The Burning House

“Fascinating….Provocative.” —New York Times “Answering this question reveals a great deal about your personality, priorities and interests.” —The Guardian (UK) If your house were on fire, what would you take? Foster Huntington has collected answers to this telling question from thousands of responders all over the world to get to the heart of what it is that people truly value. The result is The Burning House, featuring the best of Huntington’s popular website, TheBurningHouse.com along with a wealth of all-new material. Fascinating and remarkably revealing, The Burning House provides a captivating keyhole into people’s lives, feelings, and innermost thoughts that will especially appeal to the many fans of PostSecret, Not Quite What I Was Planning, Found, and Awkward Family Photos. Illustrated with sometimes moving, often unusual photographs of people’s most prized possessions, The Burning House ingeniously celebrates the differences between human beings around the globe—and the surprising similarities that unite us all.

A startling and gripping reexamination of the Jim Crow era, as seen through the eyes of some of the most important American writers "Walker has opened up a fresh way of thinking about the intellectual history of the South during the civil-rights movement."—Robert Greene, The Nation In this dramatic reexamination of the Jim Crow South, Anders Walker demonstrates that racial segregation fostered not simply terror and violence, but also diversity, one of our most celebrated ideals. He investigates how prominent intellectuals like Robert Penn Warren, James Baldwin, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, and Zora Neale Hurston found pluralism in Jim Crow, a legal system that created two worlds, each with its own institutions, traditions, even cultures. The intellectuals discussed in this book all agreed that black culture was resilient, creative, and profound, brutally honest in its assessment of American history. By contrast, James Baldwin likened white culture to a “burning house,” a frightening place that endorsed racism and violence to maintain dominance. Why should black Americans exchange their experience for that? Southern whites, meanwhile, saw themselves preserving a rich cultural landscape against the onslaught of mass culture and federal power, a project carried to the highest levels of American law by Supreme Court justice and Virginia native Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Anders Walker shows how a generation of scholars and judges has misinterpreted Powell’s definition of diversity in the landmark case Regents v. Bakke, forgetting its Southern origins and weakening it in the process. By resituating the decision in the context of Southern intellectual history, Walker places diversity on a new footing, independent of affirmative action but also free from the constraints currently placed on it by the Supreme Court. With great clarity and insight, he offers a new lens through which to understand the history of civil rights in the United States.

Two years after his father mysteriously disappeared, Jim Hawkins is coping -- barely. Underneath he's frozen in uncertainty and grief. Then Ruth Rose crashes into his life. A sixteen-year-old misfit whose manic moods have to be managed by drugs, she tells Jim that her stepfather is a murderer. Every instinct tells Jim to walk away, to get back to the slow process of dealing with his own grief. Yet something about her fierce conviction will not let him rest. Ruth Rose lights a fire in Jim -- a burning need to uncover the truth, no matter how painful that truth may be. Acclaimed author Tim Wynne-Jones turns his considerable talent to a stunning novel that is part mystery, part psychological thriller. Emotionally compelling, fast-paced, terrifying and clever -- The Boy in the Burning House is an irresistible read.

How does Buddhism respond to the climate emergency? The Burning House asks how we can wake up and respond to the climate crisis from a Buddhist perspective. It will be of interest to Buddhists concerned about the climate and to eco-activisms wishing to ground their work in a spiritual context.

The renowned poet and author of The Handmaid's Tale "brings a swift, powerful energy" to this "intimate and immediate" poetry collection (Publishers Weekly). These beautifully crafted poems -- by turns dark, playful, intensely moving, tender, and intimate -- make up Margaret Atwood's most accomplished and versatile gathering to date, setting foot on the middle ground / between body and word. Some draw on history, some on myth, both classical and popular. Others, more personal, concern themselves with love, with the fragility of the natural world, and with death, especially in the elegiac series of meditations on the death of a parent. But they also inhabit a contemporary landscape haunted by images of the past. Generous, searing, compassionate, and disturbing, this poetry rises out of human experience to seek a level between luminous memory and the realities of the everyday, between the capacity to inflict and the strength to forgive.

Visceral and affecting, Burning Down the House is an insightful insider's account of the perilous world of firefighting and an unforgettable memoir of how, in finding his passion, Wangersky lost himself.

They have been the Federation's staunchest allies, and its fiercest adversaries. Cunning, ruthless, driven by an instinct for violence and defined by a complex code of honor, they must push ever outward in order to survive, defying the icy ravages of space with the fire of their hearts. They are the Klingons, and if you think you already know all there is to learn about them...think again. From its highest echelons of power to the shocking depths of its lowest castes, from its savagely aggressive military to its humble farmers, from political machinations of galactic import to personal demons and family strife, the Klingon Empire is revealed as never before when the captain and crew of the I.K.S. Gorkon finally return to their homeworld of Qo'noS in a sweeping tale of intrigue, love, betrayal, and honor.

The negative consequences of school desegregation on Black communities in the United States are now well documented in education research. Learning in a Burning House is the first book to offer a historical look at the desegregation dilemma with clear recommendations for what must be done to ensure Black student success in today’s schools. This important book centers race and voice in the desegregation discourse, examining and reconceptualizing the meaning of “equal education.” Featuring the unique perspectives of Black school leaders, Horsford provides a critical race analysis of how racism has undermined the integration ideal and the subsequent schooling of Black children. Most importantly, the book discusses how meaningful education reform must be grounded in a moral activist vision of equal education through a cross-racial commitment to racial literacy, realism, reconstruction, and reconciliation in our schools and society. With an engaging style that invites us on a journey of discovery, Learning in a Burning House presents new insights into Black education and proposes leadership and policy solutions that can be immediately adopted to improve urban education.