Author: R. Andrew Chesnut
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190633328
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
R. Andrew Chesnut offers a fascinating portrayal of Santa Muerte, a skeleton saint whose cult has attracted millions of devotees over the past decade. Although condemned by mainstream churches, this folk saint's supernatural powers appeal to millions of Latin Americans and immigrants in the U.S. Devotees believe the Bony Lady (as she is affectionately called) to be the fastest and most effective miracle worker, and as such, her statuettes and paraphernalia now outsell those of the Virgin of Guadalupe and Saint Jude, two other giants of Mexican religiosity. In particular, Chesnut shows Santa Muerte has become the patron saint of drug traffickers, playing an important role as protector of peddlers of crystal meth and marijuana; DEA agents and Mexican police often find her altars in the safe houses of drug smugglers. Yet Saint Death plays other important roles: she is a supernatural healer, love doctor, money-maker, lawyer, and angel of death. She has become without doubt one of the most popular and powerful saints on both the Mexican and American religious landscapes.
Author: R. Andrew Chesnut
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199912882
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
R. Andrew Chesnut offers a fascinating portrayal of Santa Muerte, a skeleton saint whose cult has attracted millions of devotees over the past decade. Although condemned by mainstream churches, this folk saint's supernatural powers appeal to millions of Latin Americans and immigrants in the U.S. Devotees believe the Bony Lady (as she is affectionately called) to be the fastest and most effective miracle worker, and as such, her statuettes and paraphernalia now outsell those of the Virgin of Guadalupe and Saint Jude, two other giants of Mexican religiosity. In particular, Chesnut shows Santa Muerte has become the patron saint of drug traffickers, playing an important role as protector of peddlers of crystal meth and marijuana; DEA agents and Mexican police often find her altars in the safe houses of drug smugglers. Yet Saint Death plays other important roles: she is a supernatural healer, love doctor, money-maker, lawyer, and angel of death. She has become without doubt one of the most popular and powerful saints on both the Mexican and American religious landscapes.
Author: Roger Scruton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199986983
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
A tale of forbidden love and inevitable death, the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde recounts the story of two lovers unknowingly drinking a magic potion and ultimately dying in one another's arms. While critics have lauded Wagner's Tristan and Isolde for the originality and subtlety of the music, they have denounced the drama as a "mere trifle"--a rendering of Wagner's forbidden love for Matilde Wesendonck, the wife of a banker who supported him during his exile in Switzerland. Death-Devoted Heart explodes this established interpretation, proving the drama to be more than just a sublimation of the composer's love for Wesendonck or a wistful romantic dream. Scruton boldly attests that Tristan and Isolde has profound religious meaning and remains as relevant today as it was to Wagner's contemporaries. He also offers keen insight into the nature of erotic love, the sacred qualities of human passion, and the peculiar place of the erotic in our culture. His argument touches on the nature of tragedy, the significance of ritual sacrifice, and the meaning of redemption, providing a fresh interpretation of Wagner's masterpiece. Roger Scruton has written an original and provocative account of Wagner's music drama, which blends philosophy, criticism, and musicology in order to show the work's importance in the twenty-first century.
Author: J. D. Robb
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0349403740
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
It's a new year in New York city, and two star-crossed lovers have just discovered an insatiable appetite...for murder. Lieutenant Eve Dallas has witnessed some grisly crimes in her career and she knows just how dark things can get on the streets. But when a much-loved musician is found dead, Eve soon realises that his murder is part of a horrifying killing spree, stretching right across the country. Now the killers have reached New York, and they've found themselves another victim. Eve knows she only has a couple of days to save a young girl's life, and to stop the killers before their sadistic games escalate. Eve's husband Roarke is ready to put his brains and his considerable resources behind the search. But even as the couple works closely together, time is running out...
Author: J. D. Robb
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101600209
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
Lieutenant Eve Dallas must foil a terrorist plot in this explosive thriller in the #1 New York Times bestselling In Death series. It was just another after-work happy hour at a bar downtown—until the madness descended. And after twelve minutes of chaos and violence, more than eighty people lay dead. Lieutenant Eve Dallas is trying to sort out the inexplicable events. Surviving witnesses talk about seeing things—monsters and swarms of bees. They describe sudden, overwhelming feelings of fear and rage and paranoia. When forensics makes its report, the mass delusions make more sense: it appears the bar patrons were exposed to a cocktail of chemicals and illegal drugs that could drive anyone into temporary insanity—if not kill them outright. But that doesn’t explain who would unleash such horror—or why. Eve’s husband, Roarke, happens to own the bar, but he’s convinced the attack wasn’t directed at him. It’s bigger than that. And if Eve can’t figure it out fast, it could happen again, anytime, anywhere. Because it’s airborne…
Author: J. D. Robb
Publisher: Berkley
ISBN: 0399164421
Category : Dallas, Eve (Fictitious character)
Languages : en
Pages : 418
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Book Description
In the latest suspense thriller in the #1 New York Times bestselling series, the year 2060 is drawing to a close in New York City and loved ones are coming together for Thanksgiving. But sometimes the deepest hatreds seethe within the closest relationships, and blood flows faster than water… Lieutenant Eve Dallas has plenty to be grateful for this season. Hosting Roarke’s big Irish family for the holiday may be challenging, but it’s a joyful improvement on her own dark childhood. Other couples aren’t as lucky as Eve and Roarke. The Reinholds, for example, are lying in their home stabbed and bludgeoned almost beyond recognition. Those who knew them are stunned—and heartbroken by the evidence that they were murdered by their own son. Twenty-six-year-old Jerry hadn’t made a great impression on the bosses who fired him or the girlfriend who dumped him—but they didn’t think he was capable of this. Turns out Jerry is not only capable of brutality but taking a liking to it. With the money he’s stolen from his parents and a long list of grievances, he intends to finally make his mark on the world. Eve and her team already know the who, how, and why of this murder. What they need to pinpoint is where Jerry’s going to strike next.
Author: Tracey Rollin
Publisher: Weiser Books
ISBN: 1633410609
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Santa Muerte is a complete ritual guide to working with this famous and beloved Mexican folk saint. Death welcomes everyone. This is the foundation for the veneration of Santa Muerte, or "Holy Death." Considered to be the female personification of death, she is associated with protection and safe passage to the afterlife. She is also the patron saint of people who live on the fringes of society and often face violence and death. In recent years her constituency has expanded to include the LGBT community and people who are marginalized or whose jobs put them at significant risk of death such as military and police personnel. Santa Muerte is hailed as their potent and powerful protector, capable of delivering them from harm and even granting miracles. Santa Muerte is a complete ritual guide to working with this famous--and infamous!--Mexican folk saint. It takes us beyond the sensational headlines to reveal the truth about why Santa Muerte is so beloved by so many. Author Tracey Rollin presents simple, straightforward methods for working with Holy Death that may be used alone or easily incorporated into your own magical practice.
Author: Klester Cavalcanti
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609808290
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 245
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Book Description
The powerful true-life story of a Brazilian boy who could have been a fisherman but instead became the biggest professional killer known to the world--soon to be a major motion picture. Julio Santana as seen through the eyes of acclaimed investigative reporter Klester Cavalcanti is not a monster--he is a loyal son, a family man, a devout Christian who is tormented by his conscience with every shot. But in a cruel and lawless area of Brazil, where every life has its price, respect for life is a luxury that he can't afford. Trained by his uncle, an assassin, and initiated in murder at 17 years of age, Santana proved to be a natural. Without moralizing about mass murderer, The Name of Death attempts to show how such a career can be not so very different from other ordinary working lives. The portrait that emerges in this riveting narrative, based on seven years of phone conversations between Cavalcanti and Santana, is not only that of a man but also that of a country. Describing in detail only a handful of the almost 500 murders Santana carried out, Cavalcanti reveals just how lawless much of the interior of Brazil has been for the past 50 years. The state, the police, and the security forces play almost no part in establishing the rule of law--except when they are suppressing the guerrilla threat of the early 1970s. Cavalcanti shows just how easy it is for a boy like Julio to take the law into his own hands, and what a wild place Brazil has been and in many ways continues to be. The Name of Death is being adapted into a major motion picture produced by Fernando Meirelles (director of City of God, Blindness, and The Constant Gardener) and Globo Filmes, for release in Brazil in July 2017 and distribution in the U.S. the following year.
Author: Brian J. Karem
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0061747319
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
An investigative reporter goes inside one of the most shocking cases in California history—the brutal murder of a devoted husband by his con artist wife. Larry McNabney seemed to have it all. A horse enthusiast, successful attorney, and pillar of the community, he was loved and admired by everyone he knew—especially his much younger wife, Elisa. For six years of marriage, Larry and Elisa spent their spare time on the country club and horse racing circuit. But then his perfect life went perfectly wrong. On September 10, 2001, Larry attended a horse show . . . and disappeared. Months later, police put out a missing persons report. They soon discovered that Elisa McNabney was not the person she had claimed to be. A fugitive on the run, Elisa was a con woman who had enlisted the help of a girlfriend to slowly poison her loving husband with horse tranquilizers—all in the name of pure greed. Larry was found buried in a vineyard, after Elisa kept his corpse in her deep freezer for months. The only thing more appalling than the horrific murder was the shocking manhunt that followed and the end to this tragic story of deception, murder, and deadly seduction.
Author: Priyanka Champaneri
Publisher: Restless Books
ISBN: 1632062542
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 448
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Book Description
Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Priyanka Champaneri’s transcendent debut novel brings us inside India’s holy city of Banaras, where the manager of a death hostel shepherds the dying who seek the release of a good death, while his own past refuses to let him go. Banaras, Varanasi, Kashi: India’s holy city on the banks of the Ganges has many names but holds one ultimate promise for Hindus. It is the place where pilgrims come for a good death, to be released from the cycle of reincarnation by purifying fire. As the dutiful manager of a death hostel in Kashi, Pramesh welcomes the dying and assists families bound for the funeral pyres that burn constantly on the ghats. The soul is gone, the body is burnt, the time is past, he tells them. Detach. After ten years in the timeless city, Pramesh can nearly persuade himself that here, there is no past or future. He lives contentedly at the death hostel with his wife, Shobha, their young daughter, Rani, the hostel priests, his hapless but winning assistant, and the constant flow of families with their dying. But one day the past arrives in the lifeless form of a man pulled from the river—a man with an uncanny resemblance to Pramesh. Called “twins” in their childhood village, he and his cousin Sagar are inseparable until Pramesh leaves to see the outside world and Sagar stays to tend the land. After Pramesh marries Shobha, defying his family’s wishes, a rift opens up between the cousins that he has long since tried to forget. Do not look back. Detach. But for Shobha, Sagar’s reemergence casts a shadow over the life she’s built for her family. Soon, an unwelcome guest takes up residence in the death hostel, the dying mysteriously continue to live, and Pramesh is forced to confront his own ideas about death, rebirth, and redemption. Told in lush, vivid detail and with an unforgettable cast of characters, The City of Good Death is a remarkable debut novel of family and love, memory and ritual, and the ways in which we honor the living and the dead. PRAISE FOR THE CITY OF GOOD DEATH “In Champaneri’s ambitious, vivid debut, the dying come to the holy city of Kashi to die a good death that frees them from the burden of reincarnation…. In sharp prose, Champaneri explores the power of stories—those the characters tell themselves, those told about them, and those they believe. . . . This epic, magical story of death teems with life.” —Publishers Weekly “Brimming with characters whose lives overlap and whose stories interweave, Champaneri’s exquisite debut delves into the consequences of the past, and how stories that are told can become reality even when they contain barely a shred of truth. As Pramesh discovers, the bitterness of past wounds can bring hope for redemption and life.” —Bridget Thoreson, Booklist “Lush prose evokes the thick, close atmosphere of Kashi and the intricate religious practices upon which life and death depend. Rumor and superstition hold sway over even the most level-headed people, twisting what’s explainable into something extraordinary—with tragic consequences. . . . The City of Good Death is a breathtaking, unforgettable novel about how remembering the past is just as important as moving on.” —Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews, Starred Review "Champaneri’s Kashi is teeming and vivid . . . the book frequently charms, and it's as full of humor, warmth, and mystery as Kashi’s own marketplace." —Kirkus Reviews “The City of Good Death is the debut novel of Priyanka Champaneri but it has the confidence of a master storyteller. Drawing on the rich literary traditions of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, Champaneri’s epic saga will satisfy armchair travelers thirsty for adventure, and sick of looking out their windows.” —Chicago Review of Books "In intricate detail and with remarkable skill, Champaneri writes a powerful tale about the pull of the past and our aching need to understand the mysteries and misunderstandings that thwart our relationships. An atmospheric and immersive debut with a rich cast of characters you won’t soon forget." —Marjan Kamali, author of The Stationery Shop
