Bøker av James Marcus

An engaging reassessment of the celebrated essayist and his relevance to contemporary readers More than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson remains one of the presiding spirits in American culture. Yet his reputation as the starry-eyed prophet of self-reliance has obscured a much more complicated figure, who spent a lifetime wrestling with injustice, philosophy, art, desire, and suffering. James Marcus introduces readers to this Emerson, a writer of self-interrogating genius whose visionary flights are always grounded in Yankee shrewdness. This Emerson is a rebel. He is also a lover, a friend, a husband, and a father. Having declared his great topic to be "the infinitude of the private man," he is nonetheless an intensely social being, who develops Transcendentalism in the company of Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Theodore Parker. And although he resists political activism early on--hoping instead for a revolution in consciousness--the burning issue of slavery ultimately transforms him from cloistered metaphysician to fiery abolitionist. Drawing on telling episodes from Emerson's life alongside landmark essays like "Self-Reliance," "Experience," and "Circles," Glad to the Brink of Fear reveals how Emerson shares our preoccupations with fate and freedom, race and inequality, love and grief. It shows, too, how his desire to see the world afresh, rather than accepting the consensus view, is a lesson that never grows old.

Marius and his fellow brothers and sister have spent their entire lives living under Elder Macaro's regime in Highwash. But their time has come to face the trial of apprentices and see if they're ready to become true mages. Whilst Sebastien first born prince of Lord Salamon unknowingly seeks the resolution of his Father's vengeance. And Ralis the once beggared boy faces his greatest enemy, himself. Each of their lives makes no difference. Each of them is intertwined in a greater fate, a larger destiny. Because lurking deep beyond the village of Highwash an immense power is hidden, calling them all forth.