I read of a man who stood to speak At the funeral of a friend He referred to the dates on her tombstone From the beginning to the end He noted that first came the date of her birth And spoke the following date with tears, But he said what mattered most of all Was the dash between those years. In 1996, an announcer read Linda's Ellis's poem “The Dash” aloud on a syndicated r…
America is in trouble. We face four major challenges on which our future depends, and we are failing to meet them—and if we delay any longer, soon it will be too late for us to pass along the American dream to future generations. In That Used to Be Us, Thomas L. Friedman, one of our most influential columnists, and Michael Mandelbaum, one of our leading foreign policy thinkers, offer both a w…
What does it mean when a fictional hero takes a journey?. Shares a meal? Gets drenched in a sudden rain shower? Often, there is much more going on in a novel or poem than is readily visible on the surface -- a symbol, maybe, that remains elusive, or an unexpected twist on a character -- and there's that sneaking suspicion that the deeper meaning of a literary text keeps escaping you. In this pr…
Heard you were looking for cheat codes & walk throughs for getting it right. (Here ya go.) Okay, so it’s possible you’re the first human being ever created just so you can muddle through life, add up to nothing, or crash and burn. But probably not. Probably–in fact, definitely–you’re here for a very big, very good reason. And God wants you to live it huge. That’s the mot…
Sapardi Djoko Damono, one of Indonesia's most productive and popular poets first began writing poetry as a high school student in the mid- 1950s. Before Dawn includes poems written by the author over a forty year time span, from 1961 to 2001. Arranged as they are in chronological order, the poems in Before Dawn together form a kind of poetic autobiography. In "One Night," written in 1964, the a…
From the author of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker has been acclaimed as the most influential work on evolution in the last hundred years. In 1802 the Rev. William Paley's argued in Natural Theology that just as finding a watch would lead you to conclude that a watchmaker must exist, the complexity of living organisms proves that a Creator exists. Not so, says Richard Da…
A mother addresses the issues of grieving in a poignant and personal journey toward healing.
from the back cover: Cedric Errol is seven years old. He lives with his mother in a little house in New York. They don't have much money, but mother and son are very good friends. Cedric is a kind, friendly little boy, and everybody likes him. His father was English, but he is now dead, and Cedric and his mother are alone in the world. But one day a lawyer arrives from England with some s…