Bøger af Dan O'Brien

In Scarsdale, Dan O'Brien applies to his own early life the same honesty and insight that were evident in his prize-winning War Reporter. Growing up in a family scarred by past trauma, he makes a bid for freedom-"in love with myself and this young stray's life"- only to be pulled back into the orbit of the place he had sought to escape. Gradually, possibilities for a more lasting change unfold.

Having her best childhood friend move to the same small town she lived in, Carrie Dexter was ecstatic. It wasn't long before her own insecurities got the best of her, changing her, making her become unpleasant to the people who loved her the most; pushing her to the edge, perhaps to the point of abandoning her family. Moving to a new town to start fresh seemed to be just what the doctor ordered for Madeline Tucker. Giving up the years she spent with the same company to learn it from the ground up; when she realized she could go no farther. Moving to be near her best childhood friend and kick up her own business venture in the process. In her quest for security and stability, Madeline has no intentions of becoming romantically involved with anyone. Her spontaneity and sense of humor soon had Dustin Parker wondering if he should be making up some excuse not to work with her. The profit he would make on a sale to her; a building for her business and her home, could have him set for the year! But he knew she was dangerous ... Friendships are tested, hearts are broken. Will time heal enough for Madeline to continue to pursue her business in this town, or will it destroy her faith enough for her to throw in the towel?

Lauren Westlake, determined and resourceful FBI agent, has a penchant for weird cases. Traveling to northern Minnesota, she begins an investigation that spirals deep into the darkness of mythology and nightmares. Her investigation takes her across the country, where she is forced to confront werewolves, vampires, cultists, ancient beings, and holiday faeries. She finds new friends and old allies along the way, but her world is forever changed by these revelations. This collection includes Bitten, Drained, Frighten, Burned, Awaken, and Besieged.

The following account of my time spent between March 26th, 2008 and March 29th, 2010 is mostly factual, with occasional lapses into poetic license or vituperative anger. Humor is pursued wherever possible to ease the pain of incarceration without losing the message that "crime does not pay"--Goldman/Sachs, Bank of America, or your person or institution of choice notwithstanding. A Special Thanks to Karrie Nitsche for a beautiful cover.

We live in an era of rampant, unmitigated consumption and fear. When the world is advancing faster than our spiritual and emotional resources are capable of keeping pace. We want and we desire, recklessly, without considering the costs of this mentality and attitude. The world's highest performers are the "self-help" junkies learning to GET more, BE more and DO more. They are stretching themselves thin in just the same way we are stretching the limited resources of our planet beyond recovery. Fearless GIVING presents an alternative to this mentality. Its designed to help you consider life and living from a much different view - one that is more compelling emotionally and more beneficial physically. FG can take the disappointments, victim-thinking and pained feelings of never having or being ENOUGH to yourself or the world and turn them upside down in a way that is truly revolutionary. It tends to make things AMAZING. Fearless GIVING isn't just self-help - it is SELF development in the truest and most poignant senses of the word "self." Fearless GIVING is a world-changing answer with potential far beyond charity or tithing. Fearless GIVING is an emotional answer that shifts everything we know about pain and purpose 180 degrees. Fearless GIVING is the place inside yourself that you have always longed to return to but didn't ever understand you had left. Fearless GIVING is the "hidden in plain sight" shift in understanding that makes for the most powerful personas. Fearless GIVING is a personal oasis in a world obsessed, careening and running scared. Learn to GIVE. Learn to know the fearless place giving comes from. Learn how to "program" your mind and actions for peace and abundance and soon you will know nothing else. That is what Fearless GIVING does. With a gentle "action guide," full explanations, simple and timeless wisdom is rendered into something the "modern man" can embrace and execute. FG is the deeper, missing part of the "self-help puzzle" you have looked for. Achievement without meaning... strength without content... power unaligned with nature - say goodbye to them all as you begin to practice FG. Welcome to a new world.

A collection of prose poems that chronicles the family life of two cancer survivors. Dan O'Brien's powerful companion to Our Cancers catalogs the recovery of a cancer survivor, whose wife has recently survived her own cancer, as he returns to his daily life while raising a young daughter. This prose-poem sequence is a true survivor's notebook, using photos and the tools of memoir to evoke how disaster can constellate our past, present, and future. In his poems, plays, and nonfiction, Dan O'Brien has explored, as he says in a 2023 interview, "how trauma shatters identity, and in its aftermath we reconfigure and rewrite, as it were, the story of who we were and are and maybe will be." In highly personal poems reminiscent of dramatic monologues, as well as shorter lyric fragments, the protagonist reconsiders the people and places he knew before his illness, including his estranged family and others with cancer. While looking back he moves forward again, resuming his career as a writer and teacher, revisiting Ireland, and making a kind of pilgrimage to the Holy Land. There is a confiding and at times comical tone in these poems as O'Brien awakens to the delights, absurdities, and wonders of existence, and as he and his wife work through the aftershocks of their trauma toward a deeper love. With text and image, Survivor's Notebook shows how we go on, with resilience, gratitude, and joy, when "the emergency's elsewhere" now.

"From Scarsdale is an evocative and lyrical memoir of a haunted childhood in Scarsdale, New York. With a cancer diagnosis in his early forties, the author is compelled to revisit and resolve the mystery of his family's sadness. The fourth of six children in an Irish-American household distinctly out-of-place in this affluent suburb of New York City, O'Brien grows up in a claustrophobic milieu of secrecy, lies, and mental illness. The turning point in his maturation is an older brother's attempted suicide - an event he witnesses firsthand. From Scarsdale traces with sensitivity the complex histories and dynamics that lead to this trauma, as O'Brien investigates the psychologies of his parents, themselves the survivors of painful childhoods in Scarsdale. Then, simultaneously disturbed and catalyzed by his brother's depression, and his own developing obsessive-compulsive disorder, the adolescent O'Brien discovers literature and the theatre as an escape, though it will take years for an actual liberation to occur. In many ways this memoir is that liberation, as his ambition here has been to tell "the story of who I am and where I'm from, with honesty, insight, and something like forgiveness. To try to leave the old place behind."--

"True Story: A Trilogy gathers together three documentary plays by acclaimed playwright and poet Dan O'Brien concerning trauma, both political and personal. The Body of an American speaks to a moment in history when a single, stark photograph--of a US Army Ranger dragged from the wreckage of a Blackhawk helicopter through the streets of Mogadishu--altered the course of global events. In a story that ranges from Rwanda to Afghanistan to the Canadian Arctic, O'Brien dramatizes the ethical and psychological haunting of journalist Paul Watson. In The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage the playwright applies journalistic principles to an investigation of his childhood unhappiness, as he searches for the reason why his parents and siblings cut him off years ago. The more he learns about his family, the more mysterious the circumstances surrounding their estrangement become, until his sense of self is shaken by rumors regarding his true parentage. The trilogy concludes with New Life, a tragicomedy that finds Paul Watson in Syria and the playwright in treatment for cancer, while together they endeavor to sell a TV series about journalists in war zones. New Life explores the paradox of war as entertainment, and dares to dream of healing after catastrophe. These three gritty yet poetic plays stand as a testament to the value of witnessing, honoring, and perhaps transcending the struggles of living."--

This book is the first devoted to Hume's conception of testimony. O'Brien looks wider than the miracles essay, turning to what Hume says about testimony in the Treatise, the moral Enquiry, the History of England and his Essays.

David Hume (1711-1776), philosopher, historian, and essayist, is widely considered to be Britain's greatest philosopher. One of the leading intellectual figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, his major works and central ideas, especially his radical empiricism and his critique of the pretensions of philosophical rationalism, remain hugely influential on contemporary philosophers. This comprehensive and accessible guide to Hume's life and work includes 21 specially commissioned essays, written by a team of leading experts, covering every aspect of Hume's thought. The Companion presents details of Hume's life, historical and philosophical context, providing students with a comprehensive overview of all the key themes and topics apparent in his work, including his accounts of causal reasoning, scepticism, the soul and the self, action, reason, free will, miracles, natural religion, politics, human nature, women, economics and history, and an account of his reception and enduring influence. This textbook is indispensable to anyone studying in the areas of Hume Studies, British, and eighteenth-century philosophy.

For twenty years Dan O'Brien struggled to make ends meet on his cattle ranch in South Dakota. But when a neighbor invited him to lend a hand at the annual buffalo roundup, O'Brien was inspired to convert his own ranch, the Broken Heart, to buffalo. Starting with thirteen calves, "short-necked, golden balls of wool,” O'Brien embarked on a journey that returned buffalo to his land for the first time in more than a century and a half.Buffalo for the Broken Heart is at once a tender account of the buffaloes' first seasons on the ranch and an engaging lesson in wildlife ecology. Whether he's describing the grazing pattern of the buffalo, the thrill of watching a falcon home in on its prey, or the comical spectacle of a buffalo bull wallowing in the mud, O'Brien combines a novelist's eye for detail with a naturalist's understanding to create an enriching, entertaining narrative.

This beautifully written historical novel from one of the West's most popular writers tells the true story of the friendship between Valentine McGillicuddy, a young doctor plucked from his prestigious medical career and newly married wife to serve in the army during the Great Sioux War, and the great chief Crazy Horse. When Crazy Horse finally agrees to surrender to the United States, mistrust and treachery on both sides foster further conflict, and he is gravely wounded. McGillicuddy declares the chief his patient and struggles through a long night to keep him alive. Set in the sprawling Great Plains during the most tragic period in its history, this tale of bravery, justice, and love weaves a tapestry of time and events into the account of a single day--the last in the life of Crazy Horse--to reveal the secrets surrounding America's past.

Drawing on O¿Brien¿s experience of cancer and of childhood abuse, and on his ongoing collaboration with a war reporter, the four essays in A Story that Happens¿first written as craft lectures for the Sewanee Writers¿ Conference and the US Air Force Academy¿offer hard-won insights into what stories are for and the reasons why, "afraid and hopeful," we begin to tell them.

Poet and playwright Dan O'Brien chronicles the year and a half during which both he and his wife were treated for cancer.

Drawing deeply on O'Brien's experience of cancer and of childhood abuse, and of collaboration with a war reporter, the four essays in A Story that Happens offer hard-won insights into what stories are for and the reasons why, 'afraid and hopeful', we begin to tell them.

On a rainy afternoon in Key West, Florida, Brigid ducks into Niall O'Neill's cluttered pub, in search of her keys. Soon, it becomes clear that what Brigid is really seeking is much deeper-and more mysterious. Stories and secrets intertwine as Niall and Brigid balance the fine line between past and present, reality and shadow. "Reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's bumbling philosophers in WAITING FOR GODOT...the torrent that is KEY WEST hits the audience with a barrage of philosophical questions: Is God in every one of us? How is the thin line between ecstasy and insanity drawn? Is there life after death? What is the value of truth, and will we be haunted by our lies? And the story O'Brien weaves is entertaining. His plot drags the audience through the entire spectrum of human emotion before releasing them back into reality... [with] a shocking twist worthy of a good M Night Shyamalan reveal."Erin Morrison-Fortunato, Rochester City Newspaper

A collection of monologues from award-winning American playwright and poet Dan O'Brien.

In Scarsdale Dan OBrien applies to his own early life the same honesty and insight that were evident in his prize-winning War Reporter. Growing up in a family scarred by past trauma, he makes a bid for freedom in love with myself and this young strays life only to be pulled back into the orbit of the place he had sought to escape. ...

Since the publication of their first controversial novels in the 1950s and 1960s, Philip Roth and Edna O'Brien have always argued against the isolation of mind from body, autobiography from fiction, life from art, and self from nation. In this book Dan O'Brien investigates these shared concerns of the two authors.

Once a great falconer and environmentalist, Malone has entered middle age a broken man, devoid of the passion and promise of his youth. And now the developers are threatening to build condominiums on his beloved Brendan prairie.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of David Hume's writings on religion, paying particular attention to the inter-relationships between the various works. It presents an analysis of Hume's place in the history of atheism.

Traces the history and ecology of this American symbol from the origins of the great herds that once dominated the prairie to its near extinction in the late nineteenth century and the subsequent efforts to restore the bison population. Great Plains Bison is a tribute to the bison's essential place at the heart of the North American prairie.

Second poetry collection by Dan O'Brien based on the experience of the war reporter Paul Watson, taking in the aftermath of the Arab Spring in Syria, Libya and Egypt

Dan O'Brien's earlier award-winning novel The Contract Surgeon introduced readers to Valentine McGillycuddy, a friend of the great war chief Crazy Horse. The Indian Agent is the riveting sequel to The Contract Surgeon.

Winner of the Western Heritage Award, this beautifully crafted historical novel from one of the West's most popular writers tells the true story of the friendship between Valentine McGillycuddy, a young doctor plucked from his prestigious medical career and newly married wife to serve in the army during the Great Sioux War, and the fearsome chief Crazy Horse.

Memoir of the summer and fall writer Dan O'Brien spent honing his falconry skills on his ranch in South Dakota