My Father's Wake

Author: Kevin Toolis
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 0306921456
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
An intimate, lyrical look at the ancient rite of the Irish wake--and the Irish way of overcoming our fear of death Death is a whisper for most of us. Instinctively we feel we should dim the lights, pull the curtains, and speak softly. But on a remote island off the coast of Ireland's County Mayo, death has a louder voice. Each day, along with reports of incoming Atlantic storms, the local radio runs a daily roll call of the recently departed. The islanders go in great numbers, young and old alike, to be with their dead. They keep vigil with the corpse and the bereaved company through the long hours of the night. They dig the grave with their own hands and carry the coffin on their own shoulders. The islanders cherish the dead--and amid the sorrow, they celebrate life, too. In My Father's Wake, acclaimed author and award-winning filmmaker Kevin Toolis unforgettably describes his own father's wake and explores the wider history and significance of this ancient and eternal Irish ritual. Perhaps we, too, can all find a better way to deal with our mortality -- by living and loving as the Irish do.

Into My Father's Wake

Author: Eric Best
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781449970383
Category : Pacific Ocean
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Book Description
"Into my father's wake records a solo, 5,000-mile Pacific journey aboard the 47-foot ketch Feo, in which the author attempts to put his powerful father to rest once and for all"--Back cover

How to Fake an Irish Wake

Author: Eliza Watson
Publisher: Elizabeth Watson
ISBN: 1950786013
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 203

Book Description
FROM USA TODAY BESTSELLING AUTHOR AND FAMILY HISTORIAN ELIZA WATSON! "This is a sparkling tale of Irish ways, mysteries and friendship." —5-Stars "Love, love, loved this book! I wish I could give it 5k stars!" —5 Stars, Becky on Goodreads It’s been a rough year for 26-year-old Mags Murray. First she learns that her dad isn’t her biological father, a secret her mother took to her grave three years earlier. Then her beloved Irish grandmother passes away at Christmas while Mags is visiting her from the States. Now Mags must host her grandmother’s wake and sell her cottage. A cottage filled with cherished memories. A cottage Mags inherited but her odd jobs won’t enable her to keep. Shortly after the funeral, a young man, Finn O’Brien, arrives at the cottage with an old photograph. Finn believes the boys in the photo are a clue to his father’s identity. Mags can sympathize with him, and because she often helped her genealogist grandmother uncover skeletons in people’s closets, including hers, she agrees to assist Finn. But searching for Finn’s father stirs up trouble. Finn is in a near-fatal car crash that wasn’t an accident. So Mags and her childhood friend Biddy McCarthy investigate why someone wants to prevent Finn from finding his father. Questioning the quirky locals proves a wee bit difficult as several of the suspects were victims of Mags and Biddy’s childhood shenanigans. It might take a fake Irish wake to reveal Finn’s father and the would-be murderer. But what if the two turn out to be the same person? **Genealogy research tips included!** Other readers of Eliza Watson’s books enjoyed books by: Addison Moore, Alyssa Maxwell, Angie Fox, Carlene O'Connor, Cate Martin, Catie Murphy, Ellery Adams, Fiona Grace, Jana Deleon, Janet Evanovich, Joanne Fluke, Kennedy Layne, Laura Durham, Lee Strauss, Leighann Dobbs, Paige Shelton, Rhys Bowen, Shanna Swendson, Sheila Connolly, and Tonya Kappes. Topics: Cozy Mysteries Amateur Sleuth, Mysteries Amateur Sleuth, International Cozy Mysteries, Cozy Mysteries Women Sleuths, Genealogy, Family History, Ancestry, Family Trees, Fiction Set in Ireland, Humorous Cozy Mystery, Humorous Beach Read, International Mysteries, Chick Lit Mystery, Friendship Fiction, Witty Fiction, Humorous Fiction, Cozy Mysteries Set in Europe, Cozy Mysteries, Funny Beach Read, Cozy Mysteries How To, Cozy Mysteries like Stephanie Plum, Cozy Mystery Series, Cozy Mysteries in Ireland, Cozy Mystery Funny, Cozy Mystery Amateur Detective, Mysteries like Stephanie Plum

Before You Wake

Author: Erick Erickson
Publisher: Center Point
ISBN: 9781683246060
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
"Ten letters--featuring a wonderful mix of the practical, inspirational, and spiritual--about life's enduring values, based on a viral essay Erickson wrote for his children after he and his wife both faced grave medical situations"--

When We Wake

Author: Karen Healey
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 0316215007
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 182

Book Description
My name is Tegan Oglietti, and on the last day of my first lifetime, I was so, so happy. Sixteen-year-old Tegan is just like every other girl living in 2027--she's happiest when playing the guitar, she's falling in love for the first time, and she's joining her friends to protest the wrongs of the world: environmental collapse, social discrimination, and political injustice. But on what should have been the best day of Tegan's life, she dies--and wakes up a hundred years in the future, locked in a government facility with no idea what happened. Tegan is the first government guinea pig to be cryonically frozen and successfully revived, which makes her an instant celebrity--even though all she wants to do is try to rebuild some semblance of a normal life. But the future isn't all she hoped it would be, and when appalling secrets come to light, Tegan must make a choice: Does she keep her head down and survive, or fight for a better future? Award-winning author Karen Healey has created a haunting, cautionary tale of an inspiring protagonist living in a not-so-distant future that could easily be our own.

The Wake

Author: Paul Kingsnorth
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555979076
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Book Description
"A work that is as disturbing as it is empathetic, as beautiful as it is riveting." —Eimear McBride, New Statesman In the aftermath of the Norman Invasion of 1066, William the Conqueror was uncompromising and brutal. English society was broken apart, its systems turned on their head. What is little known is that a fractured network of guerrilla fighters took up arms against the French occupiers. In The Wake, a postapocalyptic novel set a thousand years in the past, Paul Kingsnorth brings this dire scenario back to us through the eyes of the unforgettable Buccmaster, a proud landowner bearing witness to the end of his world. Accompanied by a band of like-minded men, Buccmaster is determined to seek revenge on the invaders. But as the men travel across the scorched English landscape, Buccmaster becomes increasingly unhinged by the immensity of his loss, and their path forward becomes increasingly unclear. Written in what the author describes as "a shadow tongue"—a version of Old English updated so as to be understandable to the modern reader—The Wake renders the inner life of an Anglo-Saxon man with an accuracy and immediacy rare in historical fiction. To enter Buccmaster's world is to feel powerfully the sheer strangeness of the past. A tale of lost gods and haunted visions, The Wake is both a sensational, gripping story and a major literary achievement.

Rebel Hearts

Author: Kevin Toolis
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1250088739
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424

Book Description
For ten years Kevin Toolis investigated the lives of the IRA soldiers who wage a secret battle against the British State. His journeys took him from the back kitchens of Belfast, where men joked while making two-thousand-pound bombs, to prisons for interviews with men serving life sentences, and to the graveyards where mourners weep. Each chapter explores a world where history, faith, and human savagery determine life and death. At once moving and harrowing,Rebel Hearts is the most authoritative and insightful book ever written on the IRA.

Dreams from My Father

Author: Barack Obama
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307394123
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 463

Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF ESSENCE’S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS In this iconic memoir of his early days, Barack Obama “guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race” (The Washington Post Book World). “Quite extraordinary.”—Toni Morrison In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance. Praise for Dreams from My Father “Beautifully crafted . . . moving and candid . . . This book belongs on the shelf beside works like James McBride’s The Color of Water and Gregory Howard Williams’s Life on the Color Line as a tale of living astride America’s racial categories.”—Scott Turow “Provocative . . . Persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither.”—The New York Times Book Review “Obama’s writing is incisive yet forgiving. This is a book worth savoring.”—Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here “One of the most powerful books of self-discovery I’ve ever read, all the more so for its illuminating insights into the problems not only of race, class, and color, but of culture and ethnicity. It is also beautifully written, skillfully layered, and paced like a good novel.”—Charlayne Hunter-Gault, author of In My Place “Dreams from My Father is an exquisite, sensitive study of this wonderful young author’s journey into adulthood, his search for community and his place in it, his quest for an understanding of his roots, and his discovery of the poetry of human life. Perceptive and wise, this book will tell you something about yourself whether you are black or white.”—Marian Wright Edelman

Give Me My Father's Body

Author: Kenn Harper
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 074341005X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Book Description
A searing, true tale of extraordinary darkness, Harper's critically acclaimed history is an absorbing and poignant portrait of the short, strange, and tragic life of the boy known as the New York Eskimo. Two 16-page photo inserts and one 8-page insert.

Kingdom of Souls

Author: Rena Barron
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062870971
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 471

Book Description
A girl with no gifts must bargain for the power to fight her own mother’s dark schemes—even if the price is her life. Crackling with dark magic, unspeakable betrayal, and daring twists you won’t see coming, this explosive YA fantasy debut is a can’t-miss, high-stakes epic perfect for fans of Legendborn, Strange the Dreamer, and Children of Blood and Bone. “Magnetic and addictive. This book is black girl magic at its finest.”—New York Times bestselling author Dhonielle Clayton Heir to two lines of powerful witchdoctors, Arrah yearns for magic of her own. Yet she fails at bone magic, fails to call upon her ancestors, and fails to live up to her family’s legacy. Under the disapproving eye of her mother, the Kingdom’s most powerful priestess and seer, she fears she may never be good enough. But when the Kingdom’s children begin to disappear, Arrah is desperate enough to turn to a forbidden, dangerous ritual. If she has no magic of her own, she’ll have to buy it—by trading away years of her own life. Arrah’s borrowed power reveals a nightmarish betrayal, and on its heels, a rising tide of darkness that threatens to consume her and all those she loves. She must race to unravel a twisted and deadly scheme… before the fight costs more than she can afford. Set in a richly imagined world inspired by whispered tales of voodoo and folk magic, Rena Barron’s captivating debut is the beginning of a thrilling saga about a girl caught between gods, monsters, and the gift and the curse of power. “Masterful.” —SLJ (starred review)