Bøger udgivet af McGill-Queen's University Press

How a rising right in the United States and Europe idolizes strength, masculinity, and even war.

Drawing on case studies in Italian history, Struggles for Self-Rule asks, do the centralizing tendencies of modern politics sap the self-organizing powers of individuals and communities, and what, if anything, can be done about it?

A Time for the Province explores the culturally and symbolically important region of the Polish borderlands through the idea of the palimpsest in modern Polish provincial literature.

Paying tribute to the work of the Soviet historian Lynne Viola, Other Voices in Soviet History listens to voices that have traditionally been overlooked in familiar narratives of Soviet history.

Challenging philological and critical understandings of authenticity, The Authentic Paul tells the story of numerous critical scholars, from antiquity to the modern period, who have laboured to make a book of Paul's letters free from textual variation and forgery.

The appearance of ghosts in art and popular culture has changed significantly throughout history. From the undead corpse of the medieval tradition to the transparent forms of photographic film, to the infrared and thermal images that now populate reality television, the paranormal has literally changed shape over the centuries. In Poetics of the Paranormal Kevin Chabot articulates the idea of "spectrality," demonstrating how the paranormal is far from a stable, metaphysical category; it is a dynamic and historically contingent discourse, the contours of which shift over time. Specific media, Chabot argues, present the ghost in distinct ways that emphasize the ghostly qualities of the medium and, conversely, the technological qualities of the ghost. Through detailed analyses of nineteenth-century spirit photography, horror films, ghost-hunting reality television, and the viral internet phenomenon "Slender Man," Chabot shows how the paranormal both shapes, and is shaped by, media. Exploring key historical shifts in contemporary media while providing a rich and novel theoretical framework, Poetics of the Paranormal addresses with renewed rigor relationships between media, perception, temporality, and the elusive concept of the evidential.

Speaking at the Congress of African People in September 1970, Amiri Barak said "In Newark, when we greet each other on the streets, we say, 'what time is it?' We always say 'It's nation time!' Nationalism is about land and nation, a way of life trying to free itself." National identity and nationhood are easily too often dismissed as retrograde populism or racist exclusion. Instead, they need to be understood as a key part of a vision of globalisation that holds the imperatives of diversity and solidarity in a delicate balance. Jerry White offers a defense of the nation based on the assumption that struggles for national identity have often unfolded in ways that should be familiar to those who defend the political standpoint of the progressive left. Having evolved into something that a wide variety of actors have sought to defend, nations can also serve as a defense against the homogenizing forces of globalisation and as havens of diversity in opposition to more singularly-minded forms of affiliation. It's Nation Time is structured as a series of specific case-studies that speak to theories of nation and their historical and cultural manifestations. It includes examples as varied as Black nationalism, Simone Weil's hopes for a postwar France, the first independence period of Georgia, the Bollywood cinema of Nehru-era India, New Zealand, Quebec, Ireland, Catalonia, and the Métis, the Mohawk, and Inuit, to argue that nationalism is a social form that has much potential and life in it. Broadly internationalist but also deeply insightful about particular the cultures and politics of small nations, It's Nation Time defends an idea of nation, and a form of nationalism, that is rooted in the potential for diversity, flexibility, and progressive politics.

I find my bearings by clouds of moon jellies / afloat beneath my anchored boat, / pulsing the sea's bright night, / their milky way, unfurling. In these lush and vivid poems water gloves a swimmer's body, is "satin, yes, viscous. Albumen, vernix, newborn slick." In Hong Kong it "rinses gai lan - bright green in a silver bowl" or hibernates in the Pacific Northwest "under a silky pelt / of rain. People-less. Days, months of this / hiss, softness breaking cliffs." Cynthia Woodman Kerkham ponders the urgent question, What does water want? Whether as the body of a beloved lake, where people wrestle with the concerns of stewardship, or as the sea in which to sail and drift, or as a gene pool simmering through a family's veins, water is the main character here. It can be turbid, the amniotic colour of spittle, or, in a time of drought, "brilliant beads." As "a stream flushed over granite," water seems to want "so little it shares another's colour," yet here, it gets our full and necessary attention. Rich with vibrant language and intensity, these poems sizzle in lyric form, monologues, elegy, and haibun. Water Quality calls on us to consider that our very survival is at stake unless we make a vow to this vital element to cherish it as we would a partner.

In the early 1970s Irish prisons were overcrowded - there were few rehabilitation programs, medical care was limited, psychiatric care was practically nonexistent, and brutality was commonplace. The Irish prisoners unionized, igniting a movement that helped transform the penal system over the next decade and a half, and whose legacy is still visible today. Prisoners' Bodies is the first book on the history of the ordinary prisoners' movement, a prisoner-driven movement that sought to revolutionize the prison system in Ireland between 1972 and 1985. Oisín Wall charts the rise and fall of the prisoners' organizations, their changing social networks, tactics, and splits, and the effect that they had on life inside prison, public policy, and society at large. Considering the public discourse around prisons and prisoners during this period, Wall investigates how it shaped and was shaped by the movement. Finally, the book examines the experiences of more than twenty individuals in prison, setting their activism within the context of their lived experience and their politics. The stories are reconstructed through oral histories, court records, press reports, prisoner's publications, and archival material. Prisoners' Bodies seeks to amplify the voices of people who have been systemically and institutionally silenced in the history of modern Irish prisons.

Oil workers are often typecast as rough: embodying the toxic masculinity, racism, consumerist excess, and wilful ignorance of the extractive industries and petrostates they work for. But their poetry troubles these assumptions, revealing the fear, confusion, betrayal, and indignation hidden beneath tough personas. The Rough Poets presents poetry by workers in the Canadian oil and gas industry, collecting and closely reading work published between 1938 and 2019: S.C. Ells's Northland Trails, Peter Christensen's Rig Talk, Dymphny Dronyk's Contrary Infatuations, Mathew Henderson's The Lease, Naden Parkin's A Relationship with Truth, Lesley Battler's Endangered Hydrocarbons, and Lindsay Bird's Boom Time. These writers are uniquely positioned, Melanie Dennis Unrau argues, both as petropoets who write poetry about oil and as theorists of petropoetics with unique knowledge about how to make and unmake worlds that depend on fossil fuels. Their ambivalent, playful, crude, and honest petropoetry shows that oil workers grieve the environmental and social impacts of their work, worry about climate change and the futures of their communities, and desire jobs and ways of life that are good, safe, and just. How does it feel to be a worker in the oil and gas industry in a climate emergency, facing an energy transition that threatens your way of life? Unrau takes up this question with the respect, care, and imagination necessary to be an environmentalist reader in solidarity with oil workers.

The COVID-19 virus was responsible for the deaths of over thirty-five thousand Canadians in its first two years alone. Described as the biggest public health crisis of the century, it was an uncertain threat, which emerged within complex psychological, social legal, administrative, and economic contexts. Seized by Uncertainty explains how Canadian governments responded to that threat. Despite early warning signs, the governments failed to appreciate the trade-offs required to respond to the pandemic. Their approach, at times intolerant of debate and blind to diversity, served the interests of some over others. Their response prioritized stability and containment, enabling four in ten people to work from home, disproportionately benefiting an educated middle-class, who benefited further with soaring stock markets and housing prices. Mental health issues spiked, racialized people were much more likely to test positive for the virus, those in low-income sectors experienced unstable employment and lacked workplace safety protection, the lives of low-risk youth were in constant suspension, and residents of some care homes were virtually abandoned. Seized by Uncertainty studies the pandemic response through the contexts in which it emerged, exposing how it revealed uncomfortable truths about a fragmented society and governance problems that predated the threat.

Although state transformation is often overlooked, the process is crucial in assessing the organisational development of early modern composite monarchies and deserves further investigation. In Austria, the monarchy's emergence as a great power required it to overcome several successive crises that culminated in the decades around 1700. The Habsburgs succeeded more by adjusting relations between crown and lordships than through institution building. This unusual interaction of state and non-state actors resulted in an Austria that markedly deviated from the centralizing national state exemplified by Britain or France. The nascent Habsburg fiscal-financial-military regime transformed regional and local authority, leading to armed conflict and caused disintegration of the administrative and social fabric that had previously held local society together. From the mid-seventeenth century onward, power - whether local or central, or social or political - would undergo enormous changes. Grounded in extensive research into Czech archives and spanning an era from the Thirty Years' War to the coronation of Charles VI, Lordship and State Transformation delves into the complex transitions that characterized the first instance of a balance of power in Europe, with a focus on its under-researched great power, the Habsburg monarchy.

In February 2021 the Canadian government published a considerably expanded list of domestic terrorist entities. While some, such as Blood and Honour, were already known, others - such as Atomwaffen Division, the Base, the Proud Boys, and the Russian Imperial Movement - emerged from the shadows. Until then many considered far-right groups in Canada a negligible phenomenon, at worst a local police matter. The Great Right North charts the growth of these groups, illuminating how official and unofficial government attention generates the context in which they build their movements. The result of seven years of research - including social media scraping, analysis of print and video sources, and interviews with scores of leaders and adherents - it examines how far-right organizations operate, recruit, and finance their activities and explores why individuals choose to join. Breaking new ground by revealing the ideological underpinnings and fragmentation within these groups, the authors also highlight the role of digital platforms in their proliferation. Most politicians have been quiet about the phenomenon of far-right extremism in Canada, insisting it is imported activism financed elsewhere. The Great Right North provides an essential primer - for journalists, those working in policy institutes and think tanks, and students and scholars - for understanding its vast and urgent homegrown challenges.

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1829) both introduced and epitomized the great philosophical controversies of his age. His influential text Von den göttlichen Dingen und Ihrer Offenbarung aroused the final debate about the intrinsic nihilism of modern philosophy, which, he postulated, ran the risk of becoming a serious threat to human life and intellect. In the first English translation of this text, * On the Divine Things and Their Revelation*, Paolo Livieri provides readers with a historical investigation of the debates that preceded and followed Jacobi's book, as well as a philosophical review of its main topics and arguments. Jacobi's concluding analysis against systematic philosophy, given at the closing of the era of German idealism, offers an overview of the possibility of connecting the human and the divine according to the metaphysical approach that he develops into theism. This philosophical testament revives the divisive ideas of his first publications and provides new insights into his critique of Baruch Spinoza's philosophy, yielding a final evaluation of Immanuel Kant's transcendental method. Bringing together Jacobi's most famous themes - from faith to revelation and nihilism to immediate knowledge - On the Divine Things and Their Revelation expresses his tireless commitment to situating the human being at the centre of reality.

In the fall of 1959 Norma Beecroft, a twenty-five-year-old composition student, left her home in Toronto and travelled to Rome to study with the eminent Italian composer. She left behind her lover and mentor, the thirty-four-year-old Harry Somers, by then recognized as one of Canada's leading younger composers. For the next six months they wrote each other almost every day. Their intense and intimate correspondence documents lives lived apart but shared on the page, until the relationship came to an abrupt end. Selected from the full extant correspondence, the letters show both composers at pivotal moments in their careers, processing music and culture in their respective environments in ways that would remain influential for themselves and to each other. Beyond illuminating a tempestuous love affair, their wide-ranging letters capture the development of Canadian arts and culture of the period. They record observations about significant figures in their circles; the performances, theatre, and art Somers experienced in Toronto; and Beecroft's attempts to forge a viable compositional approach through contact with important artists and composers abroad. Somers eventually realized that what he wanted most was for Beecroft to give up her studies and return to Toronto to marry him. She turned him down and remained in Italy to study and write music, cementing her commitment to the vocation of composer that would shape the rest of her creative life. She would break ground as a woman in her field, a producer for the CBC, and a composer and early champion of electroacoustic music. A window into cultural life in Canada and Rome at the end of the 1950s, Between Composers is a striking record of a turning point in the lives and careers of two young artists that would mark them and their music for decades.

Petite société francophone concentrée dans le Canada atlantique, l'Acadie renvoie tout autant à une multiplicité de réalités socioculturelles, depuis l'ère de la colonisation en Mi'kmaki jusqu'aux grandes mutations contemporaines liées à la mondialisation. Du « Grand Dérangement » en 1755 est née une diaspora, parsemée aux quatre coins du monde atlantique, de la Louisiane à la France en passant par les Antilles. Depuis lors, l'Acadie ne cesse d'évoluer tout en se renouvelant. Repenser l'Acadie dans le monde met en lumière la relève en études acadiennes. En abordant l'Acadie comme terrain d'enquête parmi d'autres et en relation avec d'autres, cet ouvrage collectif repose sur un double pari: celui de la comparaison et celui des approchestransnationales qui consistent à saisir le fait acadien dans ses interactions avec d'autres pays, peuples et institutions. Qui parle pour l'Acadie? Le Grand Dérangement a-t-il vraiment institué une rupture sans appel? Y a-t-il convergence ou divergence entre les objectifs formulés aux différentes échelles de l'Acadie et de sa diaspora? Ces questions révélatrices sont explorées sous l'éclairage de plusieurs disciplines. En ébranlant les idées reçues et les paradigmes établis, cet ouvrage présente une perspective indispensable pour comprendre la francophonie, et surtout le dynamisme, la persévérance et la diversité du peuple acadien.

Pakistan has been a priority country for international development assistance since the early years of its creation. Three decades of war in neighbouring Afghanistan have stoked violent extremism, and negatively impacted development gains and gender equality. Canada led the first global efforts to support Pakistan women's rights and gender equality in the region. The Twelfth of February tells the story of the Canadian International Development Agency's support for women's organizations and civil society in Pakistan. Rhonda Gossen traces the ebbs and flows of financial aid, drawing on her own unique experience as a development worker as well as compelling interviews with activists, non-governmental organizations, officials, and diplomats. She assesses how women's organizations work to resist violent extremism and makes the connection between gender inequality and security threats in a volatile region. Despite the influence of Islamic extremism, the gender equality movement in collaboration with civil society in Pakistan did make tangible headway. The Twelfth of February addresses a problem that is all too timely: what is the future role for international development, given violent extremism's devastating impact on development gains including gender-based violence, women's rights, and security?

The ubiquity of streaming sites such as Pornhub has transformed the social role of sexually explicit content today. Online porn is no longer a shady corner of the internet; it is mainstream. Its production, commodification, and consumption on data-driven online platforms has changed - and is changing - our personal relationships, social and legal systems, and sexual norms. Online porn platforms are shaping sexual desires and practices in the same way that Google and Facebook have affected social relationships and the circulation of information: porn is now consumed on data-driven platforms with algorithms designed to engage the attention of users, encourage the production of user generated videos, and filter content. Through frank examination of mainstream content with themes of incest, intoxication, and so-called consensual rough sex, issues that play out in life and in court, Elaine Craig shows how the platformization of mainstream pornography is shaping our sexual culture in real time. Mainstreaming Porn maps a complicated web of legal culture and legal actors, from corporate lawyers and platform content regulation to the criminal, civil, and administrative contexts in which porn companies operate and the legal interpretation of sexual assault defences. All have profound implications for the promotion and protection of everyone's sexual integrity, and especially that of women and girls. Mainstreaming Porn is an unflinching, carefully balanced perspective on a divisive topic. Without demonizing pornography and its consumption, Craig makes a powerful argument for applying legal mechanisms to corporate-owned online platforms while offering a sober evaluation of the limits of the law in governing pervasive cultural norms and social understandings of sexuality.

We have changed Lake Ontario - and it has changed us. The Lives of Lake Ontario details the lake's relationship with the Indigenous nations, settler cultures, and modern countries that have occupied its shores. Lake Ontario has so profoundly influenced the historical evolution of North America that it is arguably the most important, yet most unappreciated, of the Great Lakes. For centuries Lake Ontario has enabled and enriched the societies that crowded its edges, from fertile agriculture landscapes to energy production systems to sprawling cities. Daniel Macfarlane examines the myriad ways Canada and the United States have used and abused this resource: through dams and canals, drinking water and sewage, trash and pollution, fish and foreign species, industry and manufacturing, urbanization and infrastructure, population growth and biodiversity loss. Serving as both bridge and buffer between the two countries, Lake Ontario came to host Canada's largest megalopolis. Yet its transborder exploitation exacted a tremendous ecological cost, leading people to turn their backs on the lake. In the later twentieth century, innovative regulations such as the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreements partially improved Lake Ontario's health. Despite signs that communities are reengaging with Lake Ontario, it remains the most degraded of the Great Lakes, with new and old problems alike exacerbated by climate change. The Lives of Lake Ontario demonstrates that this lake is both remarkably resilient and uniquely vulnerable.

The nineteenth century was a time of upheaval for the Algonquin people. As they came into more sustained contact with fur traders, missionaries, settlers, and other outside agents, their ways of life were disrupted and forever changed. Yet the Algonquin were not entirely without control over the cultural change that confronted them in this period. Where the opportunity arose, they adapted by making decisions and choices according to their own interests. Cultural Change among the Algonquin in the Nineteenth Century traces the history of settler-Indigenous encounter in two areas around the modern Ontario-Quebec border, in the period after colonial encounter but before the full effects of the Indian Act of 1876 were felt. Where Lake Timiskaming was the site of commercial logging operations beginning in the 1830s, the Lake Abitibi region had much less contact with outsiders until the early twentieth century. These different timelines permit comparison of social and cultural change among Indigenous peoples of these two regions. Drawing on nineteenth-century archival sources and twentieth-century ethnographic accounts, Leila Inksetter sheds new light on band formation and governance, the introduction of elected chiefs, food provisioning, environmental changes, and the interaction between Indigenous spirituality and Catholicism. Cultural change among the nineteenth-century Algonquin was experienced not only as an uninvited imposition from outside but as a dynamic response to new circumstances by Indigenous people themselves. Inksetter makes a case for greater recognition of Algonquin agency and decision making in this period before the implementation of the Indian Act.

The well-known story of the Beothuk is that they were an isolated people who, through conflict with Newfoundland settlers and Mi'kmaq, were made extinct in 1829. Narratives about the disappearance of the Beothuk and the reasons for their supposed extinction soon became entrenched in historical accounts and the popular imagination. *Beothuk *explores how the history of a people has been misrepresented by the stories of outsiders writing to serve their own interests - from Viking sagas to the accounts of European explorers to the work of early twentieth-century anthropologists. Drawing on narrative theory and the philosophy of history, Christopher Aylward lays bare the limitations of the accepted Beothuk story, which perpetuated but could never prove the notion of Beothuk extinction. Only with the integration of Indigenous perspectives, beginning in the 1920s, was this accepted story seriously questioned. With the accumulation of new sources and methods - archaeological evidence, previously unexplored British and French accounts, Mi'kmaq oral history, and the testimonies of Labrador Innu and Beothuk descendants - a new historical reality has emerged. Rigorous and compelling, Beothuk demonstrates the enduring power of stories to shape our understanding of the past and the impossibility of writing Indigenous history without Indigenous storytellers.

Critic, translator essayist, and gay man, Édouard Roditi (1910-1992) was a singular witness to the twentieth century. His writings over six decades are a unique account of a life lived at the flashpoints of history and at the margins of society, providing acute and unsparing observations of literature and political events. Worldwise brings together a wide range of Roditi's writings, renewing appreciation of the polyglot writer, critic, and translator. With editors offering insightful background information on Roditi - who was born in Paris and had Sephardic Jewish ancestors of Greek, Spanish, and Italian origin on his father's side and Catholic and Jewish-Ashkenazi connections on his mother's - the book covers topics as diverse as gay life, Sephardic Judaism, and postwar Europe. A published surrealist poet by eighteen, Roditi would become an interpreter at the Nuremberg trials, a highly regarded literary translator, and a perceptive social analyst whose outspoken views alternately irritated American, Soviet, and French authorities. Roditi had a knack for spotting promising minds and created literary connections across continents and languages over a long, eclectic, and creative lifetime. With accounts of his family history and childhood, essays on writers such as Hart Crane and André Breton, and forays into literary, artistic, and political subcultures between the world wars, Worldwise highlights the crucial role Roditi played as a cultural mediator and broker, while revealing his trenchant views on art and history in the twentieth century, views which remain salient and enduring in our time.

Over the past two decades, the Sanctuary City movement has resulted in hundreds of jurisdictions declaring themselves safe spaces for undocumented migrants and people without status. Although they often draw on historical precedent, public sanctuary efforts amongst settler societies are markedly different from how refuge was conceptualized in the past. To explore these broad shifts, Sanctuary in Pieces looks at the history of protection and hospitality in Montreal/Mooniyaang/Tiohtià ke over two hundred years. Laura Madokoro traces the movements and experiences of fugitive slaves, wanted criminals, internationally renowned anarchists, and war resisters before turning to instances of public sanctuary practices since the 1970s. As people sought and forged refuge, they navigated a web of social connections, political agendas, and economic realities, testing the notion of the city and whom it was for. Even as those in search of sanctuary imagined, and often enacted, possible futures in the city, sanctuary was far from easy: it lay in an underground marked by refusal and denial, selective compassion and solidarity, and sometimes outright animosity. This contested and tumultuous history offers a profound challenge to the symbolism and substance of contemporary sanctuary city efforts. Conceptually innovative, Sanctuary in Pieces speaks to activist and policy considerations in the present, the making and unmaking of community, and how historical practice can accommodate silence in studies of intimate experiences of mobility and, on occasion, refuge.

The Western welfare state model is beset with structural, financial, and moral crises. So-called scroungers, cheats, and disability fakers persistently occupy the centre of public policy discussions, even as official statistics suggest that relatively small amounts of money are lost to such schemes. In Fraudulent Lives Steven King focuses on the British case in the first ever long-term analysis of the scale, meaning, and consequences of welfare fraud in Western nations. King argues that an expectation of dishonesty on the part of claimants was written into the basic fabric of the founding statutes of the British welfare state in 1601, and that nothing has subsequently changed. Efforts throughout history to detect and punish fraud have been superficial at best because, he argues, it has never been in the interests of the three main stakeholders - claimants, the general public, and officials and policymakers - to eliminate it. Tracing a substantial underbelly of fraud from the seventeenth century to today, King finds remarkable continuities and historical parallels in public attitudes towards the honesty of welfare recipients - patterns that hold true across Western welfare states.

Railway commuting is today a mundane and routine necessity, yet for the Victorians it was a novel experience. It opened up new possibilities of living at a remove from the crowded urban centre while staying connected to its places of work. Commuting helped transform London's urban landscape, as the compact city of Dickens's London gave way to the suburban sprawl of the British capital in the early twentieth century. Slow Train to Arcadia is a history of London's suburban railway network from the 1830s to 1921 and its impact on urban mobility. The book charts the relationship between the three main actors in the formation of the suburban railway: the state, the railway companies, and the travelling public. While the railway age came quickly to Victorian Britain, commuting took a slower journey to commonplace status. In the 1840s William Gladstone sought to make railway travel accessible to all, but commuting was experienced differently according to class and gender. Slow Train to Arcadia explains why the democratization of commuting proved to be an elusive goal. Today's workers are living through a fundamental reversal in the relationship between home and the workplace. For many, a daily commute is being consigned to history, a shift that will have long-term social and economic consequences. Slow Train to Arcadia is a timely exploration of the origins of mass commuting, a similarly transformative period for the daily patterns of working life.

Edmund Snow Carpenter (1922-2011), shaped by an early encounter with Marshall McLuhan, was a renegade anthropologist who would plumb the connection between anthropology and media studies over a thoroughly unconventional career. As co-conspirators in the founding of the legendary journal Explorations (1953-59), Carpenter and McLuhan established the groundwork for media studies. After ten years teaching anthropology at the University of Toronto, hosting radio and television shows on the CBC, and doing major research in the Arctic, Carpenter left Toronto and became an itinerant anthropologist. He took up a position in Papua New Guinea, where he countered anthropological practice by handing his camera to the Papuans. Carpenter's marriage to the artist and heiress Adelaide de Menil made him a truly independent scholar. With the support of the Rock Foundation, founded by de Menil, he collected ethnographical art, curated exhibitions, and edited the materials for a twelve-volume study of social symbolism based on the massive archives created by Carl Schuster. Richard Cavell shows Carpenter - austere, generous, and unpredictable - to also be unwavering in working throughout his career within the framework established by Explorations. The anthropological impetus for media studies has largely been forgotten. This study restores that memory, tracing Carpenter's work in media and in anthropology over a lifetime of cultural achievements and intellectual convolutions.

In my palliative months / the cormorant leaves me / at peace, disintegrating / with the exhalation of a Buddha Without Beginning or End is Jacqueline Bourque's final testament to a life well lived, written in the wake of a terminal cancer diagnosis. Deeply inspired by her Acadian upbringing along the ocean shores of New Brunswick, these are poems populated by aerialists, painters, and the spirit of Charles Baudelaire, who connects the poet to "the ligatures of life." Those ligatures in turn connect her with family in the collection's remarkable title suite, bringing new life to a past that continues to resonate in the present. Without Beginning or End is a book about love, friendship, art, and the human condition. Beautiful, and poignantly human, it is an emotionally charged parting gift to loved ones and readers alike.