Résultats de recherche de titre
Articles 61 à 80 sur 144
Fragile Grounds: Louisiana's Endangered Cemeteries (America's Third Coast Series)
Par Jessica H. Schexnayder, Mary H. Manhein. 2017
Recipient of a 2018 Preserve Louisiana Award and a 2018 Coastal Stewardship AwardFragile Grounds compiles stories and photographs of endangered…
cemeteries throughout Louisiana's coastal zone and beyond. These burial places link the fragile land to the frailty of the state's threatened community structures. The book highlights the state's vibrant diversity by showing its unique burial customs and traditions, while it also identifies the urgent need for ongoing documentation of cultural elements at risk.Cemeteries associated with the culturally rich communities of Louisiana reflect the history and global settlement patterns of the state. Yet many are endangered due to recurring natural and man-made events. Nearly 80 percent of the nation's coastal land loss occurs in Louisiana. Coastal erosion, sinking land, flooding, storm surge, and sea-level rise have led to an inland migration that threatens to unravel the fabric of Louisiana and, by association, hastens the demise of its burial places.As people are forced inland, migrants abandon, neglect, or often overlook cemeteries as part of the cultural landscape. In terms of erosion, when the land goes, the cemetery goes with it. Cemeteries fall prey to inland and coastal flooding. As cities grow outward, urban sprawl takes over the landscape. Cemeteries lose out to forces such as expansion, eminent domain, and urban neglect. Not only do cemeteries give comfort for the living, but they also serve as a vital link to the past. Once lost, that past cannot be recovered.Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond
Par José Alaniz. 2014
The Thing. Daredevil. Captain Marvel. The Human Fly. Drawing on DC and Marvel comics from the 1950s to the 1990s…
and marshaling insights from three burgeoning fields of inquiry in the humanities--disability studies, death and dying studies, and comics studies--José Alaniz seeks to redefine the contemporary understanding of the superhero. Beginning in the Silver Age, the genre increasingly challenged and complicated its hypermasculine, quasi-eugenicist biases through such disabled figures as Ben Grimm/The Thing, Matt Murdock/Daredevil, and the Doom Patrol.Alaniz traces how the superhero became increasingly vulnerable, ill, and mortal in this era. He then proceeds to a reinterpretation of characters and series--some familiar (Superman), some obscure (She-Thing). These genre changes reflected a wider awareness of related body issues in the postwar United States as represented by hospice, death with dignity, and disability rights movements. The persistent highlighting of the body's "imperfection" comes to forge a predominant aspect of the superheroic self. Such moves, originally part of the Silver Age strategy to stimulate sympathy, enhance psychological depth, and raise the dramatic stakes, developed further in such later series as The Human Fly, Strikeforce: Morituri, and the landmark graphic novel The Death of Captain Marvel, all examined in this volume. Death and disability, presumed routinely absent or denied in the superhero genre, emerge to form a core theme and defining function of the Silver Age and beyond.Rabbit Heart: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Story
Par Kristine S. Ervin. 2024
A Washington Post &“Most Anticipated&” Book of the Year • A New York Times &“Must Read&”For readers of My Dark…
Places and The Fact of a Body, a beautiful, brutal memoir documenting one woman&’s search for identity alongside her family's decades-long quest to identify the two men who abducted—and murdered—her mother"Melding true crime with memoir, Ervin reminds us of what happens when we conflate people with the transgressions committed against them—the collateral damage we inflict when we turn human beings into moral allegory . . . A powerful treatise on love and loss, on mothers and daughters, but it is also a warning to all of us who consume true crime." —The New York Times Book ReviewKristine S. Ervin was just eight years old when her mother, Kathy Sue Engle, was abducted from an Oklahoma mall parking lot and violently murdered in an oil field. First, there was grief. Then the desire to know: what happened to her, what she felt in her last terrible moments, and all she was before these acts of violence defined her life.In her mother&’s absence, Ervin tries to reconstruct a woman she can never fully grasp—from her own memory, from letters she uncovers, and from the stories of other family members. As more information about her mother's death comes to light, Ervin&’s drive to know her mother only intensifies, winding into her own fraught adolescence. She reckons with contradictions of what a woman is allowed to be—a self beyond the roles of wife, mother, daughter, victim—what a &“true&” victim is supposed to look like, and, finally, how complicated and elusive justice can be.Told fearlessly and poetically, Rabbit Heart weaves together themes of power, gender, and justice into a manifesto of grief and reclamation: our stories do not need to be simple to be true, and there is power in the telling.Wishful Thinking: How I Lost My Faith and Why I Want to Find It
Par Donna Freitas. 2024
Donna Freitas wants to believe. Raised Catholic, she sang songs about Jesus as a child and lived in a house…
where nuns and priests were regular guests, yet she found herself questioning the faith of her family, examining the reasons none of it added up, and distancing herself from the God of Christianity. Despite her questions—or perhaps because of them—she made a career out of trying to understand God, pursuing a PhD in religion. But even as she taught college students about mystics, theologians, and others who wrestled with God, she was never able to embrace a faith of her own. In this searingly honest and deeply personal book, Freitas retraces her roundabout path up and out of the wilderness toward hope, and her dogged—and ongoing—search for faith. She talks about her experience with the Catholic abuse scandal, about being embraced as a speaker at evangelical colleges, about how the death of her mother and the loss of her marriage made her question everything she thought she knew about love, how she cannot reconcile the ways the concept of God makes absolutely no sense, and how she cannot stop trying to believe, despite it all. Real, raw, and beautifully written, Wishful Thinking is a powerful story about the author&’s search for belief in God and about finding God in the most unexpected places.In this laugh-out-loud and heartfelt memoir, writer, speaker, and podcaster Molly Stillman shares her unforgettable story of losing her mother,…
squandering an unexpected quarter-of-a-million-dollar inheritance in less than two years, attempting to launch a career in comedy but ending up on a farm instead, and finding faith, hope, and joy in the middle of it all. Molly Stillman has lived the type of life that when shared, people stop in their tracks and ask, "Wait, what happened?" Molly's mother, Lynda Van Devanter Buckley served as an Army nurse during the Vietnam War and wrote the bestselling memoir, Home Before Morning. When Molly was seventeen, Lynda passed away after an eight-year battle with an autoimmune disorder due to her exposure to Agent Orange. Four years later, Molly turned twenty-one and unexpectedly inherited a quarter of a million dollars from her mother's estranged family's estate. Through "retail therapy" and a long series of grossly irresponsible financial decisions, Molly found herself broke with over $36,000 in credit card debt less than two years later. Shame, guilt, and embarrassment set in.With aspirations of a career in comedy, Molly used humor to mask the pain and brokenness she felt, believing that if she looked joyful and put together on the outside, it would eventually be true on the inside. Instead, she spent the next few years depressed, lonely, and feeling alienated from those closest to her. But an unlikely call with a compassionate credit counselor, meeting the spreadsheet-loving man who eventually became her husband, and a surprising visit to a church started her on a path that changed everything.If I Don't Laugh, I'll Cry will bring readers into the tension of feeling both joy and grief and show them that every broken, messed up story has a purpose, and it's possible to gain everything if they're willing to surrender it all to Jesus.Exit: The Endings That Set Us Free
Par Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot. 2012
From a renowned sociologist, the wisdom of saying goodbyeSara Lawrence-Lightfoot is enthralled by exits: long farewells, quick goodbyes, sudden endings,…
the ordinary and the extraordinary. There's a relationship, she attests, between small goodbyes and our ability "to master and mark the larger farewells."In Exit, her tenth book, she explores the ways we leave one thing and move on to the next; how we anticipate, define, and reflect on our departures; our epiphanies that something is over and done with. Lawrence-Lightfoot, a sociologist and a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has interviewed more than a dozen women and men in states of major change, and she paints their portraits with sympathy and insight: a gay man who finds home and wholeness after coming out; a sixteen-year-old boy forced to leave Iran in the midst of the violent civil war; a Catholic priest who leaves the church he has always been devoted to, he life he has loved, and the work that has been deeply fulfilling; an anthropologist who carefully stages her departure from he "field" after four years of research; and many more.Too often, Lawrence-Lightfoot believes, we exalt new beginnings at the expense of learning from our goodbyes. Exit finds wisdom and perspective in the possibility of moving on and marks the start of a new conversation, to help us discover how we might make our exits with purpose and dignity.Lost Companions: Reflections on the Death of Pets
Par Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. 2020
A heartfelt exploration of human grief after the loss of a pet by the New York Times bestselling author of…
Dogs Never Lie About Love.Over 84 million Americans—almost 3/4 of the US population—own a pet, and our society is still learning how to recognize and dignify that relationship with proper mourning rituals. We have only recently allowed the conversation of how to grieve for our non-human family members to come front and center.Lost Companions fills a specific, important demand, a massive need in the market for an accessible, meaningful book on pet loss. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson takes a very personal, heartfelt approach to this difficult subject, allowing readers to explore their own responses and reactions, suggesting ways through and out of grief, as well as meaningful ways to memorialize our best friends. Lost Companions is full of moving, thought-provoking and poignant stories about dogs, cats, horses, birds, wombats and other animals that beautifully illustrate the strong bond humans form with them.The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir
Par Jami Nakamura Lin. 2023
A Most Anticipated Book by Poets & Writers • The Boston Globe • San Francisco Chronicle • Los Angeles Times…
• The Millions • Library Journal • Book Riot • Debutiful • and many more! In the groundbreaking tradition of In the Dream House and The Collected Schizophrenias, a gorgeously illustrated speculative memoir that draws upon the Japanese myth of the Hyakki Yagyo—the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons—to shift the cultural narrative around mental illness, grief, and remembrance. “Jami Nakamura Lin has reinvented the genre of memoir. . . . Serpentine, polyphonic, and stunningly textured, The Night Parade positively pulses with life." — Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, award-winning author of The Fact of a Body Are these the only two stories? The one, where you defeat your monster, and the other, where you succumb to it?Jami Nakamura Lin spent much of her life feeling monstrous for reasons outside of her control. As a young woman with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, much of her adolescence was marked by periods of extreme rage and an array of psychiatric treatments, and her relationships suffered as a result, especially as her father’s cancer grasped hold of their family.As she grew older and learned to better manage her episodes, Lin became frustrated with the familiar pattern she found in mental illness and grief narratives, and their focus on recovery. She sought comfort in the stories she’d loved as a child—tales of ghostly creatures known to terrify in the night. Through the lens of the yokai and other figures from Japanese, Taiwanese, and Okinawan legend, she set out to interrogate the very notion of recovery and the myriad ways fear of difference shapes who we are as a people.Featuring stunning illustrations by her sister, Cori Nakamura Lin, and divided into the four acts of a traditional Japanese narrative structure, The Night Parade is a genre-bending and deeply emotional memoir that mirrors the sensation of being caught between realms. Braiding her experience of mental illness, the death of her father, the grieving process, and other haunted topics with storytelling tradition, Jami Nakamura Lin shines a light into dark corners, driven by a question: How do we learn to live with the things that haunt us?The Worst Loss: How Families Heal from the Death of a Child
Par Barbara D. Rosof. 1994
The death of a child is like no other loss. Barbara D. Rosof's The Worst Loss will help families who…
have experienced this to know what they are facing, understand what they are feeling, and appreciate their own needs and timetables.The Way We Die Now: The View from Medicine's Front Line
Par Seamus O'Mahony. 2016
We have lost the ability to deal with death. Most of our friends and beloved relations will die in a…
busy hospital in the care of strangers, doctors, and nurses they have known at best for a couple of weeks. They may not even know they are dying, victims of the kindly lie that there is still hope. They are unlikely to see even their family doctor in their final hours, robbed of their dignity and fed through a tube after a long series of excessive and hopeless medical interventions.This is the starting point of Seamus O’Mahony’s The Way We Die Now, a thoughtful, moving and unforgettable book on the western way of death. Dying has never been more public, with celebrities writing detailed memoirs of their illness, but in private we have done our best to banish all thought of dying and made a good death increasingly difficult to achieve.Death, Society, and Human Experience
Par Robert Kastenbaum, Christopher M. Moreman. 2024
The 13th edition of Death, Society, and Human Experience provides a panoramic overview of the ways that we are touched…
by death and dying, both as individuals and as members of society. A landmark text in the field, the authors draw on contributions from the social and behavioral sciences as well as the humanities, including perspectives offered through history, philosophy, religion, literature, and the arts, to provide thorough coverage and understanding of topics associated with the end of life and death and dying. By approaching the subject from multiple angles, the authors explain the various ways that individual, cultural, and societal attitudes influence both how and when we die and how we live and deal with the knowledge of death and loss.Originally written by Robert Kastenbaum, a renowned scholar who developed one of the world’s first death education courses, Christopher M. Moreman, who has worked in the field of death studies for two decades, has updated this edition. In addition to infusing his close areas of focus, both in afterlife beliefs and experiences and how these might affect how people live their lives, he’s weaved in new coverage of current affairs, including: The impact of COVID-19 on experiences of death, bereavement, mourning, and more Expanded legalization of physician-assisted dying in the United States and several countries Changes in bereavement rituals and traditions stemming from technology use and social media With additional content and classroom extensions available online, Death, Society, and Human Experience remains a thoughtful, exploratory, and impressively comprehensive overview for undergraduate and graduate courses in death, dying, and bereavement.Caring in Context: An Ethnography of Cancer Nursing in India (Routledge Research in Nursing and Midwifery)
Par Virginia LeBaron. 2024
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted by an American nurse, Caring in Context is an exploration of how most of the…
world experiences cancer, and how nurses bear witness and respond to the suffering of others when they have little means to help—or for complex reasons, choose not to.This compelling book centers on nurses in a government cancer hospital in South India and examines key contexts that influence nursing practice and the delivery of healthcare, including hierarchical legacies of colonialism and the caste system, resource scarcity, power and perceived powerlessness, and gender inequities. These themes are illustrated through intersecting narratives, such as the story of Hameeda, an orphaned teenager with sarcoma who lives at the hospital until she becomes paralyzed, and Sister Meena, a nurse who strives to provide better care but encounters overwhelming structural obstacles and is chastised by her superiors for doing too much.Offering a critical re-examination of the realities faced by clinicians, patients, and family members who struggle to deliver and receive cancer care, Caring in Context’s unique perspective and accessible style will appeal to a wide and interdisciplinary audience, from practitioners, academics, and advocates to anyone interested in the complex context of the human experience.Back from the Deep: How Gene and Sandy Ralston Serve the Living by Finding the Dead
Par Doug Horner. 2024
The dramatic story of an unlikely search and recovery duo who help law enforcement and grieving families with their uncanny…
knack for locating bodies underwater A powerful debut for fans of deeply reported stories that follow real people with obsessional passions, and of authors like Tracy Kidder, Sebastian Junger, and Patrick Radden KeefeWhen the police and FBI exhaust their abilities and options, and when grieving families run out of resources, their last best hope has been an Idaho couple who have spent their retirement years pursuing lost causes — and have located 130 victims from lakes and rivers across the United States and Canada.Gene and Sandy Ralston, a married Idaho couple in their mid 70s, are self-taught underwater search-and-recovery specialists who volunteer their time and equipment. And yet the Ralstons are counted among the best in the world. The Ralstons have an uncanny knack for finding bodies in deep water and can regularly find a missing person within hours, sometimes even minutes, of launching their boat.Law enforcement and emergency response agencies seek out their peculiar expertise, but when the Ralstons' home phone rings it's usually a family member of a missing person. Someone reaching out after the local police and volunteer groups have called off the official search. Someone who heard from a friend of a friend about a couple from Idaho who will travel thousands of miles at the drop of a hat — charging only their travel costs — to help complete strangers.How Midsummer Night: A Memoir of Friendship and Loss
Par Janet Somerville. 2024
The author chronicles the final months of the life of her close friend and fellow teacher, in this unique and…
unforgettable memoir. When fifty-six-year-old Richard is diagnosed with glioblastoma, a rare and inoperable brain cancer, his colleague and friend Janet Somerville begins to document his life in a personal, months-long letter to him, to one day share with his wife and daughters. Teaching together at a Toronto boys&’ school, Janet and Richard bonded over their love of musical theater and literature. And now that Richard is nearing his end, it is these memories that comfort both of them through the good days and the bad. Peppered with theatrical references and inside jokes—from Shakespeare to Rodgers and Hammerstein, Monty Python to Avenue Q—the letter offers a touching glimpse into Richard&’s life. During his treatment, Janet shares with him the day-to-day activities of the school, including the unfiltered witticisms that fall from the mouths of teenage boys. Together they recollect stories of school choir trips, plays directed, and books read. Richard&’s positive attitude—his playfulness and graciousness—shines through the pages.How Midsummer Night is a beautiful tribute to a man who made his mark on his family and the community around him—a man who was so much more than just another teacher, so much more than just another friend.Moving On Doesn't Mean Letting Go: A Modern Guide to Navigating Loss
Par Gina Moffa. 2023
Grief hurts. Don&’t do it alone. Learn to navigate any loss—a parent, a friendship, a job, a miscarriage—at your own…
pace with the help of a licensed grief and trauma therapist. &“A must read. Help your mind feel less heavy and open the door to deep personal growth" —Yung Pueblo, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Lighter and Clarity & Connection After nearly two decades of clinical experience and her own journey after losing her mother to cancer, Gina Moffa, LCSW offers knows all too well how disorienting, painful, and lonely grief can be. In Moving on Doesn&’t Mean Letting Go, she offers a heartfelt, practical map through loss—one that can shift the pain of your grief even when things feel unpredictable and overwhelming. With her help you&’ll learn to: Navigate the initial shock of the &“griefall&” Recognize your unique grief rhythm Get in touch with your needs, feelings, and boundaries Mange social media and interactions with the outside world Connect mind and body through somatic exercises and self-reflections &“A lifeline to the exhausted treading water in an ocean of loss" (Rabbi Steve Leder), Moving on Doesn&’t Mean Letting Go is warm, compassionate, and perfect for readers of Grief Day by Day or It&’s OK that You&’re Not OK.Three Dads Walking: 300 Miles of Hope
Par Tim Owen, Mike Palmer, Andy Airey. 2024
'Truly heroic' Daniel Craig'A completely brilliant thing, to benefit so many' Nicole Kidman'Powerful and deeply moving' Andy Burnham'An epic journey…
. . . will touch the hearts of people everywhere' Lou Macari*Foreword from Dan Walker*'We were (and are) three ordinary dads who found ourselves in a desperate place we never expected to be, engulfed by pain and suffering beyond imagining, but who chose to push back, to not allow it to overwhelm us, to build something positive from the shattered pieces of our lives. We wanted to do something ... and this is what it became: Three Dads Walking.'These three dads would rather have never met. Strangers bound by grief, they joined together to save lives and became a national inspiration - one step at a time. This is their incredible journey. In memory of their young daughters - Sophie, Beth and Emily - who took their own lives, three dads set out on a 300-mile journey across the country, from the windswept Lakeland fells and Peak District dales to the open plains of the eastern Fens. Putting one foot in front of the other in spite of their pain, they capture the hearts of millions: laughing together, crying together, fighting to be heard. With each hill climbed and story shared, they begin to rediscover their faith in humanity and are inspired by the kindness of strangers across the land. Woven around personal diary entries and their own experiences of deep grief, this book, told in three distinct parts by each dad, grows into a beacon of hope for anyone struggling. Itʼs about the power of speaking out, of friendship, laughter and courage (and blisters). The three dads bear a heavy load, but they walk on for us all, finding light on the path after the darkest times.'Awe-inspiring' Carol VordermanKokoro: Japanese Wisdom for a Life Well Lived
Par Beth Kempton. 2024
kokoro [n.] intelligent heart, feeling mind One year. Two devastating losses. Three sacred Japanese mountains. A major life transition, a…
heart full of grief and a revelation that changes everything. Join Japanologist Beth Kempton on a pilgrimage through rural Japan in search of answers to some of life's biggest questions: How do we find calm in the chaos and beauty in the darkness? How do we let go of the past and stop worrying about the future? What can an awareness of impermanence teach us about living well?Together you will journey to the deep north of Japan, hike ancient forests, watch the moon rise over mountains of myth and encounter a host of wise teachers along the way - Noh actors, chefs, taxi drivers, coffee shop owners, poets, philosophers and the spirits that inhabit the land. You will contemplate the true nature of time at one of the world's strictest Zen temples and nothing will be quite the same again.This book is an invitation to cultivate stillness and contentment in an ever-changing, uncertain world. It all begins with the kokoro, a profound Japanese term which represents the intelligent heart, the feeling mind and the embodied spirit of every human being.To explore the kokoro is to explore the very essence of what it means to be human in this tough yet devastatingly beautiful world. When you learn to live guided by the light in your kokoro, everything changes, and anything is possible.Three Dads Walking: 300 Miles of Hope
Par Tim Owen, Mike Palmer, Andy Airey. 2024
'Truly heroic' Daniel Craig'A completely brilliant thing, to benefit so many' Nicole Kidman'Powerful and deeply moving' Andy Burnham'An epic journey…
. . . will touch the hearts of people everywhere' Lou Macari*Foreword from Dan Walker*'We were (and are) three ordinary dads who found ourselves in a desperate place we never expected to be, engulfed by pain and suffering beyond imagining, but who chose to push back, to not allow it to overwhelm us, to build something positive from the shattered pieces of our lives. We wanted to do something ... and this is what it became: Three Dads Walking.'These three dads would rather have never met. Strangers bound by grief, they joined together to save lives and became a national inspiration - one step at a time. This is their incredible journey. In memory of their young daughters - Sophie, Beth and Emily - who took their own lives, three dads set out on a 300-mile journey across the country, from the windswept Lakeland fells and Peak District dales to the open plains of the eastern Fens. Putting one foot in front of the other in spite of their pain, they capture the hearts of millions: laughing together, crying together, fighting to be heard. With each hill climbed and story shared, they begin to rediscover their faith in humanity and are inspired by the kindness of strangers across the land. Woven around personal diary entries and their own experiences of deep grief, this book, told in three distinct parts by each dad, grows into a beacon of hope for anyone struggling. Itʼs about the power of speaking out, of friendship, laughter and courage (and blisters). The three dads bear a heavy load, but they walk on for us all, finding light on the path after the darkest times.'Awe-inspiring' Carol VordermanThe House by the Lake: One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History
Par Thomas Harding. 1945
A Finalist for the Costa Biography AwardLonglisted for the Orwell PrizeNamed a Best Book of the Year byThe Times (London)…
• New Statesman (London) • Daily Express (London) • Commonweal magazine In the summer of 1993, Thomas Harding traveled to Germany with his grandmother to visit a small house by a lake on the outskirts of Berlin. It had been her “soul place,” she said—a holiday home for her and her family, but also a refuge—until the 1930s, when the Nazis’ rise to power forced them to leave.The trip was his grandmother’s chance to remember her childhood sanctuary as it was. But the house had changed, and when Harding returned once again nearly twenty years later, it was about to be demolished. It now belonged to the government, and as Harding began to inquire about whether the house could be saved, he unearthed secrets that had lain hidden for decades. Slowly he began to piece together the lives of the five families who had lived there: a wealthy landowner, a prosperous Jewish family, a renowned composer, a widow and her children, a Stasi informant. All had made the house their home, and all but one had been forced out.The house had weathered storms, fires and abandonment, witnessed violence, betrayals and murders, and had withstood the trauma of a world war and the dividing of a nation. Breathtaking in scope and intimate in its detail, The House by the Lake is a groundbreaking and revelatory new history of Germany, told over a tumultuous century through the story of a small wooden house.While topics such as death, funerary cult, and the netherworld have received considerable scholarly attention in the context of the…
Ugaritic textual corpus, the related concept of life has been relatively neglected. Life and Mortality in Ugaritic takes as its premise that one cannot grasp the significance of mwt (“to die”) without first having wrestled with the concept of ḥyy (“to live”). In this book, Matthew McAffee takes a lexical approach to the study of life and death in the Ugaritic textual corpus. He identifies and analyzes the Ugaritic terms most commonly used to talk about life and mortality in order to construct a more representative framework of the ancient perspective on these topics, and he concludes by synthesizing the results of this lexical study into a broader literary discussion that considers, among other things, the implications for our understanding of the first-millennium Katumuwa stele from Zincirli.McAffee’s study complements previous scholarly work in this area, which has tended to rely on conceptual and theoretical treatment of mortality, and advances the discussion by providing a more focused lexical analysis of the Ugaritic terms in question. It will be of interest to Semitic scholars and those who study Ugaritic in particular, in addition to students of the culture of the ancient Levant.