Catapult jan 2015 (2 Ergebnisse)

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - If Only You People Could Follow Directions is a spellbinding debut that reimagines the memoir in Jessica Hendry Nelson's thoroughly original voice. In these linked essays, Nelson's fearless writing and hypnotic storytelling centers on the story of three people: Nelson's mother Susan, her brother Eric, and Jessica herself. These three characters are deeply bound to one another, not just by the usual ties of blood and family, but also by a mother's drive to keep her children safe in the midst of chaos. The book begins with Nelson's childhood in the suburbs of Philadelphia and chronicles her father's addiction and death, her brother's battle with drugs and mental illness, her own efforts to find and maintain stability, and her mother's exquisite power, grief, and self-destruction in the face of such complicated family dynamics. Each of the book's chapters concerns a different relationship-friends, lovers, and strangers are all at play-but at its heart the book is about family, the ties that bind, enrich, and betray us, and how one young woman sought to rise above her perilous surroundings. …

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - From the simple representative shapes used to record transactions of goods and services in ancient Mesopotamia, to the sophisticated typographical resources available to the twenty-first-century users of desktop computers, the story of writing is the story of human civilization itself.Calligraphy expert Ewan Clayton traces the history of an invention which-ever since our ancestors made the transition from a nomadic to an agrarian way of life in the eighth century BC-has been the method of codification and dissemination of ideas in every field of human endeavour, and a motor of cultural, scientific and political progress. He explores the social and cultural impact of, among other stages, the invention of the alphabet; the replacement of the papyrus scroll with the codex in the late Roman period; the perfecting of printing using moveable type in the fifteenth century and the ensuing spread of literacy; the industrialization of printing during the Industrial Revolution; the impact of artistic Modernism on the written word in the early twentieth century-and of the digital switchover at the century's close.The Golden Thread also raises issues of urgent interest for a society living in an era of unprecedented change to the tools and technologies of written communication.…