Affliction

Buy Thoughts in Affliction Taken from the Bible and from Hymns, With Expositions by A.S. Thelwall (Paper for R354.00

Buy Fishing up the moon. SIGNED. A personal account of the angling affliction. Harry Parsons. for R225.00

(This title is available on demand: expected date of dispatch will be 4-7 working days once ordered) 'A humane discourse on the fragility of our minds, of the bodies that give rise to them, and of the world they create for us. This book is filled with wonders' Daily Telegraph Oliver Sacks' compassionate tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own minds. In Musicophilia, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians and everyday people - those struck by affliction, unusual talent and even, in one case, by lightning - to show not only that music occupies more areas of our brain than language does, but also that it can torment, calm, organize and heal. Always wise and compellingly readable, these stories alter our conception of who we are and how we function, and show us an essential part of what it is to be human. 'Fascinating. Music, as Sacks explains, "can pierce the heart directly". And this is the truth that he so brilliantly focuses upon - that music saves, consoles and nourishes us' Daily Mail 'An elegantly outlined series of case studies...which reveal the depth to which music grips so many people' Observer Format:Paperback Pages:448

Native Nostalgia In this, his first book, Jacob Dlamini writes about growing up in Katlehong in Gauteng, in the tradition of Orhan Pamuk's and Walter Benjamin's accounts of their childhoods in Istanbul and Berlin respectively. Using fragments from his own childhood, he examines the nostalgia that many black people feel for the past their lives under apartheid. In arguing that people do not stop being moral agents just because they are politically oppressed or discriminated against, the author seeks to recover the moral content of black life under apartheid. This book is about nostalgia, an affliction of the heart that began life as a passing ailment but became an incurable modern condition. The book uses the life of a young black South African who spent his childhood under apartheid to ask the following question: What does it mean to remember a (black) life lived under apartheid with fondness and longing? The nostalgia examined here should not be understood the same way that the archetypal black pensioner trotted out by newspapers at each general election in South Africa says: "Things were better under apartheid." No, apartheid had no virtue. But the author insists that we confront facile accounts of black life under apartheid that paint the 46 years in which the system existed as one vast moral desert, as if blacks produced no art, literature, music, bore no morally upstanding children or, at the very least, children who knew the difference between right and wrong even if those children did not grow up to make the "right" moral choices in their lives. This is not to say there was no poverty, crime or moral degradation. There was, of course. But none of this determined the shape of black life in its totality. This is not to suggest that all black families were happy the same way. Each family was, of course, unhappy in its own way. The differences between black families extended beyond questions of domestic bliss or strife. There were class, ethnic and gender differences aplenty. It behoves any history worthy of the name to take these differences seriously, which could be as small as the type of lawn one had in one's yard, the type of furniture in each bedroom, or the type of fencing one had around the yard whether the concrete slabs colloquially called "stop nonsense" or a wire mesh fence. The author is interested also in the role of the senses in a person's experience of nostalgia. He uses fragments drawn randomly from the past to look at his childhood in Katlehong as a lived experience of the senses. He tries to imagine how one might relay the history of Katlehong in terms of the senses of smell, hearing, taste, touch and sight. He uses his sensory experience of Katlehong, for example, to examine the place of radio in the life of an urban black family in apartheid South Africa. Here he does not simply wish to relay the auditory experience of listening to the radio but to look, rather, at how the very instrument that was supposed to be the government's propaganda tool actually had the opposite effect, awakening in him a political consciousness that saw him adopt a politics at odds with the political gradualism and religious conservatism of his mother. Again, he looks at how black schools, intended by government to be a great downward leveller of black ambition, inadvertently served to heighten class consciousness within black society, often pitting the local elite against the mass of the great black unwashed. Finally, he studies how local political identities were formed in relation to both a national black identity and a much broader black diasporic identity. About the Author Jacob Dlamini is one of South Africa's bright young intellectuals. A PhD student at Yale, he has written for a number of magazines and newspapers such as the Sunday Times. Author Jacob Dlamini ISBN 9781770097551 Format Paperback Pages 169p. _

This item is sold brand new. It is ordered on demand from our supplier and is usually dispatched within 7 - 12 working days Armed with a degree in medieval history and a flair for the macabre, Caitlin Doughty took a job at a crematory and turned morbid curiosity into her life's work. She cared for bodies of every color, shape, and affliction, and became an intrepid explorer in the world of the dead. In this best-selling memoir, brimming with gallows humor and vivid characters, she marvels at the gruesome history of undertaking and relates her unique coming-of-age story with bold curiosity and mordant wit. By turns hilarious, dark, and uplifting, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes reveals how the fear of dying warps our society and "will make you reconsider how our culture treats the dead" (San Francisco Chronicle). Features Summary "Morbid and illuminating" (Entertainment Weekly)-a young mortician goes behind the scenes of her curious profession. Author Caitlin Doughty Publisher W W Norton & Co Inc Release date 20150922 Pages 254 ISBN 0-393-35190-4 ISBN 13 978-0-393-35190-3

Rune, whose voice has been compared to that of an angel, has a mysterious affliction linked to her talent that leaves her sick and drained at the end of every performance. Convinced creative direction will cure her, her mother ships her off to a French boarding school for the arts, rumored to have a haunted past. This product ships within 3-5 working days.