by Barbara Thiering (Author)
Jesus was the leader of a radical faction of Essene priests. He was not of virgin birth. He did not die on the Cross. He married Mary Magdalene, fathered a family, and later divorced. He died sometime after AD 64.
In this controversial version of Christ's life, theological scholar and bestselling author Barbara Thiering presents, after more than twenty years of close study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gospels, a revolutionary theory that, while upholding the fundamental faith of Christianity, challenges many of its most ingrained supernaturalist beliefs. Jesus the Man will undoubtedly surprise those for whom a traditional understanding of biblical history is immutable and unchallengeable. But for the throngs who have been fascinated by new interpretations of this history, Thiering's work will be an essential and thrilling read.Front Jacket
Jesus was the leader of a radical faction of Essene priests. He was not of virgin birth. He did not die on the Cross. He married Mary Magdalene, fathered a family, and later divorced. He died sometime after AD 64.
This controversial version of Christ's life is not the product of a mind which wants to debunk Christianity. Barbara Thiering is a theologian and a biblical scholar. But after over twenty years of close study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gospels she has developed a revolutionary new theory which, while upholding the fundamental faith of Christianity, challenges many of its most ingrained supernaturalist beliefs.
JESUS THE MAN will undoubtedly upset and even outrage those for whom Christianity is immutable and unchangeable. But for many who have found the rituals of the contemporary church too steeped in medieval thinking, it will provide new insights into Christianity in the context of the 1990's.
9781416542247|JB|Jack Nicklaus: My Story is Jack Nicklaus's complete and compelling inside, in-depth account of those legendary majors triumphs, along with many other competition highlights - and some lowlights, too - of one of the greatest sports careers of all time. But, because this fascinating man has always been so much more than a professional athlete, his long-awaited autobiography is vastly more than a book about winning and losing. Revealed with the unfailing candor and intensity that are his most distinctive personality traits, here are all of the Jack Nicklauses his legions of admirers, and even some of those close to him, have never known the son, whose eyes still well up at the mention of his father; the husband, deeply aware of how much the strength, resilience, charm, and love of a woman content to remain in the shadows have meant to both his public image and private happiness; the famous father who, every day of his life, really has put his children first; the artist, tirelessly creating highly acclaimed courses so that others can enjoy his beloved game; the businessman, staggeringly successful at times, staggeringly unsuccessful at others; the analyst of the methods and makeups of the golfers who pushed him hardest and, most candidly of his own strengths and weaknesses; the commentator offering deep insights and strong opinions on the whys and wherefores of an occupation that has been extremely rewarding for him, yet one that he still regards as purely a game; and the multimillionaire, jet-plane-owning, world-traveling celebrity who is happiest hanging around home in a pair of shorts, then taking the kids to a family restaurant for dinner.
9781416552062|JB|In A Rocket at Heart, Rudy Tomjanovich tells the story of how the son of hardworking Croatian parents from Hamtramck, Michigan, helped the city of Houston change its image from Choke City to Clutch City. With unusual insight and unsparing honesty, Rudy talks about the doubts, the fears, and the obstacles he's overcome in becoming such a successful and well-respected coach. He tells how he learned to be a coach while standing in the spotlight; how he developed his theories of offense and defense that helped the Rockets reach the pinnacle; how he learned when to teach with praise and when to be forceful; and how he learned valuable lessons from Bill Fitch about preparation, from Don Chaney about dignity, and from Del Harris about handling adversity. He also talks, for the first time, about the adversity he himself had to learn from: the devastating punch thrown by Kermit Washington that cost Rudy a season in his prime, and could have cost him his life. Along the way, Rudy shares great stories about all the people he's known and the fun he's had in a life in basketball. He talks about his old roommate Calvin Murphy, and how this seemingly mismatched pair became the closest of friends; about watching Hakeem Olajuwon develop into one of the most extraordinary players ever to play the game; about the enormous challenge of changing a championship team in midseason by making the Clyde Drexler trade, and the satisfaction of beating the odds by winning four straight playoff series without homecourt advantage (and then, a year and a half later, trying that transition game again by adding the always entertaining Charles Barkley to the mix). With remarkable candor and self-deprecating wit, Rudy T. shows us the roads he's traveled and the good times and high points along the way.
9781416564270|JF|There is no American writer alive who is funnier, more inquisitive, or more surprising than Julie Hecht. The Unprofessionals, her first novel, whose nameless narrator also told the stories in the author's bestselling collection, Do the Windows Open?, is a mordant triumph. It follows the friendship between the narrator--a photographer in her late forties--and a young man whom she has known since his childhood and who has always shared the narrator's dismay about the way Americans live now: our discount chain stores, our incomprehensible architecture, our preoccupation with pets, our lack of manners. As the narrator takes us through the various stages of this friendship, she also tells the story of the young man's incongruous predicament on his path to heroin addiction and the absurdities of his attempted recovery. The Unprofessionals is in part a masterpiece of comic despair, in part an illumination of the customs and mores of a new and bewildering century, in part a hilarious and sad story of two outsiders who see the world with painful clarity--and, as a whole, a novel of unexampled originality.
9781416567509|JB|A touching, brilliant, and groundbreaking biography of one of literary history's most famous couples, at once a dual biography, a history, and the portrait of a long and stormy marriage, William L. Shirer's new book - written in his ninth decade - explores the passionate, highly charged, and extraordinary lives of Leo and Sonya Tolstoy. It is a compelling illumination both of the nature of genius and of the universal problems of love, sex, and marriage - themes that Tolstoy played out in his great fiction and that haunted him in his tangled domestic life. Rich in anecdotes, wise, full of sweeping history, and imbued with Shirer's profound knowledge of literature and life, Love and Hatred ranks beside such works as Robert Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra and Nigel Nicolson's Portrait of a Marriage as a masterly, intuitive, and sympathetic exploration of the love/hate relationship between two famous, bigger-than-life people. Beginning in 1862, when Tolstoy committed the blunder of asking his young bride to read his diaries of his bachelor life so there should be no secrets between them, and ending with his tragic flight from home (and marriage) in 1910 while the whole world waited for news of him, Love and Hatred tells the story of a great romance between two people who could live neither together nor apart - a romance that exhausted and obsessed them both, and that forms the basis for much of Tolstoy's work. The final book of William L. Shirer's long and brilliant career, it is - appropriately - a masterly re-creation of a time, of two extraordinary people, and of the very nature of love, marriage, and old age.
9781416572756|JB|Set in the heartland of America, Praying to a Laughing God is the remarkable and moving story of old friendships, new love, deeply hidden secrets, and the discovery of truths. It is about the death of dreams and the birth of hope; about a disappearing way of life and the reaffirmation of the human spirit. When Clark Holstrom goes each morning to open the hardware store he has operated for years on the main street of Credibull, Minnesota, he asks himself why he even bothers. Both the town and the way of life Clark has known for the past seventy years are dying; only the memories are left, and soon they will fade as well. What is best about Credibull is the comfort its residents take in the repetition of their daily lives; what is worst is the deadening monotony that has thrown a stupor over the town. So when a hotshot journalist, the author of several bestselling and exploitative true-crime books, announces that he is coming to Credibull to investigate a forty-year-old unsolved murder and make the story the basis for his next opus, the town is thrown into a frenzy of gossip and speculation. When Clark hears the news of the writer's plans, however, his reaction is one of pure dread. He remembers the murder only too well, and he knows that a reopening of the investigation could only be bad news for his best friend, Maynard Tewle, the man who everyone thought to be the murderer, but against whom the State could never make an adequate case. Maynard's health has been failing for some time, and Clark knows that the trauma of having to endure more prying into his life might be enough to kill him. And indeed the writer's arrival in Credibull does prove to be the catalyst for a change, not onlyin the lives of Clark and Maynard but of virtually everyone who has been a part of that town.
9781416572794|JB|Allander Atlasia is an infamous psychopath whose heinous crimes have earned him a lifetime stay at the Tower (nicknamed Alcatraz II), the world's most extreme maximum-security prison. But after a brilliant and brutal escape, the criminal mastermind begins a killing spree that is intensely personal -- one by one, victims fall prey to a twisted and chilling re-enactment of his own depraved past.
Jade Marlow is an ex-FBI profiler and tracker whose fearlessness is only surpassed by the severity of his own inner demons. With a record of irrational behavior and a genius for putting himself into the mind of a criminal predator, he may be the one man diabolical enough to catch Atlasia. In an escalating contest of wills and wits, two equally defiant men race toward a showdown where daring is deadly and failure is fatal. 9781416573227|JB|Support groups for people with AIDS have proliferated, but there hasn't been a handbook for AIDS group work for the mental health professional, until now. AIDS Trauma and Support Group Therapy by Martha Gabriel is the first book to offer practitioners and students in training the essential practice knowledge and theory about planning, forming and facilitating support groups for people living with AIDS/HIV. Dr. Gabriel, a leading expert and former senior clinical group supervisor at Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York City, empowers clinicians to effectively harness the enormous resource of support groups for people with AIDS/HIV. By emphasizing the traumatic aspects of AIDS, the book provides a deep understanding of the psychological issues individuals with AIDS bring to the group. Gabriel introduces a new framework for understanding trauma along with rich practice examples from diverse PWA groups. The reader learns how to deal effectively with issues unique to AIDS/HIV clients including social stigma, confidentiality and disclosure, rational suicide and suicidality related to psychiatric disturbance, dementia, and tuberculosis among group members. Dr. Gabriel addresses special considerations in group formation, issues for group therapists in the middle phase, crisis stages, and special termination issues. The impact of multiple deaths on individual members, on the group-as-a-whole and on group facilitators is explored through case narratives and discussion. And Gabriel makes specific treatment suggestions to care for these caregivers - AIDS/HIV group practitioners - who may themselves experience the symptoms of secondary traumatic stress. AIDS Trauma and Support Group Therapy: MutualAid, Empowerment, Connection is essential reading for a wide range of mental health professionals, including social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses, pastoral counselors, and a diverse group of paraprofessionals working with people with life threatening illness. 9781416575115|JB|As Kyle Malachi prepares for impending fatherhood, his growing alienation toward his better known alter ego (the pseudonymous and nationally syndicated mystery critic Stokes Moran) leads him to a rash act - he decides to kill off his fictitious rival. Despite vehement protests from his wife Lee Holland, Kyle places a simple announcement of Stokes Moran's death in The New York Times, bringing to an end a ten-year association with his more famous identity. Or so he thinks. Two days later, Lee (as Stokes Moran's literary agent) gets a call from the Manhattan police asking if she would officially identify Stokes Moran's remains. When it becomes obvious that this is not somebody's idea of a grim practical joke, both Lee and Kyle are stunned! How is it possible for a man who never existed to leave behind a flesh-and-bone corpus delicti? As Kyle struggles to explain to the admittedly skeptical authorities his convoluted relationship with the late Stokes Moran, and what led him to orchestrate Moran's public demise, Kyle quickly realizes that he is not only the police's prime suspect in this real-life murder investigation - he is their only suspect. Furthermore, Kyle knows that if he wants to stay out of prison for a crime he didn't commit, he must solve the case himself. And fast! But first, Kyle must put a name on the corpse - a name other than Stokes Moran. Any other name. 9781416576068|JB|In this splendid group portrait, David Laskin tells the stories of four friendships that helped to define the course of American literature: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, Henry James and Edith Wharton, Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Written with uncommon grace and insight, A Common Life is a fascinating narrative of the entanglements of art and life, and an illuminating study of the nature of friendship itself. In each of these pairings, the two writers met at a critical turning point in their lives and careers, and the friendship profoundly affected the course of both. The friendships came as great shafts of light, throwing open new possibilities and relieving the numbing isolation of American literary life. The shock of recognition" that passed between Melville and Hawthorne when they met in the Berkshires in 1850 changed the course of Melville's masterpiece, Moby-Dick. Edith Wharton was nearly forty, rich, and unhappily married when she met the sixty-year-old Henry James in London in 1903. His thunderous advice to "Do New York!" steered her toward her first triumph with The House of Mirth. Each friendship sprang from shared literary and personal admiration. But in time, each showed the strains of rivalry, resentment, anger, disappointment, and nasty gossip - hazards perhaps inherent in intimate relationships between writers. Welty became furious when the publication of her first book had to be postponed because the notoriously unreliable Porter had failed to finish her introduction to the book on time. Bishop and Lowell teetered for years on the brink of a love affair, and Bishop felt all the more betrayed when Lowell took apassage from her most anguished letter to him and "versed" it word for word into one of his poems. Love and loathing, reverence and revenge played their roles in all four of these intense relationships. A Common Life also uncovers the remarkable strands of influence and common heritage that link the four pairs of friends. Each new generation labored in the shadow of its predecessors, reading their works, pondering their lives, in many cases moving in similar social or literary circles. The intricate connections, both literary and personal, gather these eight lives together into a single, vividly composed group portrait. Drawing on published and unpublished letters and diaries as well as his own close readings of major texts by all eight writers, David Laskin illuminates the delicate interplay between life and art, influence and affection, affinity and personality. A Common Life offers a brilliant new perspective on the abiding importance of friendship in the lives and works of eight of our finest writers.
Author Biography
Dr. Barbara Thiering obtained her Ph.D. in theology in 1973 and has taught the subject at the university level for decades. In addition to her teaching, Thiering has been one of the most influential researchers of the Dead Sea Scrolls and has contributed numerous articles and books on the subject. She lives in Sydney, Australia, and is the mother of three children.