Lyra to the Rescue

Lyra to the Rescue
Author: L. J. Nance
Publisher: CreateSpace
Total Pages: 36
Release: 2013-09-27
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 9781493583102

A beautifully illustrated story for all lovers of mermaids and the ocean! When mermaid Lyra's family moves to a different area of the ocean to start a new colony, she's lonely and missing her old friends. Spying a little girl and her dog on a beach gives her the idea she should have a pet to keep her company. Unfortunately, lobsters and crabs won't play fetch like a dog. Her parents, busy with duties of starting up the colony, don't have time to play with her, and her three brothers don't like playing with a little girl. Lonely, she decides to look for a pet to be her companion. It takes a baby dolphin in danger to give her a new perspective on friends and her watery home.

Reading for Learning

Reading for Learning
Author: Maria Nikolajeva
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2014-06-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027269955

How does reading fiction affect young people? How can they transfer fictional experience into real life? Why do they care about fictional characters? How does fiction enhance young people's sense of self-hood? Supported by cognitive psychology and brain research, this ground-breaking book is the first study of young readers' cognitive and emotional engagement with fiction. It explores how fiction stimulates perception, attention, imagination and other cognitive activity, and opens radically new ways of thinking about literature for young readers. Examining a wide range of texts for a young audience, from picturebooks to young adult novels, the combination of cognitive criticism and children’s literature theory also offers significant insights for literary studies beyond the scope of children’s fiction. An important milestone in cognitive criticism, the book provides convincing evidence that reading fiction is indispensable for young people’s intellectual, emotional and social maturation.

Teaching Children's Literature

Teaching Children's Literature
Author: Diane Duncan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2009
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0415421004

Drawing on interview material with best-selling children's book authors and workshops conducted in a wide variety of schools this book embraces the current agenda for a more imaginative, creative and flexible English curriculum.

Fantastic Spiritualities

Fantastic Spiritualities
Author: J'annine Jobling
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2010-07-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1472535294

In this work Jobling argues that religious sensibility in the Western world is in a process of transformation, but that we see here change, not decline, and that the production and consumption of the fantastic in popular culture offers an illuminating window onto spiritual trends and conditions. She examines four major examples of the fantastic genre: the Harry Potter series (Rowling), His Dark Materials (Pullman), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Whedon) and the Earthsea cycle (Le Guin), demonstrating that the spiritual universes of these four iconic examples of the fantastic are actually marked by profoundly modernistic assumptions, raising the question of just how contemporary spiritualities (often deemed postmodern) navigate philosophically the waters of truth, morality, authority, selfhood and the divine. Jobling tackles what she sees as a misplaced disregard for the significance of the fantasy genre as a worthy object for academic investigation by offering a full-length, thematic, comparative and cross-disciplinary study of the four case-studies proposed, chosen because of their significance to the field and because these books have all been posited as exemplars of a 'postmodern' religious sensibility. This work shows how attentiveness to spiritual themes in cultural icons can offer the student of theology and religions insight into the framing of the moral and religious imagination in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries and how this can prompt traditional religions to reflect on whether their own narratives are culturally framed in a way resonating with the 'signs of the times'.

Philip Pullman

Philip Pullman
Author: Margaret Speaker Yuan
Publisher: Infobase Learning
Total Pages: 115
Release: 2013-11
Genre:
ISBN: 1438147686

Killing the Imposter God

Killing the Imposter God
Author: Donna Freitas
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2007-09-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0787982377

Freitas and King address the complex religious and spiritual dimensions of Philip Pullmans His Dark Materials trilogy.

Philip Pullman

Philip Pullman
Author: Catherine Butler
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2017-09-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137336773

Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is a worldwide classic of modern literature for both children and adults. Challenging in its intellectual scope, ambitious scale and range of literary reference, it is also hugely controversial due to its critique of organised religion. This collection of original essays by an international team of distinguished scholars assesses Pullman's achievement and introduces readers to some of the key debates surrounding His Dark Materials. Covering topics such as religion, gender, childhood and scientific enquiry, the volume also discusses the Hollywood film of the first book and features a new interview with Pullman himself.

Term Limits 4 Liberty

Term Limits 4 Liberty
Author: Stan W. Hatfield MBA
Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
Total Pages: 510
Release: 2023-12-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

Planet Xeon is located in the distant corner of the Alpha Centauri Star System, nearly six light-years away, and is comparable to planet Earth. Technology on Xeon is far beyond Earth's abilities, creating futuristic advancements, either unknown or out of reach from our reality. Xeon geoscientists have determined the planet core is unstable and may be uninhabitable in three hundred years unless it self-stabilizes, a rational probability. Superiors start a search for a habitable planet in order to save their people from becoming extinct, and they've selected planet Earth, specifically, the United States of America. Identifying what is necessary to send to planet Earth is of great concern due to the advanced technology that can produce weapons with godly powers, powers that can destroy the planet. Once Xeon technology is introduced, our lives will change dramatically and make the United States a dominating country with powers that are unimaginable, creating a force that the world will envy and fight to attain. The superiors of Xeon are concerned about sharing military technology to an unstable or corrupt government. They plan to be selective when transporting certain types of technology until such time the United States government can prove to be trustworthy, responsible with alien weapons, and have total control of other countries on the planet, preventing them from acquiring these powers. Titus and Xavia resign from their position at NASA to help the Xeon people rid the United States from corruption before announcing them to the world. In the process, they become good friends with Xeon citizens. The concerns about Xeon citizens migrating to the United States stem from the widespread corruption in the government. The Xeon government go through a comparable situation, ending in a civil war, where many people die. Term limits is discovered to be the key ingredient to a stable government that works for the people and by the people. "Lifetime politicians cultivate corruption." Adventure, space flight, romance, friendship, family, and chocolate cake.

The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2)

The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2)
Author: Philip Pullman
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
Total Pages: 658
Release: 2019-10-03
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0553510665

The #1 New York Times Bestseller! Return to the world of His Dark Materials—now an HBO original series starring Dafne Keen, Ruth Wilson, Andrew Scott, and Lin-Manuel Miranda—in the second volume of Philip Pullman’s new bestselling masterwork The Book of Dust. The windows between the many worlds have been sealed and the momentous adventures of Lyra Silvertongue’s youth are long behind her—or so she thought. Lyra is now a twenty-year-old undergraduate at St. Sophia’s College and intrigue is swirling around her once more. Her daemon Pantalaimon is witness to a brutal murder, and the dying man entrusts them with secrets that carry echoes from their past. The more Lyra is drawn into these mysteries, the less she is sure of. Even the events of her own past come into question when she learns of Malcolm Polstead’s role in bringing her to Jordan College. Now Lyra and Malcolm will travel far beyond the confines of Oxford, across Europe and into the Levant, searching for a city haunted by daemons, and a desert said to hold the truth of Dust. The dangers they face will challenge everything they thought they knew about the world, and about themselves. Praise for The Book of Dust “It’s a stunning achievement, this universe Pullman has created and continues to build on.” —The New York Times “Pullman’s writing is simple, unpretentious, beautiful, true. The conclusion to The Book of Dust can’t come soon enough.”—The Washington Post