Yearning To Return

Yom Kippur is a time of opening. Books are opened, gates unlocked, hearts overflow with emotion. When it seems like nothing can move forward, on this day all barriers are broken down. God of awe, God of might, grant us pardon in this hour, as Your gates are closed tonight. With refreshing, thought-provoking insights, Rabbanit Yemima shares uplifting messages to inspire you through the Day of Atonement.

The 1980s is remembered as a time of big hair, synthetic music, and microwave cookery. It is also remembered as the heyday of conservative politics, socioeconomic inequality, and moral panics. It is dichotomously remembered as either a nostalgic age of innocence or a regressive moral wasteland, depending on who you ask, and when. But, most of all, it is remembered. In retro fashion trends, in '80s-based film and television narratives, and through countless rebooted movies, video games, superheroes, and even political slogans imploring us to Make America Great Again (Again). More than merely a historical period, "the '80s" has grown into a contested myth, ever-evolving through the critical and expressive lens of popular culture. This book explores the many shapes the '80s mythos has taken across a diverse array of media. Essays examine television series such as Stranger Things, Cobra Kai, and POSE, films such as Dallas Buyers Club, Summer of '84, and Chocolate Babies, as well as video games, pop music, and toys. Collectively, these essays explore how representations of the 1980s influence the way we think about our past, our present, and our future.

A Globe and Mail, Hill Times and CBC Best Book of the Year Have you ever wondered what it would be like to return to your roots? Drawing on astute political analysis and extensive reporting from around the world, Return: Why We Go Back to Where We Come From illuminates a personal quest. Kamal Al-Solaylee, author of the bestselling and award-winning Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes and Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone), yearns to return to his homeland of Yemen, now wracked by war, starvation and daily violence, to reconnect with his family. Yemen, as well as Egypt, another childhood home, call to him, even though he ran away from them in his youth and found peace and prosperity in Canada. In Return, Al-Solaylee interviews dozens of people who have chosen to or long to return to their homelands, from Basques to Irish to Taiwanese. He does make a return of sorts himself, to the Middle East, visiting Israel and the West Bank, as well as Egypt. A chronicle of love and loss, of global reach and personal desires, Return is a book for anyone who has ever wondered what it would be like to return to their roots.

Hermann Cohen’s philosophy has now, finally, received the recognition it deserves. His thought undoubtedly has all the characteristics of a classic. It faced the great problems of philosophical tradition, with full critical awareness and at the same time, with the capacity to open up new, original routes. It represents one of the last expressions of great systematic thought. The papers collected in this volume deal with different aspects of Cohen’s thought, ethical, political, aesthetic and religious aspectsin particular. However they all represent attempts to follow the ubiquitous presence of certain important themes in Cohen and their capacity for containing meanings that cannot be limited to a single philosophical sphere: themes that are keys to reading unity of inspiration in his thought, which is more deeply imbedded than the exterior architectural unity of his work. The search for the fundamental themes behind Cohen is an important task, if we wish to see this philosopher as a present-day vital point of reference.

“Kundera once more delivers a seductive, intelligent entertainment … [with] elegance and grace.” — Washington Post Book World “Nothing short of masterful.” — Newsweek A brilliant novel set in contemporary Prague, by one of the most distinguished writers of our time. A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned 20 years earlier when they chose to become exiles. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence “their memories no longer match.” We always believe that our memories coincide with those of the person we loved, that we experienced the same thing. But this is just an illusion. Only those who return after 20 years, like Ulysses returning to his native Ithaca, can be dazzled and astounded by observing the goddess of ignorance first-hand. Kundera is the only author today who can take dizzying concepts such as absence, memory, forgetting, and ignorance, and transform them into material for a novel, masterfully orchestrating them into a polyphonic and moving work.

Shaliah walks her readers side by side on the following topics: -How to not be quick o speak but swift to move -How to stay strong in times of storms -How to stay above instead of below the waves -How to let go of not knowing what the future may look like -How to live in the moment -How to keep going until your unfinished story becomes great