Touchstones

In the quest for sustained sobriety and self-development, we must look outside of ourselves to discover our inner truths. Whether we are facing dependency or parenthood, marriage or meditation, everyone needs a guide to embolden their coping skills and settle in to a better, more balanced life. Touchstones has strengthened millions of recoveries for more than thirty years. Offering suggestions for deepening integrity, spirituality, and intimacy—a recovering man’s trinity—it helps men transform addictive behaviors and thinking into an empowered manhood. This engaging self-help book, designed specifically for men, explores masculinity through informative, inspirational meditations. Touchstones offers profound advice for life’s many changes and emphasizes the importance of recognizing the effects of common emotions such as anger, resentment, and fear. Its striking insight supports any stage of recovery, but the daily readings in this book are not simply for a better recovery; they are for a better, more balanced life. Continued awareness and involvement with these ideas provide ongoing personal growth. Although this growth is entirely our own, its benefits will be shared. Newfound mental health and wellness will spread infectiously to every relationship, with friends and family alike. Here, every manly struggle meets an insight. The cycle of addiction meets its end.

"Don't let life discourage you; everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was."-R.L. Evans "One cannot always be a hero, but one can always be a man" Johann Wolfgang von Goethe tells us, but sometimes simply being a man can be a mighty struggle. Take heart from this companionable book of daily meditations, a year's worth of friendly words to cheer you on your way. Speaking straight to men who are striving for serenity or trying to maintain emotionally and spiritually balanced lives, these daily touchstones begin with quotations from sources as varied as William Shakespeare, Wendell Berry, Michael Spinks, and Woody Allen and conclude with affirmations that underscore the lessons of intimacy, integrity and spirituality. They explore the masculine role of lover or spouse, father or friend and, like a helping hand extended, case the daily strain of making a man's way.

Touchstones examines the ways in which John McGahern became a writer through his reading. This reading, it is shown, was both extensive and intensive, and tended towards immersion in the classics. As such, new insights are provided into McGahern's admiration and use of writers as diverse as Dante Alighieri, William Blake, James Joyce, Albert Camus and several others. Evidence for these claims is found both through close reading of McGahern's published texts as well as unprecedented sleuthing in his extensive archive of papers held at the National University of Ireland, Galway. The ultimate intention of the book is to draw attention to the very literary and writerly nature of McGahern as an artist, and to place him, not just as a great Irish writer, but as part of a long and venerable European tradition.

Beyond a glass wall, a speculative story on the nature of existence.

One of Latin America's most garlanded novelists—and the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature—Mario Vargas Llosa is also an acute and wide-ranging cultural critic and an acerbic political commentator. Touchstones collects Vargas Llosa's brilliant readings of seminal twentieth-century novels, from Heart of Darkness to The Tin Drum; incisive essays on political and social thinkers; and contemporary pieces on 9/11 and the immediate aftermath of the war in Iraq. Fantastically intelligent, inspired, and surprising, Touchstones is a landmark collection of essays from one of the world's leading writers and intellectuals.

Considered the world leader in designing iconic public architecture, Curtis Fentress is redefining the art of civic buildings. In Touchstones of Design: Redefining Public Architecture, Fentress features many of his most innovative and inspiring works. This includes a new vision for LAX that embodies a design philosophy learned through time and experience. Best known for flipping the design of Denver International Airport upside down, Fentress introduces drama and beauty to the spaces communities use everyday. North-Carolina born Fentress left his position with I.M. Pei and Kohn Pedersen Fox to found his own firm in 1980 in Denver and began designing major projects.

Do you have any special little girls in your life? Maybe it's a daughter, a niece, a goddaughter. Whatever the connection, every little girl needs older women in her life to pass down words of advice and wisdom for the future. In Touchstones for Women, Bernice Allen offers encouraging stories perfect for women young and old to begin writing journals and letters to the little girls in their lives. Learn to experience God through the five Touchstones—Trust, Faith, Forgiveness, Love, and Praise. Touchstones for Women offers the necessary tools to share how you learned to trust God, have faith in him, practice forgiveness, show love, and with your whole heart praise him no matter the circumstances. If you wish to leave a thought-provoking, heart-touching legacy for the special little girls in your life, this instructional, inspirational book is a must-read.