tristan, Merlin, and the Grail legends from the bounds of Campbell’s hero’s journey and invites the masculine into more nuanced, complex ways of dealing with trauma, growth, and self-knowledge. Strand reseeds our minds with new visions of male identity and shows how each of us, regardless of gender, can develop a matured ecological empathy and witness a blossoming of sacred masculine powers that are soft, curious, connective, and celebratory.

Sophie Johnson, Unicorn Expert

Author: Morag Hood
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1534431624
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 30

Book Description
Meet the master of magical creatures: Sophie Johnson! She’s an expert on unicorns…or so she thinks! Sophie is a unicorn expert. She dresses up her toys, stuffed animals, and even her baby brother as unicorns! But living with enchanted animals can be tricky business. And Sophie is so caught up in teaching others that she fails to notice the magic right under her nose. This funny and fresh picture book tells the story of a unicorn hiding in plain sight and a little girl who is totally oblivious to his presence!

Sophie's World

Author: Jostein Gaarder
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466804270
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 599

Book Description
A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

Sophie's Mixed-Up Magic: Out of Sight

Author: Amanda Ashby
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101590696
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Book Description
The final book in the lively, fun series for tween girls--just right for Disney Channel fans! With her powers under control and things with Jonathan on track, Sophie can now focus on learning the whole truth about her dad (not to mention trying to figure out how she can save him and bring him back to their family). Fortunately, she's got Malik, her djinn-guide, to help her as she navigates carpet-flying, learns how to make herself invisible, and braces herself for what promises to be a very exciting adventure. But if it brings her dad back, it will all be worth it!

Sophie's Masterpiece

Author: Eileen Spinelli
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780743490122
Category : Children's stories
Languages : en
Pages : 32

Book Description
Sophie is no ordinary house spider. She's an artist and takes great pride in her work. Every web she spins is more wonderous than the one before. But the guests at Beekman's Boardinghouse don't like spiders. Everywhere Sophie goes guests scream and shoo her away. No one there wants anything to do with Sophie and her magnificent creations - no one except the young woman up on the third floor who is busy 'weaving' something herself; and when she runs out of yarn, Sophie knows that the time has finally come to create the masterpiece of a lifetime.

Baby, Unplugged

Author: Sophie Brickman
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062966499
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description
A charming, meticulously researched, and illuminating look at how technology infiltrates every aspect of raising children today, filled with helpful advice parents can use to best navigate the digital landscape, and ultimately learn to trust their own judgment. There’s an app or device for nearly every aspect of parenting today: monitoring your baby; entertaining or educating your toddler; connecting with other new parents for tips, tricks, and community—virtually every aspect of daily life. But it isn’t a parenting paradise; the truth is much more complicated. The mother of two young daughters, journalist Sophie Brickman wondered what living in a tech-saturated world was doing to her and her children. She turned to experts, academics, doctors, and innovators for advice and insight. Baby, Unplugged brings together Brickman’s in-depth research with her own candid (sometimes hilarious) personal experience to help parents sort through the wide and often confusing tech offerings available today and to sort out what’s helpful and what’s not. Filled with relatable and entertaining stories as well as practical takeaways, Baby, Unplugged is destined to become a touchstone for parents today, giving them the permission to forge their own path through the morass of technological options, to restore their faith in themselves, and to help them raise good, social, and engaged people in the modern world.

William Styron's Sophie's Choice

Author: Rhoda Sirlin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780761821823
Category : Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Although Sophie's Choice by William Styron won the American Book Award for fiction, it met with some very mixed reviews. Some critics regarded the novel as bombastic and melodramatic-in short, a colossal failure. In William Styron's "Sophie's Choice," Rhoda Sirlin demonstrates that Sophie's Choice is Styron's most audacious, original, and artistically successful novel to date. First, this book will counter the many critics who have assailed the novel as anti-Semitic. Sirlin then counters the argument that Sophie's Choice is a sexist novel and that Styron and his youthful alter ego, Stingo, are misogynists. Finally, Sirlin explores the novel's powerful theme-absolute evil, showing that while insisting on the power and inextinguishability of evil in human beings and nature, Styron ultimately provides a compassionate vision of humanity struggling for meaning in an indifferent universe. Through this examination, Sirlin shows that Styron must be appreciated as one of the most audacious and humane voices in contemporary literature.

Sixteen Runaway Pumpkins

Author: Dianne Ochiltree
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780439799393
Category : Arithmetic
Languages : en
Pages : 28

Book Description
Rhyming text and illustrations demonstrate how many pumpkins it takes to fill a wagon and how quickly they add up each time the number is doubled.

Too Much

Author: Rachel Vorona Cote
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 1538729717
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
Lacing cultural criticism, Victorian literature, and storytelling together, "TOO MUCH spills over: with intellect, with sparkling prose, and with the brainy arguments of Vorona Cote, who posits that women are all, in some way or another, still susceptible to being called too much." (Esmé Weijun Wang) A weeping woman is a monster. So too is a fat woman, a horny woman, a woman shrieking with laughter. Women who are one or more of these things have heard, or perhaps simply intuited, that we are repugnantly excessive, that we have taken illicit liberties to feel or fuck or eat with abandon. After bellowing like a barn animal in orgasm, hoovering a plate of mashed potatoes, or spraying out spit in the heat of expostulation, we've flinched-ugh, that was so gross. I am so gross. On rare occasions, we might revel in our excess--belting out anthems with our friends over karaoke, perhaps--but in the company of less sympathetic souls, our uncertainty always returns. A woman who is Too Much is a woman who reacts to the world with ardent intensity is a woman familiar to lashes of shame and disapproval, from within as well as without. Written in the tradition of Shrill, Dead Girls, Sex Object and other frank books about the female gaze, TOO MUCH encourages women to reconsider the beauty of their excesses-emotional, physical, and spiritual. Rachel Vorona Cote braids cultural criticism, theory, and storytelling together in her exploration of how culture grinds away our bodies, souls, and sexualities, forcing us into smaller lives than we desire. An erstwhile Victorian scholar, she sees many parallels between that era's fixation on women's "hysterical" behavior and our modern policing of the same; in the space of her writing, you're as likely to encounter Jane Eyre and Lizzie Bennet as you are Britney Spears and Lana Del Rey. This book will tell the story of how women, from then and now, have learned to draw power from their reservoirs of feeling, all that makes us "Too Much."

Adelaide Hills Gardens

Author: Christine McCabe
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781760762308
Category : Gardens
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The Adelaide Hills charts the evolution of gardening in Australia. And though anchored deeply in history, many of its gardens have their sights set firmly on the future. Old oak, elm and ash trees, planted long ago after memories of English gardens, live alongside stringybark eucalypts and native bush gullies, fruit-bearing orchards and wineries. All have thrived on the region's good rainfall, cool climate and natural springs. Over time, the Hills has weathered storms, droughts and fires. In response to these changing conditions, gardens, too, have changed. Heavily forested slopes have, in many cases, given way to veggie patches, free-ranging chickens and sheep, while Victorian rose and rhododendron hordes have made room for climate-compatible native flora. Encompassing twenty gardens, taking in grand Victorian estates and repurposed municipal water tanks alike, with evocative stories by Christine McCabe and sublime photography by Simon Griffiths, this book is a testament to the power of gardens to adapt, delight and restore.