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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Anatomy of Hope: How People Prevail in the Face of Illness'
An inspiring and profoundly enlightening exploration of one doctors discovery of how hope can change
the course of illness
Since the time of the ancient Greeks, human beings have believed that hope is essential to life. Now, in this groundbreaking book, Harvard Medical School professor and New Yorker staff writer Jerome Groopman shows us why.
The search for hope is most urgent at the patients bedside. The Anatomy of Hope takes us there, bringing us into the lives of people at pivotal moments when they reach for and find hope--or when it eludes their grasp. Through these intimate portraits, we learn how to distinguish true hope from false, why some people feel they are undeserving of it, and whether we should ever abandon our search.
Can hope contribute to recovery by changing physical well-being? To answer this hotly debated question, Groopman embarked on an investigative journey to cutting-edge laboratories where researchers are unraveling an authentic biology of hope. There he finds a scientific basis for understanding the role of this vital emotion in the outcome of illness.
Here is a book that offers a new way of thinking about hope, with a message for all readers, not only patients and their families. "We are just beginning to appreciate hopes reach," Groopman writes, "and have not defined its limits. I see hope as the very heart of healing." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Being Dead'
Penzler Pick, June 2000: It begins with a murder. Celice and Joseph, in their mid-50s and married for more than 30 years, are returning to the seacoast where they met as students. They are reliving their first amorous encounter in the sand dunes when they are set upon by the murderer who beats them to death with a rock and steals their watches, their jewelry, and even their meager lunch. From that moment forward, this remarkably written book by Jim Crace becomes less about murder and more about death. Alternating chapters move back in time from the murder in hourly and two-hourly increments. As the narrative moves backward, we see Celice and Joseph make the small decisions about their day that will lead them inexorably towards their own deaths. Eventually we learn about their first meeting, and that this is not the first time tragedy has struck them in this idyllic setting.
In other chapters the narrative moves forward. Celice and Joseph are on vacation and nobody misses them until they do not return. Thus, it is six days before their bodies are found. Crace describes in minute detail their gradual return to the land with the help of crabs, birds, and the numerous insects that attack the body and gently and not so gently prepare it for the dust-to-dust phase of death. Celice and Joseph would have been delighted with the description: she was a zoologist and he was an oceanographer, and they spent their lives with their eyes to the microscope, observing the phenomena of life and death. Some readers might find this gruesome, but the facts of death are told in such glorious prose that these descriptions in no way detract from the enjoyment of the book.
After her parents do not return home, their daughter, Syl, must search the morgues and follow up John and Jane Doe reports until she is finally asked to make an identification of the remains in the dunes. We then discover that the reader has had a more intimate relationship with them in death than Syl ever had with them in life. This small gem of a book, not really a mystery in the usual sense, will stay with you long after you finish. --Otto Penzler [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Blind Faith'
A Simon & Schuster eBook [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bodies in Motion and at Rest'
All poets who take their jobs seriously spend a good deal of their time pondering death. Few, though, have logged as many hours as Thomas Lynch, who for 25 years has been a funeral director in Milford, Michigan. As might be expected from a writer who performs "daily stations with the local lately dead," Lynch's second essay collection, Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality, has a lot to say about both the current state of his industry (with its "Walmartized" funerals) and the attitude Americans have toward death, which is more or less to pretend it doesn't exist and to hope it never happens to us or anyone we know. Of course, this leads to our inability to properly understand life. And we become one of those stunned mumblers whom the author has spent a lifetime consoling and selling caskets to at Lynch & Sons.
As in his previous collection, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, Lynch muses on contemporary American life with an appealing mix of light and dark. The effect can be striking, especially in his essays on the death of a crafty old gravedigger; the alcoholism he inherited from his father and, devastatingly, watches develop in his son; his divorce and the wicked poem he later writes about his ex-wife. His prose is always lively, though in several essays he relies on the same cultural touchstones--Bill Gates, the Internet, his Catholic-school upbringing and the "wonderful breasts" of the nuns, and (oddly) the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song "Love the One You're With." More unfortunately, he can lapse into familiar generalizations of the "we boomers" or "as an Irish Catholic" variety. Then again, funeral directors must keep an eye on the habits and statistics of generations and groups (as Lynch puts it, "our favorite parlor game is Demographics and Expectancies"), so perhaps a few familiar generalities are excusable--an occupational hazard of the poet-essayist-mortician. In Lynch's case (and there probably isn't another), they seem a fair exchange for his entertaining and often surprisingly humble wisdom. --John Ponyicsanyi [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Color Works: The Crafters Color Guide'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Death: The Final Stage of Growth'
Ours is a death-denying society. But death is inevitable, and we must face the question of how to deal with it. Coming to terms with our own finiteness helps us discover life's true meaning.
Why do we treat death as a taboo? What are the sources of our fears? How do we express our grief, and how do we accept the death of a person close to us? How can we prepare for our own death?
Drawing on our own and other cultures' views of death and dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross provides some illuminating answers to these and other questions. She offers a spectrum of viewpoints, including those of ministers, rabbis, doctors, nurses, and sociologists, and the personal accounts of those near death and of their survivors.
Once we come to terms with death as a part of human development, the author shows, death can provide us with a key to the meaning of human existence. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Dirty Job'
Charlie Asher is a pretty normal guy. A little hapless, somewhat neurotic, sort of a hypochondriac. He's what's known as a Beta Male: the kind of fellow who makes his way through life by being careful and constant -- you know, the one who's always there to pick up the pieces when the girl gets dumped by the bigger/taller/stronger Alpha Male.
But Charlie's been lucky. He owns a building in the heart of San Francisco, and runs a secondhand store with the help of a couple of loyal, if marginally insane, employees. He's married to a bright and pretty woman who actually loves him for his normalcy. And she, Rachel, is about to have their first child.
Yes, Charlie's doing okay for a Beta. That is, until the day his daughter, Sophie, is born. Just as Charlie -- exhausted from the birth -- turns to go home, he sees a strange man in mint-green golf wear at Rachel's hospital bedside, a man who claims that no one should be able to see him. But see him Charlie does, and from here on out, things get really weird. . . .
People start dropping dead around him, giant ravens perch on his building, and it seems that everywhere he goes, a dark presence whispers to him from under the streets. Strange names start appearing on his nightstand notepad, and before he knows it, those people end up dead, too. Yup, it seems that Charlie Asher has been recruited for a new job, an unpleasant but utterly necessary one: Death. It's a dirty job. But hey, somebody's gotta do it.
Christopher Moore, the man whose Lamb served up Jesus' "missing years" (with the funny parts left in), and whose Fluke found the deep humor in whale researchers' lives, now shines his comic light on the undiscovered country we all eventually explore -- death and dying -- and the results are hilarious, heartwarming, and a hell of a lot of fun.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dolce Agonia'

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Dyer's Companion'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Dyer's Garden : From Plant to Pot; Growing Dyes for Natural Fibers'
Paperback [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'East of the Mountains'
David Guterson's first novel, Snow Falling on Cedars, was a true ensemble piece, in which even a high-stakes murder trial seemed like a judgment passed on the community at large. In his eloquent second novel, however, the author swings dramatically in the opposite direction. East of the Mountains is the tale of a solitary, 73-year-old Seattle widower. A retired heart surgeon, Ben Givens is an old hand at turning isolation to his advantage, both professionally and personally: "When everything human was erased from existence except that narrow antiseptic window through which another's heart could be manipulated--few were as adroit as Dr. Givens."
Now, however, Ben has been dealt a problem entirely beyond his powers of manipulation: a diagnosis of terminal cancer. With just a few months to live, he sets out across the Cascades for a hunting trip, planning to take his own life once he reaches the high desert. A car crash en route puts an initial crimp in this suicide mission. But the ailing surgeon presses onward--and begins a simultaneous journey into the past. Between present-tense episodes, which demonstrate Ben's cranky commitment to his own extinction, we learn about his boyhood in Washington's apple country, his traumatic war experience in the Italian Alps, and the beginning of his vocation.
Guterson narrates the apple-scented idyll of Ben's childhood in a typically low-key manner--and orchards, of course, are seldom the stuff of melodrama. Still, many of his ambling sentences offer miniature lessons in patience and perception: "They rode back all day to the Columbia, traversed it on the Colockum Ferry, and at dusk came into their orchard tired, on empty stomachs, their hats tipped back, to walk the horses between the rows of trees in a silent kind of processional, and Aidan ran his hands over limbs as he passed them with his horse behind him, the limbs trembling in the wake of his passing, and on, then, to the barn." The wartime episodes, however, are less satisfactory. Clearly Guterson has done his research down to the last stray bullet, but there's a second-hand feeling to the material, which seems less a token of Ben's detachment than the author's.
There is, alas, an additional problem. Begin a story with a planned suicide, and there are exactly two possible outcomes. It would be unfair to reveal Ben's fate. But as the forces of life and death yank him one way, then another, Guterson tends to stack the deck--particularly during a bus ride toward the end of the novel, when Ben's fellow passengers appear to have wandered in from a Frank Capra film. Yet East of the Mountains remains a beautifully imagined work, in which the landscape reflects both Ben's desperation and his intermittent delight. And Guterson knows from the start what his protagonist learns in painful increments: that "a neat, uncomplicated end" doesn't exist on either side of the mountains. --James Marcus [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Eating Heaven'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying'
Offers families, friends, and care-givers of terminally ill patients suggestions for facilitating a peaceful death with advice on listening to the dying in order to understand their needs. 25,000 first printing. Tour. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Five People You Meet in Heaven'
Part melodrama and part parable, Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven weaves together three stories, all told about the same man: 83-year-old Eddie, the head maintenance person at Ruby Point Amusement Park. As the novel opens, readers are told that Eddie, unsuspecting, is only minutes away from death as he goes about his typical business at the park. Albom then traces Eddie's world through his tragic final moments, his funeral, and the ensuing days as friends clean out his apartment and adjust to life without him. In alternating sections, Albom flashes back to Eddie's birthdays, telling his life story as a kind of progress report over candles and cake each year. And in the third and last thread of the novel, Albom follows Eddie into heaven where the maintenance man sequentially encounters five pivotal figures from his life (a la A Christmas Carol). Each person has been waiting for him in heaven, and, as Albom reveals, each life (and death) was woven into Eddie's own in ways he never suspected. Each soul has a story to tell, a secret to reveal, and a lesson to share. Through them Eddie understands the meaning of his own life even as his arrival brings closure to theirs.
Albom takes a big risk with the novel; such a story can easily veer into the saccharine and preachy, and this one does in moments. But, for the most part, Albom's telling remains poignant and is occasionally profound. Even with its flaws, The Five People You Meet in Heaven is a small, pure, and simple book that will find good company on a shelf next to It's A Wonderful Life. --Patrick O'Kelley [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gilead: A Novel'
Twenty-four years after her first novel, Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson returns with an intimate tale of three generations from the Civil War to the twentieth century: a story about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America's heart. Writing in the tradition of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Marilynne Robinson's beautiful, spare, and spiritual prose allows "even the faithless reader to feel the possibility of transcendent order" Slate . In the luminous and unforgettable voice of Congregationalist minister John Ames, Gilead reveals the human condition and the often unbearable beauty of an ordinary life. Gilead is the winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'A Guide to Practical Pastoring'
A 'hands-on' reference for those who are involved in the work of leading or pastoring a congregation. It takes an honest look at the problems that may occur and gives biblical guidelines for dealing with them, as well as the benefit of many years experience. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'How We Die'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter'
Attempting to demythologize the process of dying, Nuland explores how we shall die, each of us in a way that will be unique. Through particular stories of dying--of patients, and of his own family--he examines the seven most common roads to death: old age, cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's, accidents, heart disease, and strokes, revealing the facets of death's multiplicity.
"It's impossible to read How We Die without realizing how earnestly we have avoided this most unavoidable of subjects, how we have protected ourselves by building a cultural wall of myths and lies. I don't know of any writer or scientist who has shown us the face of death as clearly, honestly and compassionately as Sherwin Nuland does here."--James Gleick
From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In Memoriam'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Journey Through Heartsongs'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Life After Death: A Study of the Afterlife in World Religions'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Life Lessons: Two Experts on Death and Dying Teach Us About the Mysteries of Life and Living'
After experiencing a paralyzing stroke in 1995 and facing her own mortality, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (author of the renowned On Death and Dying) realized she had some unfinished business to take care of. "I wanted to write one more book, not on death and dying, but on life and living," she explains. So she joined forces with coauthor David Kessler, a leader in the field of hospice care, and together they wrote about the lessons we can learn about living from those who are dying. As Kessler explains in his introduction, "The dying have always been teachers of great lessons, for it's when we are pushed to the edge of life that we see most clearly."
In days gone by, the community would have gathering places where children and adults listened to elders tell their stories of life's challenges and the meaning they found in life. In lieu of that kind of extended community, the authors offer this book, filled with stories from the edge. Then, like fireside elders, they weave these personal stories into themes, such as living authentically, the importance of play, finding one's power, loving relationships, and self-compassion. One cannot say enough about the lasting value of this beautifully written and carefully rendered book. This is your chance to see life from the 20/20 vision of hindsight. In the end what will we value most? Here are some hints: the days we surrendered and became calm, the times we healed that which was broken, and of course all the moments we opened ourselves to love. --Gail Hudson [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Love You Forever'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Memory on Cloth: Shibori Now'
Shibori is infinitely more than the tie-dye that became well known in the late 1960s. Shaped-resist dyeing techniques have been done for centuries in every corner of the world. Yet more than half of the known techniques-in which cloth is in some way tied, clamped, folded, or held back during dyeing, to keep some areas from taking color - originated in Japan.
Shibori can be used not only to create patterns on cloth but to turn fabric from a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional object. The word is used here to refer to any process that leaves a "memory on cloth" -a permanent record, whether of patterning or texture, of the particular forms of resist done. In addition to traditional methods it encompasses high-tech processes like heat-set on polyester (made famous by Issey Miyake's revolutionary pleated clothing), melt-off on metallic fabric, the fulling and felting that make it possible to turn all-natural fabrics into three-dimensional shapes, weaving resist (in which, for instance, a warp thread can be pulled to gather the cloth to resist dye), and dévorée, in which just one part of a mixed fabric is dissolved with chemicals.
Author Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada has been teaching shibori around the world for nearly thirty years, and helped to establish the World Shibori Network and the International Shibori Symposium. She coauthored in 1983 the authoritative Shibori: The Inventive Art of Japanese Shaped-Resist Dyeing, which in turn inspired many artists to add shibori processes to their repertoire.
The range of vibrant modern art covered in Memory on Cloth is remarkable, and includes work by artists from Africa, South America, Europe, India, Japan, China, Korea, the United States, and Australia in more than 325 stunning photos and illustrations. It encompasses fabric design, wearable art and fashion, and textile art or various sculptural forms. The work of more than seventy innovative designers including Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, Jurgen Lehl, Jun'ichi Arai, Hélène Soubeyran, Geneviève Dion, Asha Sarabhai, Junco Sato Pollack, Ana Lisa Hedstrom, Marian Clayden, and Carter Smith is presented, and each artist shares details on the processes that they themselves have created, making this an invaluable reference for artists in every field. A number of innovative artists who combine shibori techniques with knitting, weaving, or quilting are also included, suggesting new ways to combine innovation with more traditional forms. A final section on modern techniques gives extremely detailed information, including dye recipes, on various high-tech processes and the particular methods that individual artists use to achieve certain effects.
As informative as it is inspirational, Memory on Cloth will take its place alongside Wada's earlier work, Shibori, as a definitive text that will help keep shaped-resist dyeing processes a vibrant and important form of modern art.
Features
* More than 325 stunning photos and illustrations
* Encompasses fabric design, wearable art and fashion, and textile art or various sculptural forms
* Covers more than seventy innovative designers
* Includes works by artists from Africa, South America, Europe, India, Japan, China, Korea, the United States, and Australia
* Each artist shares details on the processes that they themselves have created
Praise for Shibori (co-authored by Yoshiko Wada):
"In this age of hyperbole there is great risk in declaring a singular event. Nonetheless one has occurred with the long anticipated publication of Shibori: The Inventive Art of Japanese Shaped Resist Dyeing. Word of this book has long circulated in the inner and outer sanctums of the textile world with excitement and expectation building. This combination of bilingual, scholarly, creative and resourceful authors has brought us a classic volume . . . A masterful blend of historical material that puts Japanese textiles in context, clearly described and illustrated techniques along with information and illustrations of contemporary work from Japan and the West make this book an essential acquisition for anyone who proclaims a serious interest in textile dyeing, design, or historic textiles." ?Glen Kaufman, in Surface Design Journal
"Well researched, well written, well organized and well illustrated." ?Crafts Magazine [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Navajo and Hopi Dyes'
A combination of two historic works by native instructors on the preparation and use of dyes for fiber and associated art ingredients. The book includes a two-sided color insert of dye charts produced in the American Southwest [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Never Change'
Elizabeth Berg has a single great gift as a novelist. She creates heroines who are stuck and unhappy, yet deeply sympathetic. This may seem like an easy trick to pull off, but it's not. Think about it: usually when a character is mired in a problem--especially a problem stemming from her own reluctance to change, or fear of commitment, or lack of identity--the reader is ready within a few dozen pages to shout, "Pull yourself together!" and set the book aside. In contrast, Berg's characters seem like enjoyable challenges: problems with actual solutions.
In Never Change, Berg uses her gift to great advantage. Middle-aged Myra Lipinsky describes herself as "the one who sat on a folding chair out in the hall with a cigar box on my lap selling tickets to the prom, but never going." And despite a flourishing career as a visiting nurse, she feels as much an also-ran as ever. As the novel begins, in fact, high school seems to be rearing its ugly head again: Chip Reardon, the heartthrob of Myra's youth, has returned to town to live with his parents. Chip is dying from a brain tumor, and Myra becomes his nurse. Berg is not the kind of writer to lay bare the unsettling power dynamics of such a situation. Instead, Chip and Myra become friends and, well, learn how to love each other. It's a testament to the author's strong sense of character that we actually believe--and what's more, care about--Myra's emergence from her emotional cocoon. And the book is full of nice details, like this snapshot of children being read to at a library, "rising up on their knees to see the pictures, resting their hands unselfconsciously on those ahead of them so that they would not lose their balance." Such careful observations, recounted in Myra's voice, make us believe that she is a character worth knowing, and worth saving. --Claire Dederer [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'On Death & Dying'
Book [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'On Death and Dying'
An audio presentation of the world-famous bestseller in which Kubler-Ross examines attitudes and factors that contribute to society's anxiety about death. 2 cassettes. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'On Death And Dying'
Although most areas of human experience are nowadays discussed freely and openly, the subject of death is still surrounded by conventional attitudes and reticence that offer only fragile comfort because they evade the real issues. The dying may thus be denied the opportunity of sharing their feelings and discussing their needs with family, friends, or hospital staff. Although receiving devoted medical care, a dying patient is often socially isolated and avoided, since professional staff and students can find contact painful and embarrasing.
Aware of the strains imposed on all sides by this situation, Dr Kubler-Ross established a seminar at the University of Chicago to consider the implications of terminal illness for patients and for those involved in their care. Patients invited to talk about their experience often found great relief in expressing their fear and anger and were able to move towards a state of acceptance and peace. The seminar, initially composed of students of medicine, sociology, psychology, and theology, but later joined by hospital staff and relatives of patients, enabled many members to come to terms with their own feelings and to respond constructi to what the patients had to teach them.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Paula'
"Listen, Paula. I am going to tell you a story so that when you wake up you will not feel so lost." So says Chilean writer Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits) in the opening lines of the luminous, heart-rending memoir she wrote while her 28-year-old daughter Paula lay in a coma. In its pages, she ushers an assortment of outrageous relatives into the light: her stepfather, an amiable liar and tireless debater; grandmother Meme, blessed with second sight; and delinquent uncles who exultantly torment Allende and her brothers. Irony and marvelous flights of fantasy mix with the icy reality of Paula's deathly illness as Allende sketches childhood scenes in Chile and Lebanon; her uncle Salvatore Allende's reign and ruin as Chilean president; her struggles to shake off or find love; and her metamorphosis into a writer. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Questions and Answers on Death and Dying: A Companion Volume To On Death And Dying'
On Death and Dying is one of the most important books ever written on the subject and is still considered the bench-mark in the care of the dying. It became an immediate bestseller, and Life magazine called it "a profound lesson for the living." This companion volume consists of the questions that are most frequently asked of Dr. Kübler-Ross and her compassionate answers. She discusses accepting the end of life, suicide, terminal illness, euthanasia, how to tell a patient he or she is critically ill, and how to deal with all the special difficulties surrounding death. Questions and Answers on Death and Dying is a vital resource for doctors, nurses, members of the clergy, social workers, and lay people dealing with death and dying. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Shibori: The Inventive Art of Japanese Shaped Resist Dyeing Tradition Techniques Innovation'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Six Months To Live'
FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. After being diagnosed with leukemia, thirteen-year-old Dawn is delighted to find a friend to battle alongside with her, until her friend, Sandy, slips back from remission. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers'
"One of the funniest and most unusual books of the year....Gross, educational, and unexpectedly sidesplitting."Entertainment Weekly
Stiff is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. For two thousand years, cadaverssome willingly, some unwittinglyhave been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They've tested France's first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender reassignment surgery, cadavers have been there alongside surgeons, making history in their quiet way.More editions of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers:
› Find signed collectible books: 'A Summer to Die'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Surviving Death: A Practical Guide to Caring for the Dying & Bereaved'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying'
In this major and comprehensive work, Buddhist meditation master and international speaker Sogyal Rinpoche brings together the ancient wisdom of Tibet with modern research on death and dying and the nature of the universe. With unprecedented scope, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying clarifies the majestic vision of life and death that underlies The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Sogyal Rinpoche presents simple yet powerful practices from the heart of the Tibetan tradition that anyone, whatever their religion or background, can do to transform their lives, prepare for death, and help the dying.Rinpoche shows the hope there is in death: how we can go beyond denial and fear to discover what it is in us that survives death and is changeless. He presents a lucid, inspiring, and complete introduction to the practice of meditation, to karma and rebirth, and to the trials and rewards of the spiritual path. He gives advice on how to care for the dying with love and compassion and offer them spiritual assistance.Rinpoche presents his own vision of the near-death experience from the Tibetan perspective. He explains in detail the "bardos," those states of consciousness after death that have fascinated and tantalized Western artists, psychologists, scientists, doctors, and philosophers ever since the publication of The Tibetan Book of the Dead in 1927.The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying is not only a spiritual masterpiece but also a manual, a guide, a work of reference, and a source of sacred inspiration. It has been written to inspire all who read it to begin the journey to enlightenment and so become "servants of peace," working in the world with joy, wisdom, and compassion to take part in safeguarding the future of humanity. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tuesdays With Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Lifes Greatest Lesson'
Maybe it was a grandparent, or a teacher or a colleague. Someone older, patient and wise, who understood you when you were young and searching, and gave you sound advice to help you make your way through it. For Mitch Albom, that person was Morrie Schwartz, his college professor from nearly twenty years ago. Maybe, like Mitch, you lost track of this mentor as you made your way, and the insights faded. Wouldn't you like to see that person again, ask the bigger questions that still haunt you? Mitch Albom had that second chance. He rediscovered Morrie in the last months of the older man's life. Knowing he was dying of ALS - or motor neurone disease - MItch visited Morrie in his study every Tuesday, just as they used to back in college. Their rekindled relationship turned into one final 'class': lessons in how to live. TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE is a magical chronicle of their time together, through which Mitch shares Morrie's lasting gift with the world. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Undertaking'
"...I had come to know that the undertaking that my father did had less to do with what was done to the dead and more to do with what the living did about the fact of life that people died," Thomas Lynch muses in his preface to The Undertaking. The same could be said for Lynch's book: ostensibly about death and its attendant rituals, The Undertaking is in the end about life. In each case, he writes, it is the one that gives meaning to the other. A funeral director in Milford, Michigan, Lynch is that strangest of hyphenates, a poet-undertaker, but according to Lynch, all poets share his occupation, "looking for meaning and voices in life and love and death." Looking for meaning takes him to all sorts of unexpected places, both real and imagined. He embalms the body of his own father, celebrates the rebuilt bridge to his town's old cemetery, takes issue with the Jessica Mitfords of this world, and envisages a "golfatorium," a combination golf course and cemetery that could restore joy to the last rites. In "Crapper," Lynch even contemplates the subtleties of the modern flush toilet and its relationship to the messy business of dying: "Just about the time we were bringing the making of water and the movement of bowels into the house, we were pushing the birthing and marriage and sickness and dying out." Death and fatherhood, death and friendship, death and faith and love and poetry--these are the concerns that power Lynch's undertaking. Throughout, Lynch pleads the case for our dead--who are, after all, still living through us--with an eloquence marked by equal parts whimsy, wit, and compassion. In the last essay, "Tract," he envisions almost wistfully the funeral he'd choose for himself, and then relinquishes that, too. Funerals, after all, are for the living. The dead, he reminds us, don't care. --Mary Park [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'A Very Easy Death'
A Very Easy Death has long been considered one of Simone de Beauvoirs masterpieces. The profoundly moving, day-by-day recounting of her mothers death shows the power of compassion when it is allied with acute intelligence (The Sunday Telegraph).
Powerful, touching, and sometimes shocking, this is an end-of-life account that no reader is likely to forget.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Wheel of Life: A Memoir of Living and Dying'
Psychiatrist and author of On Death and Dying Elisabeth Kübler-Ross has long been considered an expert on the terminally ill, and she is credited with bringing the hospice movement to the United States. Now retired after a series of strokes, and, at 70, facing her own death, she has written The Wheel of Life: A Memoir of Living and Dying, a highly personal memoir. Besides telling her unusual life's story, this book is also a startling treatise on death. Recounting her research with the dying and with those who claim to have "returned" after dying, Dr. Kübler-Ross also writes eloquently about her belief in the afterlife. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Who Dies?: An Investigation of Conscious Living and Conscious Dying'
While many books have dealt with the 'stages of dying', and particularly the stages of acceptance of death, this is the first to demonstrate how to open the immensity of living with death. 'Who Dies?' shows us how to participate fully in life as the perfect preparation for whatever may come next, be it sorrow or joy, loss or gain, death or a new wonderment at life. Stephen's work is magic. His work with the grieving and dying is amongst the most skilful and compassionate that I am aware of. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross This book has addressed itself to the many aspects of the dying process with refreshing insight, candour, and lightness. It divests the incredible melodrama called 'death' of its frightful power, supplanting fear with calm, simple, compassionate understanding. from the Preface by Ram Dass Other books by Stephen Levine Embracing the Beloved A Gradual Awakening Guided Meditations, Explorations and Healings Healing into Life and Death Meeting at the Edge. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Wild Color'
Crafters who work with environmentally friendly materials will love this guide to growing and using plants to make dyes in a range of colors. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Year of Magical Thinking'
From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage-and a life, in good times and bad-that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later-the night before New Year's Eve-the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.This powerful book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Las cinco personas que encontraras en el cielo / The Five People You Meet in Heaven'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Las Cinco Personas Que Encontraras En El Cielo / the Five People You Meet in Heaven'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Encuentros Con Morrie'
En marzo de 1995, el escritor Mitch Albom viajó cerca de mil kilómetros para pasar una tarde con un hombre moribundo -Morrie Schwartz, su antiguo profesor de sociología- y encontró algo que no se esperaba. Aunque Schwartz estaba reducido a una silla de ruedas y se encontraba en las fases finales de una terrible enfermedad, estaba viviendo uno de los momentos más productivos de su vida: trabajando en un libro de aforismos, rodeado de amigos y estudiantes, difundiendo su sabiduría a través de un conocido programa de televisión. "Entonces pensé", dice Albom, "yo tengo 37 años y estoy en perfecto estado de salud. Él tiene 78 y se está muriendo; sin embargo, él parece definitivamente más feliz y satisfecho".
Éste fue el inicio de la serie de encuentros que dieron lugar a este libro y que constituyen la mayor lección que alguien puede recibir. En sus encuentros, que siempre tienen lugar los martes, Morrie y Mitch hablan sobre todas las cosas importantes de la vida, pero sobre todo Morrie comparte con su antiguo alumno lo que ha aprendido de la vida desde el momento en que supo que iba a morir. Y su mensaje, para sorpresa de todos, es una lección de optimismo, entereza, amor y generosidad. Al final, como dice Albom, "Encuentros con Morrie no es en absoluto un libro acerca de la muerte. Es un libro acerca de cómo vivir bien y encontrar la satisfacción".
"Mientras nos queramos unos a otros y tengamos presente el sentimiento del amor que tuvimos, podemos morir sin irnos del todo. Todo el amor que uno creó queda allí. Todos los recuerdos siguen allí. Uno sigue viviendo en los corazones de todos los que tocó y quiso mientras estuvo aquí... La muerte es el final de una vida, pero no de una relación", le dice Morrie a Mitch, en uno de sus últimos encuentros. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Paula'
Paula es el libro más conmovedor, más personal y más íntimo de Isabel Allende. Junto al lecho en que moría su hija Paula, la gran narradora chilena escribió la historia de su familia y de si misma con el propósito de regalársela a Paula cuando ésta superara la enfermedad. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Siempre Te Querre/Love You Forever'
A young woman holds her newborn son
And looks at him lovingly.
Softly she sings to him:
"I'll love you forever
I'll like you for always
As long as I'm living
My baby you'll be."
So begins the story that has touched the hearts of millions of Americans. Since publication in l986, Love You Forever has sold more than 15 million copies in paperback and the regular hardcover edition.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Le Scaphandre Et Le Papillon'
avec couverture illustrée d' un dessin en couleurs. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Une Mort Tres Douce'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Cura De Schopenhauer'
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