50 Bài Học Triết Lý Từ Cuộc Sống - Duy Trì Trái Tim Khiêm Tốn tải về miễn phí cuốn sách

Gareth Edwards kaffienblog — This is not the best book I've ever read but it was really good. I had not heard of a traumatic brain issue called Left Neglect so that was interesting as well as how the main character dealt with it. I loved where she landed at the end. A good read and a pretty page turner.

Hee-joo Choi chjcgw15438 — Miniseries: Cowboys Royale Category: Suspense

车 蓝雨 _oliny — Fabulous book outlining basic puppy training - everything from dominance to potty training. :) The Monks are reknowned for dog training.

Adrian Rosu noxer — Just bought this massive history of film; never expecting to obtain it at the bargain price I did. I referenced it a few years back at the public library and am now glad to have my own copy. The earlier parts dispel common myths of the early cinema routinely passed on through the general film literature and discourse. I'm nowhere near finishing this. But it's obvious from what I have read and seen in this beautifully assembled book that this is one of the very finest overviews of the movies yet published.

Elizabeth Piñeros totonpiner3b27 — Edward Abbey was not a politically correct environmentalist. He was known to drive around in his shiny red gas guzzling Cadillac throwing beer cans out the window, justifying it by saying that the roads were the real pollution. He frustrated both conservatives and liberals with his views and actions, but his anarchist spirit, appetite and love of the desert Southwest could not be hemmed in by the rigidities of either party. (Although he once said "It is better to be a knee jerk liberal than a knee pad conservative.") I disagree with his views on immigration, but understand what informed them. He was so protective of the land he loved that he did not want to see it destroyed by overpopulation. I first read Desert Solitaire in my early twenties and fell in love. I've read it several times since then but haven't read any Abbey in probably over ten years. While reading Down the River I fell in love with him all over again. Abbey's writing is contemplative and philosophical, fiery and feisty, lusty, fearless, gorgeous, and OPINIONATED. He fills me with a yearning for my somewhat misplaced wild self, for the desert Southwest, and for wild adventure in general. Abbey reminds me of Terry Tempest Williams when he writes about our culture's obsession with sex, saying that we are so obsessed because sex is about the only primordial adventure left for most of us who are caged in by industrial society. I'm also reminded of the book, Wild Hunger: The Primal Roots of Modern Addiction, which looks into the root causes of addiction, claiming that it is our lack of and longing for primal connection and experience that cause us to become addicted to a variety of substances or activities. Down the River introduces me to an Edward Abbey that feels a bit tamer and more sociable than I was used to in either Desert Solitaire or The Monkey Wrench Gang. I must admit that it was kind of a shock to read about Abbey taking a guided rafting tour (I guess I saw him as a self-sufficient DIY guy), sipping wine and listening to musicians play pleasant music (far too civilized, and dare I say, "yuppie"!) at sunset in a canyon after roughing it all day on the river. Funny the images we unconsciously concoct of our gods... I liked the first essay, Down the River with Henry Thoreau, the best. Abbey floats down the Green and Colorado rivers while offering his musings about Thoreau and modern society. Abbey is sometimes called the Thoreau of the West, but in character Thoreau and Abbey were quite different. Thoreau was an easterner, a devout vegetarian, puritanical, apparently asexual, and almost religious/mystical about environmentalism. Though Abbey was born in Pennsylvania, he was a westerner through and through, making the West his home. He was also an unapologetic carnivore/omnivore, a lover of women, and much more down-and-dirty-in-the-muck-of-earth than Thoreau. Despite their differences Abbey had great respect for Thoreau. When I think back to Walden, even though I love the book, there were parts of it that were quite dry and solely factual - measurements of ponds and counts of particular animals or goods in his cabin. Abbey's writing feels much more succulent and passionate. I prefer Abbey. The following excerpts offer a little taste of Abbey's philosophy about knowledge and understanding. "Modern science and technology have given us the engineering techniques to measure, analyze, and take apart the immediate neighborhood, including the neighbors, but this knowledge adds not much to our understanding of things. 'Knowledge is power,' said Francis Bacon, the great-great grandfather of the nuclear age. Power, exactly - that's been the point of the game all along. But power does not lead to wisdom, even less to understanding. Sympathy, love, physical contact - touching - are better means to so fine an end." "Though a sucker for philosophy all of my life I am not a thinker but a feeler - a toucher. A feeler groping his way with the white cane of the senses through the hairy jungle of life. I believe in nothing I cannot touch, kiss, embrace - whether a woman, a child, a rock, a tree, a bear, a shaggy dog. The rest is hearsay. If God is not present in this young prickly pear jabbing its spines into my shin, then God will have to get by without my help. I'm sorry but that's the way I feel. The message in the bottle is not for me." So beautiful and eloquent... In many of the essays, Abbey is traveling and riding rivers with his daughter Susie. Later it becomes clear to me why he included a review of the book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, one of all time my favorites. In "ZAMM" the author Robert Pirsig contemplates the nature of Value while riding cross country on a motorcycle with his son Chris. Abbey was asked by the Mountain Gazette to write a review of the book, but since he had already written a favorable review for the New York Times he supposedly subcontracted it to a friend of his who he said was a biker, a pimp, a freelance mechanic and an ex-convict. The review is hilarious. He bemoans the lack of practical and technical advice and writes that the book has "...a lot of fuzzy philosophizing and half-assed mystical fucking ancient history, man, [that] keeps getting in the way of the book as a fucking whole." I have to wonder if Abbey is pulling our leg and made up this guy, It's just too funny! Abbey does not have a general love of "the land", "the earth", "the environment"; he is in love with a particular place on earth, the Desert Southwest. His writing in the essay, Notes from a Cold River, about his time in the Yukon, is not nearly as vibrant and connected. Something clearly comes alive in Abbey when he is in the desert Southwest or when he is contemplating or writing about it. Where did I read once that we love specific things or people; we do not love in general?? The other essay that I really liked was My Friend Debris. He writes about his friendship with Debris(DePuy), "not only a painter of romantic landscapes but a maker of jerky." Here's an excerpt: "As a matter of course, like good sagebrush patriots, we burned or leveled innumerable billboards together, and sanded and sugared a goodly number of earthmovers, ore-trucks, front-end loaders and Caterpillar bulldozers. Naturally." Sounds like good times! Through his conversations with Debris, I realized what an artist Abbey is in his own right. I tended to think of Abbey as a kind of hard-nosed, but passionate realist, but really there is quite a romantic in there. He is a word painter. I just can't do Edward Abbey enough justice. Only he can do that through his writing. He is one of a kind, and I have to think that his writing has helped and will continue to help to preserve the desert Southwest. I will end with a couple excerpts from Down the River that really give a lot of the flavor and humor (oh, I never mentioned that!) of Abbey's writing. "Gathered on their favorite dead tree, heads nodding together, the vultures resembled from our vantage point a convocation of bald, politic funeral directors discussing business prospects - always good. Dependable. The mature birds have red, wrinkled featherless heads; the young are a bluish color and also naked. The heads are bald because it's neater, safer, more sanitary, given the line of work. If you made your living by thrusting your beak and eyes and ears and neck deep into the rotting entrails, say, of a dead cow, you too would prefer to be as bald as a buzzard. Feathers on the head would impede a hasty withdrawal, when necessary, and might provide lodging for maggots, beetles, worms, and bacteria. Best for the trade to keep sleek and tidy." "She is dressed this morning like a gypsy in full skirt, flowered blouse, a scarlet kerchief on her head and golden hoops dangling from her pierced ears. She wears sandals. She plays the guitar. She smokes a pipe and farts when she feels like it, and swears like a man. A good honest woman." "If we must have one more war let it be a simple and direct encounter between Kremlin and Pentagon, one deft surgical strike removing simultaneously two malignancies from the human body politic. Mankind will not be free until the last general is strangled with the entrails of the last systems-analyst. As my sainted grandmother used to say." Brilliant.